Tendencies Quotes - Page 10

• We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about.

  Ai Weiwei

  Country, Sacrifice, Rights

  "David Cameron, as you visit China please listen to us" by Ai Weiwei, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2010.

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• I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• Certainly businesses the world over are facing greater competitive pressure than ever before, and this leads to executive stress which, in turn, tends to bring out authoritarian tendencies in many bosses. To balance this, we now know a lot more about how we can successfully cope with a situation that is not likely to improve in the near future.

  Srikumar Rao

  Stress, Boss, Balance

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• Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

  Peter Singer

  Philosophy, Circles, Doe

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.187, Princeton University Press

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• Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

  Erich Fromm

  Character, Successful, Battle

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.387, Open Road Media

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• The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

  Allan Bloom

  Sex, Self, Atmosphere

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

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• The greatest tragedy of old age is the tendency for the old to feel unneeded, unwanted, and of no use to anyone; the secret of happiness in the declining years is to remain interested in life, as active as possible, useful to others, busy, and forward looking.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Years, Secret, Tragedy

  Eleanor Roosevelt (1962). “Book of common sense etiquette”

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• Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.

  Amy Lowell

  Art, Emotion, Form

  Amy Lowell (1931). “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry”, p.7, Ardent Media

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• Does the Gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural 'next step'? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?

  Dallas Willard

  Jesus, Believe, People

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• All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.

  Jane Addams

  Democracy, Glimpse, Hints

  Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.15, Youcanprint

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• In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

  Theodor Adorno

  Philosophy, Discipline, Intellectual

  Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.6, Columbia University Press

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• The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.

  James Russell Lowell

  Men, Rivers, Heaven

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “My Study Windows”, p.166

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• I think that the tendency for most people is to fall back on a comic interpretation of things because things are so sad, so terrible. If you didn't laugh you'd kill yourself. But the truth of the matter is that existence in general is very very tragic, very very sad, very brutal and very unhappy.

  Woody Allen

  Laughter, Fall, Thinking

  "'Nothing Pleases Me More than Being Thought of as a European Filmmaker'". Interview with Helene Zuber, www.spiegel.de. June 20, 2005.

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• He who loses sight of the word of God, falls into despair; the voice of heaven no longer sustains him; he follows only the disorderly tendency of his heart.

  Martin Luther

  Fall, Heart, Sight

  Martin Luther (1848). “The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt”, p.9

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• A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation but in his personality.

  James Branch Cabell

  Writing, Men, People

  James Branch Cabell (2013). “The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection”, p.7, eBookIt.com

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• Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

  Mao Zedong

  Party, Organization, Discipline

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.126, Lulu.com

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• Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community - for example, another country or historical period... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

  Richard Rorty

  Country, Wall, Moving

  "Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism)". Book by Richard Rorty (p. 197), 1991.

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• There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Division, Movement, Tests

  "Tariq Ali v. Christopher Hitchens: A Debate on the U.S. War on Iraq, the Bush-Kerry Race and the Neo-Conservative Movement". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. October 12, 2004.

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• [Slave] trade ... is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish ... liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler].... It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.

  James Otis

  Men, Law, Tyrants

  "Argument Against the Writs of Assistance". "Argument Against the Writs of Assistance" by James Otis Jr., 1761.

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• Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.

  Lester Bangs

  Laughing, Funeral, Life Is Precious

  "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" by Lester Bangs, edited by Greil Marcus, Random House/Vintage Books, (p. 222), 1988.

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• The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.

  Anatol Rapoport

  Doe, Neurons, Systematic

  "The bulletin of mathematical biophysics" by Anatol Rapoport, (pp. 145-157), 1948.

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• The Americans... are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency.

  James F. Cooper

  Art, People, Ignorant

  "The American Democrat: Or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America". Book by James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.

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• See, there is a tendency to look at India as a country.

  Rahul Gandhi

  Country, India, Looks

  YouTube Chanel "CongressToday"/ "Rahul Gandhi Speech at CII Summit: 04 April, 2013", www.youtube.com. April 4, 2013.

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• There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Spiritual, Art, Sight

  Wassily Kandinsky (2015). “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, p.15, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• There's a normal tendency in the campaign, during a crisis, for the country to rally around the White House. vThat may help Al Gore in this campaign, but on the other hand, George W. Bush handled himself so well the other night on foreign policy that I think it fortified him just before this crisis broke.

  David Gergen

  Country, Night, Thinking

  "Gore, Bush seek return to campaign themes, but international policy dominates". www.cnn.com. October 13, 2000.

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