Imposition Quotes - Page 3

• Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Art, Past, Long

  D. H. Lawrence, Simonetta de Filippis (2002). “Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays”, p.33, Cambridge University Press

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• The greatest dread of ordinary man is death, with its rude imposition interrupting fortuitous plans and fondest attachments with an unknown and unwelcome change. The yogi is a conqueror of the grief associated with death. By control of mind and life force and the development of wisdom, he makes friends with the change of consciousness called death-he becomes familiar with the state of inner calmness and aloofness from identification with the mortal body.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Death, Grief, Men

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• It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.

  Vaclav Havel

  Rights, People, Leader

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• Imposition of the death penalty is arbitrary and capricious. Decision of who will live and who will die for his crime turns less on the nature of the offense and the incorrigibility of the offender and more on inappropriate and indefensible considerations: the political and personal inclinations of prosecutors; the defendant's wealth, race and intellect; the race and economic status of the victim; the quality of the defendant's counsel; and the resources allocated to defense lawyers.

  Gerald Heaney

  Race, Decision, Political

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• By its attempt to regulate and govern the private businesses, which are miscalled public accommodations in the bill, this proposal would inject the Government into the most sensitive areas of human contractual relations-agreements for personal services. In so doing, constitutional interpretations of long standing are being swept aside in favor of tortuous rationalizations which studiously ignore the constitutionally-forbidden imposition of involuntary servitude on citizens

  Strom Thurmond

  Agreement, Government, Long

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• The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

  George Washington

  Rights, Arbitrary, Use

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1944). “The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799: prepared under the direction of the United States George Washington bicentennial commission and published by authority of Congress”

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• Even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.

  Robert Kennedy

  Pain, Home, Opportunity

  Robert F. Kennedy, Edwin O. Guthman (1993). “RFK: collected speeches”, Viking Pr

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• The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

  Ted Nelson

  Views, Years, Defining

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• The institutions that claim to represent God, when they are not ignored altogether, are treated like other human institutions that have to earn their right to a hearing by the value of what they say, and not by virtue of who is saying it. Today, authority has to earn respect by the intrinsic value of what it says, not by the force of its imposition.

  Richard Holloway

  Hearing, Today, Ignored

  Richard Holloway (2000). “Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics”, p.31, Canongate Books

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• The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.

  Chris Hedges

  Country, Fear, Giving Up

  Chris Hedges (2011). “Death of the Liberal Class”, p.21, Nation Books

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• This trial cannot be separated from the process of the historical struggle in Palestine that continues today between the Zionist Movement and the Palestinian people, a struggle that centers on Palestinian land, history, civilization, culture and identityAs for your judicial apparatus, which is where this court comes from: it is one of the instruments of the occupation whose function is to give the cover of legal legitimacy to the crimes of the occupation, in addition to consecrating its systems and allowing the imposition of these systems on our people through force.

  Ahmad Sa'adat

  Struggle, Land, Civilization

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• Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

  Amartya Sen

  People, Identity, Violence

  Amartya Sen (2007). “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”, p.2, Penguin Books India

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• If we admit instrumental musick in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews?—yea, dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions? or, how can we decline a whole rabble of church-officers, necessary to be introduced for instrumental musick, whereof our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us no manner of direction?

  Cotton Mather

  Jesus, Dancing, Church

  Cotton Mather (1820). “Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620, Unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698”, p.228

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• If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.

  Thomas Sowell

  Civilization, Vision, Arbitrary

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• Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.

  Thomas Sowell

  Black, Quality, Deterioration

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• Our goal as a parent is to give life to our children's learning--to instruct, to teach, to help them develop self-discipline--an ordering of the self from the inside, not imposition from the outside. Any technique that does not give life to a child's learning and leave a child's dignity intact cannot be called discipline--it is punishment, no matter what language it is clothed in.

  Barbara Coloroso

  Children, Self, Punishment

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• Thanks in large measure to the ACLU, the belief that there is a wall of separation between faith and state, not just church and state, is endemic. The exercise of religious faith in the public square is not prohibited; only the federal imposition of a particular faith. Hardly anyone any longer knows the difference.

  F. LaGard Smith

  Christian, Religious, Wall

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• The impositions that this government is trying to put on now, it's the typical death by 1,000 cuts. We'll take a little bit here, we'll take a little bit here, we'll take a little bit here. And it doesn't end the conversations for 25, 50 years. It starts the conversation again the next day what they're looking to take back.And really it's about freedoms.

  Sean Hannity

  Cutting, Government, Years

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• In the major institutions of education, government, science, and the arts, we are witnessing the imposition of a post-Christian view of life. It now dominates in motion pictures, television, and every other form of entertainment.

  D. James Kennedy

  Christian, Religious, Art

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• Human rights and international criminal law both illustrate the contradictory potential of international law. On one level, the imposition of human rights norms is a restraint on interventionary diplomacy, especially if coupled with respect for the legal norm of self-determination. But on another level, the protection of human rights creates a pretext for intervention as given approval by the UN Security Council in the form of the R2P (responsibility to protect) norm, as used in the 2011 Libyan intervention. The same applies with international criminal accountability.

  Richard A. Falk

  Determination, Responsibility, Self

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisond by their own self policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Giving Up, Self, Expectations

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• In some cases, I allow the edge of the set, the edge of my own artificial, artistic imposition, to show up because I don't want to hide from that. I want to acknowledge that there is a living human and a living eye and a living mind and a living heart responding to what's going on out there.

  James Balog

  Eye, Heart, Mind

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• In the doctrine of the world and humankind as 'will to power and nothing else', Heidegger identified not an antidote to nihilism, but the completion of it. For what can be more destructive of truth and value than the doctrine that these are simply the impositions on the world of human exercises of power?

  David E. Cooper

  Exercise, Nihilism, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

  Potter Stewart

  Taken, Punishment, Murder

  Potter Stewart's expression of the majority opinion in 7-2 ruling that the death penalty is a constitutionally acceptable form of punishment for premeditated murder, July 2, 1976.

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• Many people in my constituency come to see me absolutely distraught at the prospect of losing their private rented flat because of the imposition of a housing benefit cut. Social cleansing is going on in all of central London because of the benefit cap. That is a disgraceful situation.

  Jeremy Corbyn

  Cutting, People, London

  "West Coast Rail Franchise". House of Commons meeting, Oral Answers to Questions, publications.parliament.uk. December 6, 2012.

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