Insisting Quotes - Page 2

• Insisting on living in your past will kill your future. Let it go.

  Tony Evans

  Inspirational, Christian, Letting Go

  FaceBook post by Tony Evans from Apr 10, 2012

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• Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.

  Ermanno Bencivenga

  Freedom, Mean, Arbitrary

  Ermanno Bencivenga (1997). “Freedom: A Dialogue”, p.62, Hackett Publishing

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• Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.

  E. J. Dionne

  Real, Optimism, Political

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• [The Royal Society] is quite simply the voice of science in Britain. It is intellectually rigorous, not afraid to be outspoken on controversial issues such as climate change, but it is not aggressively secular either, insisting on a single view of the world. In fact, there are plenty of eminent scientists - Robert Winston, for instance - who are also men of faith.

  Bill Bryson

  Faith, Science, Men

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• I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.

  Adolfo Bioy Casares

  Believe, Ideas, Alive

  Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ruth L. C. Simms (2003). “The invention of Morel”, New York Review of Books

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• Hammond is insisting SG-1 needs a sociopolitical nerd to offset our overwhelming coolness.

  Jack O'Neill

  Nerd, Needs, Overwhelming

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• The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them.

  D. A. Carson

  Jesus, Important, Truthful

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• Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being. . . . We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Creativity, Creative

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• But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Real, Ignorance, Ideas

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• By not having sex before marriage, you are insisting on your right to take these things seriously, when many around you do not seem to. By reserving a part of you for someone else, you are insisting on your right to keep something sacred.

  Wendy Shalit

  Sex, Before Marriage, Sacred

  Wendy Shalit (2000). “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue”, p.212, Simon and Schuster

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• For me, this is a familiar image - people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Responsibility, Organization, Ideas

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2010). “Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Large Print 16pt)”, p.77, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Buddhism, Giving

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not the practice, now will I allow subversives to get away by insisting that I’ve got to prove everything against them in a court of law or [produce] evidence that will stand up to the strict rules of evidence of a court of law.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Law, Practice, Produce

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• But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

  Nick Hanauer

  Unemployment, Minimum Wage, Littles

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• Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

  Philip Slater

  Jobs, Buying Things, People

  Philip Slater (2016). “The Pursuit of Loneliness: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal”, p.182, Beacon Press

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• We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.

  Yukio Mishima

  Flower, Suffering, Dying

  "Yukio Mishima on Hagakure: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan". Book by Yukio Mishima and Jocho Yamamoto translated by Kathryn Sparling, 1977.

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• The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Faith, Religious, Past

  "Teach Your Children Well for a Better Life" by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 2, 2012.

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• Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.

  Robin Hobb

  Men, Goes On, May

  Robin Hobb (2003). “Mad Ship”, p.150, Spectra

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• Prayer is repeating the victor's name (Jesus) into the ears of Satan and insisting on his retreat.

  S. D Gordon

  Jesus, Prayer, Names

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• Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds,
  insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a
  real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who
  lost this game; now it is the planet.

  Ronald Wright

  Running, Real, Past

  Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.124, Canongate Books

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• The behavior of the Taliban as well as their extremist attitudes do not correspond in any way with a tolerant Islam. We have always been opposed to extremist tendencies of Islam and we still are. We have not stopped insisting on defending an Islam of tolerance which would be profitable to every Muslim, in Afghanistan and in the whole world, and we will always defend it.

  Ahmad Shah Massoud

  Attitude, Tolerance, Islam

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• Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

  Richard Russo

  Believe, Past, Thinking

  "Straight Man". Book by Richard Russo, 1997.

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• Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

  Ann Oakley

  Fitness, Mother, Humorous

  Ann Oakley (1974). “Woman's work: the housewife, past and present”, Vintage

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• We should pay as much reverence to youth as we should to age; there are points in which you young folks are altogether our superiors: and I can't help constantly crying out to persons of my own years, when busied about their young people--leave them alone; don't be always meddling with their affairs, which they can manage for themselves; don't be always insisting upon managing their boats, and putting your oars in the water with theirs.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Years, Water, People

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1869). “The book of snobs. Sketches and travels in London. Denis Duval”, p.131

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• America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.

  George Will

  Government, America, Immigration

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