Stance Quotes

• This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Funny, Cute, Happiness

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• A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind.

  Morihei Ueshiba

  Mind, Aikido, Posture

  Morihei Ueshiba, John Stevens (2010). “The Art of Peace”, p.103, Shambhala Publications

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• The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

  Robert Bork

  Religious, Believe, Views

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• There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its hostile stance towards sexuality.

  John Roberts

  Church, Elements, Matter

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• The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.

  Leon Kass

  Children, Abortion, Important

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• There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Stars, Order, Feelings

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.97, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

  Daryl Hannah

  Young Generation, Common Sense, Political

  "Hollywood star takes eco-activism to Web". Interview with Vanessa McGrady, www.nbcnews.com. Jun 1, 2006.

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• The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

  Harold Bloom

  Teacher, Thinking, Trying

  Harold Bloom, Robert Moynihan (1986). “A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man”

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• We see people of kindness, compassion, and possibly even faith being told, "Because of a characteristic with which you were born, you are evil and bad." Anything that even implies such a stance is profoundly toxic.

  Andrew Solomon

  Kindness, Compassion, People

  Source: andrewsolomon.com

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• What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can't avoid the daily tremors. Don't fight them. Just find a different way to stand.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Healing, Fighting, Different

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• The secret to healthy conflict resolution isn't taking a 'you against me' stance. The secret is realizing it's 'us against Satan.' He's the real enemy.

  Lysa TerKeurst

  Religious, Real, Healthy

  FaceBook post by Lysa TerKeurst from Apr 20, 2017

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• Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.

  Henri Nouwen

  Spiritual, Imagination, Waiting

  Henri J.M. Nouwen (2017). “You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living”, Convergent Books

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• We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.

  Bell Hooks

  Education, Thoughtful, Thinking

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• So the Bush-Obama administration has taken a fiscal stance diametrically opposed to that of the patron saint of free enterprise. While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried. By shifting the tax burden off property and off rent-seeking monopolies - above all, off the financial sector - this policy has raised America's cost of living and doing business, thereby undercutting its competitive power and running up larger and larger foreign debt.

  Michael Hudson

  Running, Military, War

  "Adam Smith Critiques the Deficit Reduction Commission". Personal website, michael-hudson.com. December 06, 2010.

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• It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.

  Haruki Murakami

  Home, Perfect, Fundamentals

  "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Book by Haruki Murakami, 1997.

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• During the war, a battle was fought here, not only for the creation of a new Yugoslavia, but also a battle for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign republic. To some generals and leaders their position on this was not quite clear. I never once doubted my stance on Bosnia. I always said that Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot belong to this or that, only to the people that lived there since the beginning of time.

  Josip Broz Tito

  War, Yugoslavia, People

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• Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

  Jerry Saltz

  Inspirational, Dance, Art

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• It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

  Rebecca Walker

  Memories, Past, Views

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• If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences.

  Tim Ferriss

  Strong, Mean, People

  Interview with John Romaniello, www.askmen.com.

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• Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Real, Hands, Groups

  "Islam is not a monolith" by Mohsin Hamid, www.theguardian.com. May 19, 2013.

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• If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.

  Seamus Heaney

  Distance, Taken, Self

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• There were a lot of people who were a little afraid of the rage or blaming stance I was taking, and find what I am doing now more refreshing.

  Alanis Morissette

  People, Littles, Blame

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• More and more political analysts and weak-kneed politicians are advising the historically pro-life Republican Party to abandon its pro-life stance for political gain. My first response is that if you cannot trust a party on the value of defending human life, how can you trust it on issues like marginal tax rates?

  Gary Bauer

  Party, Issues, Political

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• John flung himself into a pseudo-karate stance, one hand poised behind him and one in front, posed like a cartoon cactus. I thought for an odd moment he had moved his limbs so fast they had made that whoosh sound through air but then I realized John was making that sound with his mouth.

  David Wong

  Air, Hands, Cartoon

  David Wong (2011). “John Dies at the End”, p.526, Titan Books

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• Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Pain, Real, Thinking

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