Adversarial Quotes

#1. Trials by the adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood.

Warren E. Burger

#2. Adversarial power relationships only work if you never have to see or work with the bastards again.

Peter Drucker

#3. Why does the UK government ignore workplace bullying? Our system of democracy - government and law - is based on the adversarial model. To be successful in these fields, bullying behaviour is almost a prerequisite.

Tim Field

#4. Business and the state have a common interest; not an adversarial interest.

Roy Barnes

#5. I think I've been mildly obsessed with my hair. I don't think I have a hugely adversarial relationship with it. One my essay is about my decision to keep coloring my hair once it started to go gray, but once I wrote the essay - once the book was in production - I decided to go gray.

Elizabeth Benedict

#6. The House Of Commons has never been a tea-party. It consists of strong-minded, often very idealistic people, who are trying to accomplish something for our country. We are inheritors of an adversarial system and that, in itself, fosters conflict.

John Allen Fraser

#7. Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

Nick Cave

#8. You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence.

Pankaj Mishra

#9. A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.

Walker Percy

#10. Perhaps it's a cultural problem: a capitalistic society that encourages people to see negotiations as a zero-sum game - my loss is your gain, my gain is your loss - will encourage an inevitably adversarial exchange.

Anonymous

#11. A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.

Glenn Greenwald

#12. Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don't see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win them.

Alfie Kohn

#13. Lucy said, The law is an adversarial contest that defines justice as staying within the rules and seeing the game to its conclusion. Justice is reaching a conclusion. It has very little to do with right and wrong. The law gives us order. Only men and women can give us what you want to call justice.

Robert Crais

#14. All reporters have a stripe of irreverence in their mental makeup. It usually keeps them from turning into toadies, a danger for those who associate, even in an adversarial way, with the rich and powerful.

Carolyn Hart

#15. I don't want to be just a voice on the phone.
I have to get to know these guys face-to-face and develop a sincere relationship.
That way, if we run into problems in a deal, it doesn't get adversarial.
We trust each other and have the confidence we can work things out.

Wayne Huizenga

#16. Bill Maher and I are on against each other, and we're friends. He can do my show any time he wants, and I've done Politically Incorrect several times. There's no reason to think competition has to be adversarial.

Jay Leno

#17. I salute you for your courage, and I applaud your perseverance, and I embrace you for your faith in the face of adversarial forces.

Alanis Morissette

#18. In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power.

Glenn Greenwald

#19. We're supposed to believe that the press is liberal, dangerous, adversarial, out-of-control. That itself is an extremely good example of corporate propaganda.

Noam Chomsky

#20. All forms of commerce are adversarial.

Barry Diller

#21. He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. Relieving your feelings was fun, but the best course of action was to make things as difficult as possible for the person trying to make things difficult for you.

John Lanchester

#22. In the adversarial system, it's more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.

Jon Krakauer

#23. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.

T.C. Boyle

#24. It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.

Chuck Klosterman

#25. Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.

Nathaniel Branden

#26. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Arundhati Roy

#27. It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

James Hillman

#28. The relationship between press and politician - protected by the Constitution and designed to be happily adversarial - becomes sour, raw and confrontational.

Roger Mudd

#29. To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.

Chuck Klosterman

#30. Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.

Michael Ignatieff

#31. Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.

Nathaniel Branden

#32. Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.

Sol Stein

#33. One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn't have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn't be a single person, it would be the technological connections.

Margaret Atwood

#34. The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a 'No Drama' rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.

Maureen Dowd

#35. An adversarial family law system raises the stakes unnecessarily high, exacerbates the antagonism of the couples concerned, and is directly responsible for making it impossible for couples who would otherwise have reconciled to do so.

Louis De Bernieres

#36. It's an adversarial world outside of the safety of nirvana and enlightenment. In life, all beings need to feed on other beings just in order to exist. Some beings also like to cause others to needlessly suffer, just out of pure maliciousness

Frederick Lenz

#37. I was clearly fascinated by him, but had the strange sense that he was equally fascinated by me. As far as he was concerned I was the devil itself, but the devil always holds a variety of attractions.

Jacob Wren