Respectable Quotes - page 6
Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production, and thus to time-anomaly. (...) As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more closely to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears-on the screen-as something like the 'father' of itself.
Nick Land
You are now a famous champion, that has crowned with victory a righteous cause for which many stalwart knights and gallant gentlemen have made the supreme sacrifice, because they knew that in the end the right must conquer. Your success thus represents the working out of a great moral principle, and to explain the practical minutiae of these august processes is not always quite respectable.
James Branch Cabell
The appearance in the mind of undesirable and ignoble thoughts, even if they are very fleeting and only half-articulate, has an unpleasant effect upon one's self-esteem. Therefore such thoughts are often shoved aside, unattended to and unopposed. Often they are also camouflaged by more pleasing and respectable labels which hide their true nature. Thoughts disposed of in either of these two ways will strengthen the accumulated power of ignoble tendencies in the subconscious.
Nyanaponika Thera
The character, or tone, of a society depends on what the society regards as the most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most perfectly embody the habits or attitudes in question. That is to say, every society regards a specific human type (or a specific mixture of human types) as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts.
Leo Strauss
Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall.
Wyndham Lewis
I have to come clean; I've broken a lot of laws, and the ones I haven't I've certainly thought about. I have sinned in thought, word, and deed. God forgive me. Actually God forgave me, but why would you? I'm here getting a doctorate, getting respectable, getting in the good graces of the powers that be, I hope it sends you students a powerful message: Crime does pay.
Bono
The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss.
Abraham Lincoln
You just think about supporting a wife and children on a dollar and ninety cents a day. Most of us work on Sundays; poor people can't afford to rest on the Sabbath in a great city like this. Sometimes when I do have a Sunday off I go to church and take my wife and the children. It seems respectable, somehow, to go. And then the minister gets up and talks about the gratitude we ought to feel to God for all the blessings he gives us, and how thankful we ought to be that we live through his mercy. It may be very true as far as he is concerned, but I often think-and I don't mean to be ungrateful or irreverent-that most people in this world have very little to be thankful for, and very little reason to thank God for life at all. Nine tenths of the people in New York find scarcely a moment in their lives which they can call their own, and see mighty little but misery from one year's end to the other.
Jack Finney
I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism, and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill, to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.
Annette Baier
[The Hoare-Laval proposals] were not so frightfully different from those put forward by the Committee of Five [of the League of Nations]. But the latter were of respectable parentage: and the Paris ones were too much like the off-the-stage arrangements of nineteenth-century diplomacy.
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Today, after six years, there are... still many respectable people associated with German ‘dynamism' who have not yet realized that their imagined national and racial rebirth amounts to nothing more than the adoption of the revolutionary system of ‘direct action' as the fundamental principle of the carrying of the ‘mass revolt' to completion. Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism and myth;' this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism.
Hermann Rauschning
I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands.
Giovannino Guareschi
