Tendencies Quotes - Page 15

• I like the idea of people having romantic tendencies towards a place they don't know that well. I think it's great. Why not? My dad's view of New York is very similar to Americans' when they talk about Ireland.

  Chris O'Dowd

  New York, Dad, Thinking

  "Chris O'Dowd on the Genius of Christopher Guest, Working with James Franco, and Grafting". Interview with Scott Raab, www.esquire.com. April 17, 2014.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  20 Copy quote

• Homicide through gun violence is the leading cause of death among young African American males in the United States. If people look a certain way they have a higher tendency of dying, of having their lives taken away.

  Ryan Coogler

  Taken, Gun, People

  "Fruitvale Station's success a 'surprise' for first-time director Ryan Coogler" by Rory Carroll, www.theguardian.com. July 30, 2013.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

  Richard Dawkins

  Psychology, Desire, Belief

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.221, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whenever any black man in america shows signs of an uncompromising attitude, against the injustices that he experiences daily, and shows no tendency whatsoever to compromise with it, then the American press [characterizes him] as a radical, as an extremist someone who's irresponsible, or as a rabble rouser or someone who doesn't rationalize in dealing with the problem.

  Malcolm X

  Attitude, Men, America

  11 Copy quote

• 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”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Christian, Views, Organization

  Andrew Dickson White (2012). “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods”, p.52, Transaction Publishers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure ... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Race, Judging, Employment

  Jeremy Bentham (1839). “The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Now First Collected: Under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring ...”, p.254

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Mind, Saws, Constitution

  Lionel Trilling (1955). “Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. (2. Print.)”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

  Paul Klee

  Expression, Quality, Fairy

  Paul Klee (1969). “Paul Klee: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• [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.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Believe, Intellectual, Elements

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich August von Hayek, 1944.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The general tendency towards an eight-hour working day has undoubtedly been healthful, and it is wise for the State to set a good example as an employer of labor, both as to the number of hours of labor exacted and as to paying a just and reasonable wage.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Wise, Eight, Numbers

  4 Copy quote

• No doubt, God alone has become all these objects, animate and inanimate, but in the relative world all beings act and suffer according to their past Karma and innate tendencies.

  Sarada Devi

  Karma, Past, Doubt

  "Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations" by Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, (p. 361), 2004.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.

  Thomas Malthus

  Mean, Evil, Balance

  "Principles of political economy considered with a view to their practical application". Book by Thomas Robert Malthus, Book II, Chapter I, "On The Progress of Wealth", Section X, p. 430, 1836.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source