Unreliable Quotes

• Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

  Paul Theroux

  Gains, Reputation, Modest

  Paul Theroux (1986). “Sunrise with Seamonsters”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• People can be unreliable and disloyal; possessions can lose their value; jobs that once stimulated you can become boring. But principles remain steady through it all.

  Nido R Qubein

  Jobs, People, Principles

  Nido R. Qubein (1997). “Stairway to Success: The Complete Blueprint for Personal and Professional Achievement”, Wiley

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• Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

  George Saunders

  Real, Mean, Accomplishment

  George Saunders (2014). “Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness”, p.48, A&C Black

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• Conclusions from observations are unreliable, only the mind can come nearer to to the truth. Thus, in some ways, philosophy is more important than science.

  Anaxagoras

  Philosophy, Mind, Important

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• A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

  Leonard Cohen

  Love, Battle, Allies

  Leonard Cohen (2011). “The Favourite Game”, p.156, Emblem Editions

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• First impressions are always unreliable.

  Franz Kafka

  First Impression, Firsts, Impression

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• Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Hype, Obscure, Intention

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• The most unreliable thing in this world is human relationships.

  Jack Ma

  Leadership, Business, World

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• My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.

  Ashleigh Brilliant

  Humorous, Profound, Insane

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• I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Mother, Beach, Children

  E.L. Doctorow (2010). “World's Fair: A Novel”, p.15, Random House

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• Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

  Evan Esar

  Business, Definitions, Statistics

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• What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

  Lillian Hellman

  Book, Telling The Truth, Tricky

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• Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in the future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.

  Sri Yukteswar Giri

  Spiritual, Men, Effort

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• Truths that become old become decrepit and unreliable; sometimes they may be kept going artificially for a certain time, but there is no life in them.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Truth, May, Sometimes

  'A New Model of the Universe' (2nd ed., 1934) preface

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• Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?

  Hans Christian von Baeyer

  Reality, World, Shifting

  Hans Christian Von Baeyer (2004). “Information: The New Language of Science”, p.64, Harvard University Press

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• What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.

  Charlie Munger

  Sloth, Unreliability, Answers

  "Charlie Munger USC Law Commencement Speech- May 2007 3/5". Youtube video, www.youtube.com. January 19, 2010.

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• I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

  Anne Fadiman

  Believe, Book, Scotch

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.4, Macmillan

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• UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.

  Carl Sagan

  Interesting, Cases, Ufo

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• So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Plato, Thinking, Views

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

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• In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.

  John Derbyshire

  Selfish, Lazy, Matter

  John Derbyshire (2009). “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism”, p.175, Crown Forum

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• Don't doubt your faith; doubt your doubts for they are unreliable.

  T. B. Joshua

  Doubt

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• Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police's abject failure to prevent crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The worse government fails to control crime, the more the politicians want to restrict individuals' rights to defend themselves. But police protection in most places is typical government work - slow, inefficient, and unreliable.

  James Bovard

  Gun, Rights, Government

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• As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

  Stephen Hawking

  New York, Rain, Butterfly

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• In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable.

  Henrik Svensmark

  Mean, Climate, Earth

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• Hope founded upon a human being, a man-made philosophy or any institution is always misplaced... because these things are unreliable and fleeting.

  Charles Stanley

  Philosophy, Men, Fleeting

  Charles F. Stanley (2012). “Turning the Tide: Real Hope, Real Change”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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