Top 100 Breakdown Quotes
#1. I'm having a nervous breakdown, she thought with relief. I'm about to lose my mind, and that's just as well, because this cannot possibly be fixed. It is simply not fixable.
Liane Moriarty
#2. I'm a neurotic Jew who doesn't want loans. I can't even carry a balance on my credit card without having a nervous breakdown.
Duff Goldman
#3. With the breakdown of money economy the practice of international barter is becoming prevalent.
John Maynard Keynes
#4. A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.
Mariama Ba
#5. My mother was very ill when I was 18. She had a brain operation and then a nervous breakdown. It's very strange when you see your parents, who have always been your pillars of strength, suddenly become vulnerable. You don't know whether to be angry that they are not strong or devastated.
Emilia Fox
#6. I believe it is possible that we can turn today's breakdown into a planetary breakthrough on one condition. We can do it if we can break free of a set of dominant but misleading ideas that are taking us down.
Frances Moore Lappe
#7. Today in Ukraine, many people struggle to survive, older ones often see the breakdown of the Soviet system as a loss of stability and security for average people, and therefore a certain hostility to quickly acquired wealth is from their point of view quite understandable at the first look.
Victor Pinchuk
#8. The available divorce data show that marital breakdown is now considerably more common in the Bible Belt than in the secular Northeast ... The percentages of broken families and unwed mothers remained higher in places like Arkansas and Oklahoma than in New York and Massachusetts.
Joe Conason
#9. The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country's immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.
Barbra Streisand
#11. Everybody faces obstacles. And I looked to people who had been through many to succeed in life. Abraham Lincoln, born to a poor family, faced defeat through most of his life. Lost eight elections, failed two businesses, had a nervous breakdown, and still became president.
Dave Winfield
#12. The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.
Julian Jaynes
#14. It's like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they'd be born out of the cocoon as something else.
M.R. Carey
#15. Hey!" Lula yelled, back in Ranger's face. "You look at me when I'm having a breakdown. And don't pull that mysterio silent shit on me. I don't take that bus, you see what I'm saying?
Janet Evanovich
#16. The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.
Norbert Wiener
#18. Come on, there's no one there. You want coffee?" Tess asked.
"Yeah, sure, why not? I'm only on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't imagine why caffeine wouldn't help this situation.
Frankie Rose
#19. How to achieve the moral breakdown of the enemy before the war has started - that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed.
Adolf Hitler
#20. By Revolution, we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of society which may not be threatened by such breakdown, and in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognized and a world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars.
Bhagat Singh
#21. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
#22. If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
#23. Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes.
Patton Oswalt
#24. Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.
Jeanette Winterson
#25. Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.
Cherrie Moraga
#26. No one is to blame for the breakdown in trust between politics, media and the public.
Tony Blair
#27. They'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown
not even he was that dreadful a novelist.
Philip Roth
#28. I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.
Natalie Maines
#30. There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.
P. J. O'Rourke
#31. (F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement.
Walter E. Williams
#32. And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.
Hu Shih
#33. I'm taking one thing at a time. With the children and launching my solo career it would drive me to a nervous breakdown if I tried to organise a wedding on top of that.
Natasha Hamilton
#34. Coach John Wooden used seven players at UCLA. Coach Denny Crum used to say, 'The more moving parts you have, the greater the chance you have for a breakdown.' I think there's a lot of veracity to that.
Skip Prosser
#35. Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
Roald Dahl
#36. T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.
Mary Jo Bang
#37. When pressed to tell people how I got myself into my current nepotism-gone-bad situation, I like to describe it as a mini-breakdown. The prefix makes all the difference. It makes it sound more like a vacation than a condition best treated with medication and art therapy.
Jill A. Davis
#38. More and more, we have been able to present the argument that recruitment of child soldiers is a social breakdown that leads to atrocities, because that's why they get them.
Romeo Dallaire
#39. When there is breakdown in a relationship, you must have the hard conversation. It may not be pretty and it may not feel good. But if you are willing to listen and tell the truth, it will open
up.
Iyanla Vanzant
#40. Hey, pretty damn smart aren't you? You made it just ugly enough. inconspicuous. Nobody looks twice."
"I have to admit, that was a hard one for me. I think one of the designers had a breakdown. Cried for an hour
J.D. Robb
#41. I don't get into these petty things, Kentucky-Louisville. To me, it's nonsense ... There will be people at Kentucky that will have a nervous breakdown if they lose to us ... They've got to put the fences up on bridges. There will be people consumed by Louisville.
Rick Pitino
#42. For new media reactionaries ... the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.
David L. Ulin
#43. Wherever you find marital failure, you will find a breakdown in real communication. Wherever you find marital success, you will find a good communication system.
Wayne Mack
#44. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R.D. Laing
#45. The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining-it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process.
Paul Clark
#46. Having a mental breakdown is not on my list of things to do today.
Marissa Meyer
#47. If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.
Dean Koontz
#48. Once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on: Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.
Karl A. Menninger
#49. You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown.
Mick Jagger
#50. Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt "strange inside" two or three times during my life.
Stanislaw Ulam
#51. The last thing we need is yet another makeup company. Even I have a nervous breakdown when I go through the department store makeup floor.
Lauren Hutton
#52. I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time.
Kate Bush
#53. This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.
Nigel Farage
#54. The demand being made of me was to treat the breakdown as if fear and frustration were not a part of it, to act as if my life, the whole life, has not changed.
Arthur W. Frank
#55. I was just absolutely exhausted. The media said I've been treated for a nervous breakdown. All that stuff I just took as people taking the opportunity when you're down to give you a kick.
John Hewson
#56. On the other hand, I believe there's hope, because the breakdown and the repair are happening simultaneously.
Kathryn Bigelow
#57. People who continue in blatant sin whilst exercising spiritual gifts create this ever widening gulf in their personality which results in spiritual failure, emotional collapse, sometimes mental breakdown, physical illness, relational difficulties and quite often a complete moral lapse.
Graham Cooke
#58. The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich
#59. It was the final chapter of his breakdown, the moment when his glass drained of everything, and its emptiness awaited only for choices to come.
Sarah Winman
#60. I have been to hell and back. I had a very, very bad nervous breakdown.
Andy Gibb
#61. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
Theodore Kaczynski
#62. My interest in protein breakdown as a research problem began in l955 at about the time I joined the Biochemistry Department of Yale University. It was known that proteins break down intracellularly in the mature animal.
Irwin Rose
#63. I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.
David Foster Wallace
#64. This is what a total breakdown must be, I though. You find yourself standing somewhere you should't be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you've become someone else entirely. You've lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped into a train whose destination is total lunacy
Gilly Macmillan
#65. For the love of Christ, shut-up! Let a bitch enjoy you mental breakdown in peace.
C.J. Roberts
#66. I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.
Jonathan Ames
#67. A ten-year-old boy doesn't want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn't feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else's failure.
Chuck Klosterman
#68. It felt like a textbook breakdown to me, but Diana called it a spiritual awakening. I think we were both right. In fact, I'm starting to question if you can have one without the other.
Brene Brown
#69. Warfare leaves a residue of 'eat drink and be merry' that often leads inexorably to moral breakdown.
Frank Herbert
#70. Praise and worship is such a powerful device is able to dismantle every shackle and its able to breakdown every wall.
Euginia Herlihy
#71. I'm f**king pathetic when it comes to being an entertainer. People come because they want to see me have a nervous breakdown.
Mark Linkous
#72. I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood.
Mel Brooks
#73. Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body's oxygen cycle.
Dr. Milton Helpern
#74. 'Portlandia' is the most fun show. When I get a breakdown of what the arc of the story is going to be, I could never in my wildest dreams anticipate the direction.
Kyle MacLachlan
#75. Your breakdown is just a divine set-up for your breakout, which leads to an irrevocable breakthrough.
Hope D. Blackwell
#76. I had a woman breakdown and cry when she met me which was difficult to deal with because immediately when someone starts to cry, you want to comfort them, you know, 'Poor thing.' I comforted her. I tried to make her feel better.
Elijah Wood
#77. How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?" I ask.
"Keep going," Christian says. "Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.
Suzanne Finnamore
#78. You can't rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn't it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it?
Tom Robbins
#79. Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.
Marian Keyes
#80. What's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.
Stephanie Coontz
#81. A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders.
Michael Medved
#82. There is no breakthrough without a breakdown.
Tony Robbins
#83. With the breakdown of discipline in the home and with every source of amusement and instruction pouring poison into daily life, it is not to be wondered that the minds of people are ready to receive anything but the truth and that they are ready to believe lies and ultimately the lie.
Billy Graham
#84. Low-income Americans' potential for mobility is often impaired by family breakdown, cultural dysfunction, and the polarization of norms
Yuval Levin
#85. We were talking about really getting Europe on its feet. It was our hope that there would be a breakdown of trade barriers in Europe first, and then eventually a breakdown internationally, which would help increase trade with Europe.
W. Averell Harriman
#86. Taking my faltering as a sign of imminent emotional breakdown.
Andrea Cremer
#87. I wish she knew that there are other options besides "complete and utter breakdown" and "plastic smile, everything's fine." There's a middle ground, waiting to be found.
Cat Clarke
#88. The main interest of most members of the Christian Coalition is the breakdown of the family. I think that's our biggest problem, and if the whole country was as concerned and active in issues of the family as members of the Christian Coalition are, we'd probably be better off as a country.
Lamar Alexander
#89. Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.
- Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"
from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache
Clint Catalyst
#90. The greatest asset of any nation is the spirit of its people, and the greatest danger that can menace any nation is the breakdown of that spirit-the will to win and the courage to work.
George B. Cortelyou
#91. Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams.
Bella Abzug
#92. A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.
Art Buchwald
#93. It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
#94. Bob comes into the office with a smear of grease on his white shirt over the bulge of his beer gut, and he's talking nonstop about what's going on with the breakdown of the automatic testing machines. "Bob," I tell him, "forget about that for now.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
#95. I wanted us to have a holiday, not a ruddy breakdown.
Alan Garner
#96. Not many people sleep with other men and when the other man leaves have a nervous breakdown.
Andrew Sullivan
#97. Whether or not we can save Lake Michigan, whether or not we can avoid a breakdown in our criminal justice system are more important than whether or not I'm going to be governor.
Bill Scott
#98. Because there's beauty in the breakdown.
Imogen Heap
#99. I didn't know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I'd become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.
Jardine Libaire
#100. I am simply submerged in work from five in the morning to eleven at night; almost need a few days off to escape a breakdown!
Richard Neutra
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