Sophisticated Quotes - Page 4

• For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Technology, Purpose, Use

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.426, Random House

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• He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

  Nicole Krauss

  Loneliness, Understanding, Solitude

  Nicole Krauss (2003). “Man Walks Into a Room”, p.156, Anchor

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• "If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."

  Richard Russo

  Dad, Men, Thinking

  "Empire Falls". Book by Richard Russo, May 8, 2001.

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• your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.

  Chris Cleave

  Girl, House, Drug

  Chris Cleave (2010). “Little Bee: A Novel”, p.128, Simon and Schuster

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• Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Chickens, Deals, Humans

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2010). “Eating Animals”, p.84, Penguin UK

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• Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Vision, Criticism

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• Another ten points from Gryffindor,” said Snape. “I would expect nothing more sophisticated from you, Ronald Weasley, the boy so solid he cannot Apparate half an inch across a room.

  J. K. Rowling

  Boys, Half, Gryffindor

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• We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.

  David Rockefeller

  New York, Grateful, Past

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• Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

  Donald A. Norman

  Clever, Thinking, Self

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• One dictionary defines denouement as "a final part in which everything is made clear and no questions or surprises remain." By that definition, it is exactly the wrong word to describe this chapter. This chapter will make nothing clear; it will raise many questions; and it may even contain a surprise or two. But I say we call it the denouement anyway because the words sounds so sophisticated and French.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Two, Finals, May

  Pseudonymous Bosch (2011). “The Name of this Book is Secret: The Secret Series”, p.193, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

  Doris Lessing

  Sleep, Fighting, Thinking

  Doris May Lessing (1981). “The Golden Notebook”, Bantam

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• The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind...It seems that every time a pressing danger is avoided a new and more sophisticated threat appears on the horizon...Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Spiritual, Mind, Comfort

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• I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

  Anna Funder

  Beautiful, School, Names

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.10, Granta Books

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• There he is, tall, tanned, Italian, sophisticated. So what do you do?" I said, "Er, leap on him and snog him within an inch of his life? Taking care not to strangle myself on his false beard, or disturb his banana.

  Louise Rennison

  Italian, Care, Beard

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• Ah,” said Magnus. “Nerd love. It is a beautiful thing, while also being an object of mockery and hilarity for those of us who are more sophisticated.

  Cassandra Clare

  Beautiful, Nerd, Hilarity

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “City of Lost Souls”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

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• In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Country, Promise, Corporations

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.90, Random House

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• Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.

  Haruki Murakami

  Hips, Made, Trendy

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• Boxing is a more sophisticated form of hockey.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Stupid, Humor

  "George Carlin: Playin' with Your Head". TV Special, www.imdb.com. 1986.

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• What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?' She nodded. 'The firing squad.' 'That's not the whole truth. Try again.' 'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness. 'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.' He was silent for several minutes. 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' 'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

  Angela Carter

  Country, Simple, Squad

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• One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Attention, Examination, Labs

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• I'm sophisticated, charming, suave, and debonair, Professor. But I have never claimed to be civilized.

  Derek Landy

  Suave, Charming, Debonair

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• All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Time, Mortality, Abstract

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Against the Day”, p.653, Penguin

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• And one more idea which may be laughed and sneered at in some supposedly sophisticated circles, but I just have to believe that the loving God who has blessed this land and thus made us a good and caring people should never have been expelled from America's classrooms. It's time to welcome Him back, because whenever we've opened ourselves and trusted in Him, we've gained not only moral courage but intellectual strength.

  Ronald Reagan

  Religious, Believe, Blessed

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• Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Education, Teacher, School

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• Though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Powerful, Cat, Eye

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.84, Atlantic Books Ltd

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