Sympathetic Quotes - Page 4

• Like many others, I'm deeply sympathetic to the huge numbers of people looking to come here today to escape suffering and poverty in their own lands. But as a country, we cannot afford to have a total open-door policy without any restrictions on entry.

  Ed Koch

  Country, Doors, Land

  5 Copy quote

• The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.

  Adam Smith

  Fall, Passion, Empathy

  Adam Smith, James R. Otteson (2004). “Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings”, p.22, Imprint Academic

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

  Rick Moody

  Fall, Character, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In Crash, you've got a pathological cop who at the end justifies police brutality. He tells the naïve, young cop that you're going to end up the same as him. He's the most sympathetic character in the movie. So, the naïve cop ends up murdering this Black kid and tries to cover up the evidence. It sort of justifies police brutality and the planting of evidence which is what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.

  Ishmael Reed

  Character, Kids, Police

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

  Andrew O'Hagan

  Ideas, People, Should

  "In truth" by Andrew O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people 'cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different... Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows.

  Louis C. K.

  Character, Thinking, Tv Shows

  "Louis C.K. on the Importance of Acting Like an Asshole". Interview with Steve Marsh, www.vulture.com. June 29, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.

  Jennifer Niven

  Hurt, People, Wish

  9 Copy quote

• Who can tell whether the parallelogram, which in our ignorance we have defined and drawn, and the whole of whose properties we profess to know, may not be all the while panting for exterior angles, sympathetic with the interior, or sullenly repining at the fact that it cannot be inscribed in a circle?

  Lewis Carroll

  Ignorance, Circles, May

  The Dynamics of a Parti-cle (1865)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There was a conservative consensus for an amendment I put forward called Trust, But Verify that would have strengthened border security on both refugees, students and those coming here. And Marco sided and I guess was more sympathetic to Chuck Schumer and to the president than he was to conservative principles.

  Rand Paul

  President, Principles, Borders

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am sympathetic to the fact that Turkey is doing everything it can to prevent the civil war in Syria from spilling over into its own country.

  Thomas de Maiziere

  Country, War, Turkeys

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Directors always used to be like the police to me - the enemy, the people to tell me what to do when I didn't want to do it. But I've lived with one for a while now and I guess I can put myself more in their position. You shouldn't be too sympathetic to them.

  Helen Mirren

  People, Police, Enemy

  "New Again: Helen Mirren". Interview with James Saynor, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 18, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

  John Irving

  Silly, Emotional, Style

  14 Copy quote

• We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology however frank and open our behaviour we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Spiritual, Mean, Men

  15 Copy quote

• Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.

  Alice Mattison

  Writing, Thinking, Keys

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We find in the novella a seamless interweaving of at least two narrative voices, one of which is that of an observer so sympathetic that his language appears to be Aschenbach's own, the other of which is superficially celebratory (except at the moment of moralistic condemnation) but undercuts Aschenbach by means of an ironic detachment.

  Philip Kitcher

  Mean, Narrative Voice, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

  Mary Oliver

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose.

  Philip Kitcher

  Narrative Voice, Appreciate, Giving

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• They [Chinese] will need a sympathetic intercessor with other people in the world to avoid conflict and create trust, and of course, Dalai Lama would be ideal. In another ten years from now though, he won't have the time to be really effective for them. They're truly wasting their time not using him now.

  Robert Thurman

  Years, People, Chinese

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think as an intelligent person you would agree that when you are teaching among oppressed people that they should be relieved of their oppression not 100 or 10 years from now, but right now, you're going to find your talk is going to fall upon sympathetic ears.

  Malcolm X

  Fall, Teaching, Intelligent

  4 Copy quote

• Look, if I were running the FBI, you know, I probably would want to have backdoors as well, so I'm sympathetic to the director's view. But there is risk if you put that backdoor in. There's no question you enhance the risk, number one. Number two, there are the privacy implications that are of concern to parties.

  Rod Beckstrom

  Running, Party, Views

  "The Cybersecurity Argument For And Against Device Encryption". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Linda Wertheimer, www.npr.org. December 26, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The affiliation clause in our Constitution is a privilege: a courtesy to a sympathetic body. Were you not a Mason, or Co-Mason, you would have to be proposed and seconded, and then examined by savage Inquisitors, and then-probably-thrown out on the garbage heap. Well, no, it's not as bad as that; but we certainly don't want anybody who chooses to apply. Would you do it yourself, if you were on the Committee of a Club? The O.T.O. is a serious body, engaged on a work of Cosmic scope. You should question yourself: what can I contribute?

  Aleister Crowley

  Privilege, Serious, Savages

  11 Copy quote

• I'm sympathetic to the people who go, "Whoa, we'd like to have the benevolent, wise dictator. It will all work much more efficiently," but the reason that we remain staunch democrats - with a small d - is it's a decades long, it's a centuries long, it's a country long process for being inclusive.

  Reid Hoffman

  Wise, Country, Long

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If I talk to black students on campus, they're not sympathetic to the people who are not sympathetic with [Black Lives Matter movement]. The fact that you want to argue rather than find some common ground, I think, has gotten a lot worse in the last years.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Thinking, Years, People

  Source: www.npr.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Having a son with a disability helps makes Walter White a more sympathetic character. There's no story line that shows Walt Jr. going through the things that you go through as a teenager with a disability. It's always his relationship to other characters. That was my issue with it.

  Zach Anner

  Teenager, Character, Son

  Source: abilitymagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I, for one, despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters. And I think that home-state constituency issue is a pretty constant one. And I think the problem of extreme lobbying by the corporate sector, which runs about $30-to-$1 compared to everybody else in the world, and the constituent aspect combines to give those industries a consistent advantage.

  Sheldon Whitehouse

  Running, Country, Home

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source