Notion Quotes - Page 11

• Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

  Margaret Halsey

  People, Ridiculous, Myth

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

  Margaret Halsey

  Real, Race, White

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• for the first time I tasted this tropical fruit, which people here are so fond of. ... I could have fancied I was biting into soap. I have a notion that we shall not become very good friends, the banana and I.

  Fredrika Bremer

  Food, Good Friend, People

  Fredrika Bremer, Adolph Benson, Carrie Catt (2007). “America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer”, p.98, Applewood Books

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• It turns out that our notions of what a 'self' is and how it might feel fulfilled have no more objective status than most of the rest of reality. It seems we make ourselves up as we go along.

  Maureen O'Hara

  Reality, Self, Might

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• Personally, I don't endorse the notion of mortality. It's fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones.

  Sue Grafton

  Loved Ones, Mortality, Fine

  Sue Grafton (2011). “V is for Vengeance”, p.68, Penguin

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• Writers and scholars have emerged in recent times (some familiar, some new) to continue to challenge the notion of a literature that encompasses the world - and reaffirms our existence in it. It is a multicultural vision that embraces and includes our shrinking universe; it is a multicultural vision that the white man fears and a vision that the rest of us can celebrate.

  Jessica Hagedorn

  Men, White Man, Challenges

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• Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

  Ida Tarbell

  Ambition, Mean, Democratic Ideals

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• I loved dancing with a delirious 'I wish I could die' passion, especially when the music appealed to me ... but alas! only one in ten partners had any notion of time, and what made it worse, the nine were always behind, never before the beat. ... Sometimes I would firmly seize smaller, lighter partners by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and whirl them along in the way they should go, but I saw they were not enjoying themselves, and oddly enough I wanted these wretches to like dancing with me.

  Ethel Smyth

  Dance, Passion, Dancing

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• I am worried about this word, this notion - security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch. Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? ... Why are we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else?

  Eve Ensler

  Insecure, People, Focus

  Eve Ensler (2006). “Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World”, p.13, Villard

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• Network news accustoms audiences to assertion not argument. Over time, it reinforces the notion that politics is about visceral identification and apposition, not complex problems and their solutions. ... sound bites aren't very helpful. They can tell a voter what a candidate believes, but not why. And many issues are too complex to be freeze dried into a slogan and a smile. ... What's lost in a world in which everything's an ad? Perhaps the country that created the assembly line has simply found a more efficient way to do politics.

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson

  Country, Believe, Issues

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• When we let go of all our notions about things, everything becomes really true.

  Kosho Uchiyama

  Letting Go, Really True

  Kōshō Uchiyama (1993). “Opening the Hand of Thought: Approach to Zen”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• For many people - from secular feminists to observant Jews - the notion of a feminist Judaism is an oxymoron.

  Judith Plaskow

  People, Feminist, Religion

  Judith Plaskow (1990). “Standing again at Sinai: Judaism from a feminist perspective”, Harpercollins

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• the very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Color, Racism, Confusion

  Patricia J. Williams (2016). “Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race”, p.4, Macmillan

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• If the immigrant is responsible for assimilation of the country, and some of these people are in fact are born there. But if you find it unwelcoming to your own barbaric notions of equality, that is not on the country, that is on you. If you leave a horrible place, please leave your horrible practices behind.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Country, Practice, People

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• To me, fantasy should be as real as possible. I don't buy into the notion that because it's fantastic, it should be unrealistic, because I think you have to have a sense of believing the world that you're going into.

  Peter Jackson

  Real, Believe, Thinking

  "Peter Jackson Talks THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, Coming on When Guillermo del Toro Left, and Post-Converting LORD OF THE RINGS to 3D". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. December 14, 2012.

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• The most expensive care we can give, we're giving those Americans without insurance. It's kind of stupid that we're fighting the notion that we want to quit paying a hidden tax and be up front about covering people in a way that is cost-effective.

  Barack Obama

  Stupid, Fighting, People

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• We in America count on the profit motive to get people to do the right thing. That's our basic American notion when it comes to business.

  Chris Matthews

  America, People, Profit

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Childhood, Training, Groups

  Interview with Crystal Wilkinson, appalachianheritage.net. November 20, 2014.

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• The American notion of family is perhaps the most romanticized, deep-rooted, and misery-producing fantasy of the last hundred years.

  Joy Browne

  Family, Years, Lasts

  Joy Browne, M.D. (2010). “The Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life (and the Eight Realities That Will Save You)”, p.11, Harmony

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• I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

  Tobsha Learner

  Atheist, Father, Philosophy

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• Democracy has become, unless I mistake, a kind of test or shibboleth, by which we try men and measures; and this is the same as to say that it is merely a word which is powerful with us, and not the wide and true notion of what the word means. But we must define the true import of words, and not be slaves to syllables; for democracy in form is not necessarily people-power in fact, but power perhaps of a few, who cajole the many and so lead and use the people for their own ends.

  James Vila Blake

  Powerful, Mistake, Mean

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• Up to here, in general, we have mainly stuffed the brain of the young people with a indigestible multitude of varios notions, without thinking about enough of the prime necessity to form their character.

  African Spir

  Character, Thinking, People

  "Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir". Book by Hélène Claparède-Spir, p.58, 1937.

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• I used to do miserably in English literature, which I thought was a sign of moral turpitude. As I look back on it, I think it was rather to my credit. The notion of actually putting writers' words into other words is quite ridiculous because why bother if writers mean what they mean, and if they don't, why read them? There is, I suppose, a case for studying literary works in depth, but I don't quite know what 'in depth' means unless you read a paragraph over and over again.

  Patricia Wentworth

  Education, Mean, Thinking

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• Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  People, Mouths, May

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• For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Ocean, Thinking, Vanity

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