Knee-jerk Quotes

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative. (Edward Abbey)
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful. View quote
Edward Abbey
My philosophy isn't only not conducive to misanthropy, as it might appear to a superficial reader, and as many have accused me. It essentially rules out misanthropy, it tends toward healing, to dissolving discontent and hatred. Not knee-jerk hatred but the deep-dyed hatred that unreflective people who would deny being misanthropes so cordially bear (habitually or on select occasions) toward their own kind in response to hurts they receive-as we all do, justly or not-from others. My philosophy holds nature guilty of everything, it acquits mankind completely and directs our hate, or at least our lamentations, to its matrix, to the true origin of the afflictions living creatures suffer, etc. View quote
Giacomo Leopardi
We don't know what the event that has allowed for this massive oil to be released. And until we know that, I hope we don't see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we're going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering. View quote
Rick Perry
Look at the movie 'Wag the Dog, I think this has all the elements of that movie. Our reaction to the embassy bombings should be based on sound, credible evidence, not a knee-jerk reaction to try to direct public attention away from his personal problems. View quote
Jim Gibbons
In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does. View quote
Junot Diaz
I fall in love with characters when they're out of their element or are uncomfortable and you really feel for them in a knee-jerk sympathetic way. View quote
Anna Kendrick
It's tough being an actor making music, because even I have a knee-jerk reaction to that. View quote
John Hawkes
When I look back on my knee-jerk reactions now, I realize I should have just taken a breath. View quote
Fred Durst
I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian. View quote
Rupert Murdoch
Scholars, journalists, activists, and others have an almost knee-jerk tendency to praise Bangladesh's beginnings as a secular nation and trace its slide into Islamist domination from the 1975 assassination of its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That praise is warranted - but only to a limited extent, for secularism and any semblance of democratic ideals were in their death throes long before Sheikh Mujib was. (Richard Benkin)
Speaking of the sanctions, they are not just a knee-jerk reaction on behalf of the United States or its allies to our position regarding the events and the coup in Ukraine, or even the so-called Crimean Spring. I'm sure that if these events had never happened – I want to point this out specifically for you as politicians sitting in this auditorium – if none of that had ever happened, they would have come up with some other excuse to try to contain Russia's growing capabilities, affect our country in some way, or even take advantage of it. 4 December 2014, The Kremlin Moscow, http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/news/23341. View quote
Vladimir Putin
In the past, I had a knee-jerk approach to work, and it showed on screen. I was doing movies for the wrong reasons - trying to juggle dates, do too many guest appearances, take up projects under pressure or for emotional reasons. View quote
Salman Khan
You have to temper your emotions and try to stay stable. And also try top stay on your routine. [...] It showed me how fleeting opinions are. And how opinions and people's choices and I guess criticisms are rarely based in fact. A lot of times they are knee-jerk reactions, a lot of times they're based off of media perception, you know, what they can see on the surface. Surface perception. And that a lot of people don't take time to delve deep into things before they make an opinion, or make a criticism or make a remark. And that's OK. That's the society we live in, it is what it is, you have to accept it. View quote
Richard Sherman (American football)