Respectable Quotes - Page 13

• All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Life, People, Income

  Saki, Hector Hugh Munro (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated)”, p.392, Delphi Classics

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• If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

  Leslie Stephen

  Profound, Wish, Study

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• Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Religious, Philosophical, Hands

  Sydney J. Harris (1985). “Pieces of Eight Pa”, Mariner Books

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• Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference.

  Isaac Asimov

  Animal, Hands, Differences

  Isaac Asimov (2012). “Foundation's Edge”, p.71, Spectra

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• I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

  Jane Austen

  Writing, Effort, Style

  Jane Austen (1906). “Letters”

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• If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

  Albert J. Nock

  Strong, Plato, Character

  "Isaiah's Job". The Atlantic Monthly, June 1936.

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• Who is respectable when thinking himself alone and free from observation will be so before the eye of all the world.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Eye, Thinking, World

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• Faith that trusts on Jesus alone for salvation, and not on your respectable life, and the obedience that follows Him, are the indispensable steps to salvation. You admit that you have not taken these decisive steps. Then, however near you are, you are not in Christ.

  Theodore L. Cuyler

  Jesus, Taken, Steps

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 229, 1895.

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• Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak.

  Howard Zinn

  Powerful, Pride, Thinking

  Howard Zinn (2011). “The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy”, p.289, Seven Stories Press

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• Liberalism itself, is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and "respectable" ungodliness.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Church, Matter, Kind

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• Whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable. For punishment when awarded with due consideration, makes the people devoted to righteousness and to works productive of wealth and enjoyment; while punishment, when ill-awarded under the influence of greed and anger or owing to ignorance, excites fury even among hermits and ascetics dwelling in forests, not to speak of householders.

  Chanakya

  Ignorance, Punishment, Dwelling

  "Arthashastra". Book by Chanakya, Translated by R. Shamasastry. Bangalore: Government Press, Book I: "Concerning Discipline", Chapter 4 "Determination of the Place of Varta and of Dandaniti", 1915.

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• I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.

  G. H. Hardy

  Good Man, Example, Waste

  "Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work". Book by G. H. Hardy, 1940.

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• The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.

  John Pilger

  Children, Impact, Decision

  "This much I know". Interview with Tom Templeton, www.theguardian.com. November 13, 2005.

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• Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

  Jerry Fodor

  Mean, Differences, Views

  "Modularity of Mind". Book by Jerry Fodor, 1983.

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• I believe journalism is coming to be regarded as quite a respectable occupation for gentlemen nowadays.

  Anthony Trollope

  Believe, Gentleman, Occupation

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• To proclaim himself an agnostic, while to some it might appear more respectable and cautious, would be to say in effect that he hadn't decided what to believe.

  E. Haldeman-Julius

  Believe, Atheism, Would Be

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• As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

  C. Wright Mills

  Atheism, World, Variables

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• What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and falacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend.

  George Washington

  Wise, Taken, Character

  Letter to John Jay, August 15, 1786.

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• Many terms which have now dropped out of favour will be revived, and those that are at present respectable, will drop out, if useage so choose with whom resides the decision and the judgment and the code of speech.

  Horace

  Decision, Speech, Favour

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• One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.

  Gilbert F. White

  Wise, Mean, Government

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• Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can't hate black people anymore, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.

  Tom Clancy

  Hate, People, Catholic

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• One of the interesting things about "outsidership" is that underneath it there's a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to - the species, Western capital culture - was a little more respectable. My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

  George Carlin

  Interesting, Relaxation, Wish

  Interview with Ricky Young, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

  Callan McAuliffe

  Dialect, Accents

  Source: collider.com

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• Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.

  William Ellery Channing

  Life, Fun, Grateful

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• An honest, sensible, humane man, . . . laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity . . . is really the most respectable man in society, [and] makes himself and all about him most happy.

  John Adams

  Money, Men, Simplicity

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