Tendencies Quotes - Page 17

• I believe that one's basic financial attitudes are - like a tendency toward fat knees - probably formed in utero, or, at the very latest, in cribbo.

  Peg Bracken

  Attitude, Believe, Knees

  Peg Bracken (1969). “I Didn't Come Here to Argue”

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• The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration.

  Leigh Hunt

  Running, Laughter, Drama

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• I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.

  William Shenstone

  Silly, Character, People

  William Shenstone (1804). “Essays on Men and Manners”, p.107

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• Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

  Meg Greenfield

  Drama, Simple, Reality

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• I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

  Adrienne Rich

  White, People, Understanding

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.16, W. W. Norton & Company

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• sometimes the very faults of parents produce a tendency to opposite virtues in their children.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Children, Opposites, Parent

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1822). “Works”, p.302

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• I highly recommend getting older! There's less tendency to people-please.

  Alanis Morissette

  People, Getting Older, Please

  "I've been a thorn in people's sides just by existing" by Lucy O'Brien, www.theguardian.com. May 21, 2008.

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• I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.

  Francoise Sagan

  Firefly, People, Bangs

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• History is not truth versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What's important is what we make of it; its moral use. By writing history, we can widen readers' thinking and deepen their sympathies in every direction. Perhaps history should show us not how to control the world, but how to enlarge, deepen, and discipline ourselves.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

  Gretel Ehrlich (1989). “Heart Mountain”, Vintage

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• Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

  Louise Bogan

  Strong, Real, Men

  Louise Bogan (2005). “A poet's prose: selected writings of Louise Bogan : with the uncollected poems”, Swallow Press

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• The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other.

  Harriet Martineau

  Past, Dwelling, Perspective

  Harriet Martineau (1836). “Philosophical essays. Essays on the art of thinking. Sabbath musings. Moral essays. Parables. Poetry”, p.221

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• The worst effect of party is its tendency to generate narrow, false, and illiberal prejudices, by teaching the adherents of one party to regard those that belong to an opposing party as unworthy of confidence.

  Dorothea Brande

  Party, Teaching, Prejudice

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• It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

  Alice Munro

  Wind, Land, Mind

  Alice Munro (1990). “Friend of my youth: stories”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• People have an annoying tendency to compare shoe prices with the cost of other things. They might say, 'Wow - those shoes cost as much as a sofa!' Well, this may be true, but the comparison is so silly. After all, you can't wear a sofa.

  Mimi Pond

  Silly, Shoes, People

  Mimi Pond (1985). “Shoes never lie”, Berkley Pub Group

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• there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.

  Mary Parker Follett

  People, Experts, Crowds

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• boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

  Rona Jaffe

  People, Boredom, Faces

  Rona Jaffe (2005). “The Best of Everything”, p.20, Penguin

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• marriage, home life, and children, ought to be enjoyed by men and women together. Nobody - and least of all the child - is served by the present tendency to put these things all on one side as 'Woman's World.

  Alva Myrdal

  Children, Home, Equality

  Alva Myrdal, Viola Klein (2003). “Women's Two Roles: Home and Work”, p.28, Psychology Press

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• The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.

  Thomas Malthus

  Mean, Men, Race

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1798). “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Imporvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers”, p.346, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• The conclusions seem inescapable that in certain circles a tendency has arisen to fear people who fear government. Government, as the Father of Our Country put it so well, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. People who understand history, especially the history of government, do well to fear it. For a people to express openly their fear of those of us who are afraid of tyranny is alarming. Fear of the state is in no sense subversive. It is, to the contrary, the healthiest political philosophy for a free people.

  Jeff Cooper

  Country, Father, Philosophy

  "Jeff Cooper's Commentaries", Vol. 4, No. 16, December 1996.

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• I noticed long ago that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous.

  Nur Muhammad Taraki

  Long Ago, Hands, Dangerous

  "Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89" by Rodric Braithwaite, (p. 65), 2010.

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• There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.

  Bruce LaBruce

  Gay, Order, Lifestyle Choices

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• President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Men, Thinking, Voice

  "Khaled Hosseini, Kabul’s Splendid Son". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May/June, 2009.

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• If you're in a subordinate position of some sort and pretty much all of us are at some point in our lives, your general tendency is to try and impress the people above you or person above you so well that they will like you, keep you or maybe promote you. In the process of doing that you are not aware that that person above has insecurities and if you try so hard they may see that you are after their job or that you are better than they are or they might envy the fact you are younger.

  Robert Greene

  Jobs, People, Envy

  Source: www.josephbushnell.com

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• one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.

  Susan Jacoby

  Past, Rights, Years

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• Be light. Smile. Drop. Learn the tendency to drop and smile and move through.

  Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

  Smile, Moving, Learning

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