Tendencies Quotes - Page 24

• One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ''weasel words.'' When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ''weasel word'' after another there is nothing left of the other.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Eggs, Meat, Use

  Speech, St. Louis, Mo., 31 May 1916. The Oxford English Dictionary documents usage of the term weasel word as early as 1900.

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• I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City.

  Harold Ford, Jr.

  Country, New York, Taken

  Interview with Michael Barbaro, www.nytimes.com. January 12, 2010.

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• Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Essence, Humanity

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• The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted - or rather tend to be corrupted - by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Organization, People, Political

  "The State and Revolution". Book by Vladimir Lenin. Chapter 6, www.marxists.org. 1917.

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• Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Smoking, Curls, Mouths

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• Good systems tend to violate normal human tendencies.

  William Eckhardt

  Normal, Humans

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• We have a tendency to obscure the forest of simple joys with the trees of problems.

  Christiane Collange

  Simple, Tree, Joy

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• The scientific method is designed to help investigators overcome the most entrenched human cognitive habit: the confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant. That's why we are all inclined to stick to a hypothesis we believe in. Science is one way of forcing us, kicking and screaming if necessary, to modify our views.

  Carol Tavris

  Believe, Views, Decision

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• It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Exercise, Limits, Disputes

  "Slavery and Freedom". Book by Nikolai Berdyaev, 1939.

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• I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge - that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Long, Stronger, Steel

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 2, p. 84, 1977.

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• A mighty stream of tendency.

  William Hazlitt

  Evolution, Streams

  William Hazlitt (1848). “The Miscellaneous Works”, p.86

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• No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Mean, Men

  "My Disillusionment in Russia". Book by Emma Goldman, 1925.

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• If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

  Emma Goldman

  Pride, Men, Numbers

  Emma Goldman (2012). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.69, Courier Corporation

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• There’s a tendency for young people to get discouraged and frustrated easily. But don’t be afraid to fail. In many ways, we learn so much more from our failures than our successes. Remind yourself that failure is nothing more than a means to a greater end. Bide your time, learn from your mistakes, and lead by example. If you believe in what you’re doing, it will show.

  Anna Maria Chavez

  Mistake, Believe, Mean

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• When your account has these massive swings up and down, there's a tendency to feel a rush when the market is going your way and devastation when it's going against you. These emotions do absolutely nothing to make you a good trader. It's far better to keep the equity swings manageable and strive for a sense of balance each day, no matter what happens.

  Tom Basso

  Swings, Balance, Devastation

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• I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Opposites, Issues, Opponents

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.378, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Interesting, Rewards

  "A Surfeit of Fine Art". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1986) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 127), 1989.

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• The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Lonely, Attitude, Real

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views - towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues - has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform...not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.

  William O. Douglas

  Thinking, Views, Issues

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• Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.

  John Bolton

  War, Fighting, Lasts

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• The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

  Rebecca West

  Vices, Tempted

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Thinking Reed”, p.193, Open Road Media

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• I also try to discipline myself when I get into a situation... and I'm trying to think of an answer, instead of being verbose, which is a tendency that I have, to be concise. Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

  Dan Quayle

  Thinking, Discipline, Trying

  Los Angeles Times (attributed to an earlier Associated Press interview), October 30, 1988.

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• The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

  Chinua Achebe

  Real, Years, Challenges

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.50, Penguin

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• The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced - that without intelligence we should be brutes - but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world.

  George Henry Lewes

  Character, Eye, Sacrifice

  "Rose, Blanche, and Violet". Book by George Henry Lewes, Volume 1, p. 8-9, 1848.

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• We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, not for illumination.

  David Ogilvy

  Illumination, Support, Use

  "The Unpublished David Ogilvy".

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