Ascribed Quotes

#1. She hadn't ascribed to this modern notion of equality between the sexes. Woman were patently superior.

Laura Kinsale

#2. Stupidity is not ascribed to gender.

Joanna Shupe

#3. Capablanca plays very superficially sometimes, in a way that can only be ascribed to lack of concentration. This is an integral weakness of his make-up and can only be partially compensated by his employing his time allowance to the full.

Max Euwe

#4. I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.

Oliver Sacks

#5. One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#6. Of course, they (i. e., demons) had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.

Jack McDevitt

#7. He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

Salman Rushdie

#8. Soli Deo Gloria should be ascribed to every good work.

Duane Hewitt

#9. The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.

Sigmund Freud

#10. It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Michael Behe

#11. We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment.

Michel Houellebecq

#12. All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.

Ayn Rand

#13. All attributes ascribed to God are attributes of His acts, and do not imply that God has any qualities.

Maimonides

#14. The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

#15. In the believer there is nothing that can magnify man; he is planted, nourished, and protected by the Lord's own hand, and to Him let all the glory be ascribed.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#16. With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

Richard Courant

#17. A number of rare or newly experienced foods have been claimed to be aphrodisiacs. At one time this quality was even ascribed to the tomato. Reflect on that when you are next preparing the family salad.

Jane Grigson

#18. Between married persons, the cement of friendship is by the laws supposed so strong as to abolish all division of possessions: andhas often, in reality, the force ascribed to it.

David Hume

#19. I. All the distinctive characteristics of personality are ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the Bible.

R.A. Torrey

#20. Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.

W. Somerset Maugham

#21. Each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.

Andrew Motion

#22. Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee, and say not that which though doest not.

Baha'u'llah

#23. It was a saying of an ancient philosopher, which I find some of our writers have ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, who perhaps might have taken occasion to repeat it, that a good face is a letter of recommendation.

Joseph Addison

#24. Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#25. Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.

Sam Harris

#26. So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their ancestors.

Randall Kennedy

#27. Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#28. I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.
-W.A. Clark, ascribed

Bill Dedman

#29. Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

Isaac Newton

#30. To lead a blameless life you must curb your passions , and whatever misfortune may befall you cannot be ascribed by anyone to want of good luck, or attributed to fate; these words are devoid of sense, and all fault will rightly fall on your own head.

Giacomo Casanova

#31. Most of my failures can be ascribed to the fact that I chose that which was 'easy' over that which was 'right'. And while it's 'right' to admit this to myself, it isn't 'easy.' So, which choice am I going to make this time?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#32. Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.

Edward Gibbon

#33. So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#34. There is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.

Plato

#35. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Michael Behe

#36. I think an editing style is something that is ascribed to the work after-the-fact. I don't think you go in with a particular intention, but I think if there is an integrity to the work and the material you are working with, the work comes from the nature of that material.

Jay Cassidy

#37. Everything wonderful in appearance has been ascribed to angels, to devils, or to saints. Everything ancient has some legendary tale annexed to it. The common operations of nature have not escaped their practice of corrupting everything.

Thomas Paine

#38. I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

Sigmund Freud

#39. If R. Akiva was perhaps overly generous in judging his generation, it can perhaps be ascribed to the belief, based on his own experience, that everyone is capable of a dramatic life change.

Meir Soloveichik

#40. All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.

Saint Augustine

#41. legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers;

James George Frazer

#42. In this matter of baptism - if I may be pardoned for saying it - I can only conclude that all the doctors have been in error from the time of the apostles ... All the doctors have ascribed to the water a power which it does not have and the holy apostles did not teach.

Huldrych Zwingli

#43. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

Edward Abbey

#44. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

William James

#45. It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.

Daniel Pipes

#46. the qualities ascribed to the cowboy are identical to those of the English knight.18

Denis Hayes

#47. The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war.

Carl Sagan

#48. Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

Shalom Auslander

#49. An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Niels Bohr

#50. Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Stephen Fry

#51. They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.

Boris Pasternak

#52. Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.

David Brooks

#53. Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.

Scott Farris

#54. Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

Lord Acton

#55. In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

John Boyd Orr

#56. I have been ... moved to wonder whether my job is a job or a racket, whether economists, and particularly economic theorists, may not be in the position that Cicero, citing Cato, ascribed to the augurs of Rome-that they should cover their faces or burst into laugher when they met on the street.

Frank Knight

#57. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Ayn Rand

#58. What virtue is it that is born with us?
Much less can honor be ascribed thereto,
Honor is purchased by the deeds we do.
Believe me, Hero, honor is not won,
Until some honorable deed be done.

----From "Hero and Leander, Sestiad I

Christopher Marlowe

#59. Management [ Providence ], knowledge, and intention are not the same when ascribed to us and when ascribed to God.

Maimonides

#60. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.

Thomas Jefferson

#61. I imagine it is because you can lead him to a story for his newspaper, and if it is for his paper, it must be something to make Hamilton look poorly.

David Liss