Top 100 Defensive Quotes
#1. Whatever clutter may be getting in your way during a conversation or communication, use the simple acronym HEAR to enter a more spacious and less defensive awareness. HEAR stands for: hold all assumptions; enter the emotional world; absorb and accept; and reflect, then respect. H
Donald Altman
#2. With fandom, people are sensitive, and sometimes defensive, about their experiences.
Rainbow Rowell
#3. Some actors don't mind it. Those who are pretty. They think it's nice to be looked at because they are nice to look at. I appreciate that. I'm very happy to salute that aspiration. But I don't like the way I look so I don't like being photographed. I become defensive.
Richard Griffiths
#4. When you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you're trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence.
Meghan Daum
#5. With the help of your therapist or healing ally, you can identify who makes you feel uneasy, concerned, scared, or defensive.
Jeanne McElvaney
#6. There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation.
Warren G. Harding
#7. I wasn't sure of the exact mindset you should have when you go into a Test match. So I probably became too defensive when I played my first Test match. Short balls in one-day cricket, I have never thought of just defending.
Virat Kohli
#8. Sometimes we get defensive about what we feel guilty about.
Amy Poehler
#9. Saul took their fear of the Philistines personally. Rejection always takes things personally, becoming defensive, and thus never allows us to see or hear things properly. Remember, the most commons signs of rejection are being defensive and taking things personally.
Anthony Hulsebus
#10. Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.
Sun Tzu
#11. We knew that if we had to win the World Cup, the defensive side of the game had to be better, which means bowlers will have to bowl tight and we will have to field better.
Ricky Ponting
#12. The challenge to America is to extend to Asia the defensive shield of American power in forms consonant with Asian freedom and self-respect.
Ferdinand Marcos
#13. In an honest effort to gain understanding, asking questions do not, necessarily, imply a conclusion has been determined. They can be used to avoid making the wrong judgement. If building trust is the ultimate goal - there is no need to be defensive, or feel threatened by any inquiry.
T.F. Hodge
#14. Now that I'm retired, I want to say that all defensive linemen are sissies.
Dan Fouts
#15. Aggressiveness was a fundamental to success in airtoair combat and if you ever caught a fighter pilot in a defensive mood you had him licked before you started shooting.
David McCampbell
#16. Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.
Francine Prose
#17. The defensive perimeter [of the United States in East Asia] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus.
Dean Acheson
#18. We approach markets backwards. The first thing we ask is not what can we make, but how much can we lose. We play a defensive game.
Larry Hite
#19. General Grant had no fixed plan of campaign beyond the general idea to avoid the strong defensive line occupied by General Lee behind Mine Run, and find a way to draw him out to open battle.
James Longstreet
#21. I am a defensive tackle that no matter the situation, even if it is in nickel, I can go in there and rush the passer. And I can help the team out on first and second, too. I will get pressure.
Darius Philon
#22. As for the boys ... vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the function that father knows best' Parents, especially fathers, teach their sons to obey authority no matter what.
Martha Stout
#23. All the charges you enumerate have been made with one purpose in mind-to place our office on the defensive and make us waste valuable time answering allegations that have no basis in fact.
Jim Garrison
#24. If you are a good team, your offense is born on the defensive end.
Don Meyer
#25. A warrior lives on his wars, whether offensive or defensive. And he suffers a collapse if he finds that his warring capacity is unwanted.
Mahatma Gandhi
#26. Now he laughed again. "I'm sorry. I just tend to get on the defensive." "That's okay. I tend to get on the clueless. So we're even." He
N.R. Walker
#27. But if you parry individuals points - a negative and defensive enterprise - you never step back and actively imagine a world in which a different system of ideas could be true - a positive act.
Deborah Tannen
#28. All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive.
Roger Williams
#29. I think every time I go in a game, I have added something positive. I have gotten a rebound or made a defensive play. That is what I try to focus on.
Rebecca Lobo
#30. It's not going to be easy; Enterprise IT has spent decades growing a defensive culture based on the premise that you only get noticed when you screw up, so that must be avoided at all costs.
Tim Bray
#31. By going on the defensive ... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.
Ilana Mercer
#32. Pride lives on the defensive against anyone and anything that tries to subtract from its self-sustained worth. Confidence, on the other hand, is driven by the certainty of God-given identity and the conviction that nothing can take that identity away.
Beth Moore
#33. Before, shortstops and second basemen were mostly defensive guys that made all the plays and didn't really hit that well. But now it's beginning to change a little bit. Now, shortstops and second basemen are very productive in terms of run producing.
Chase Utley
#34. Some people are hard to hold accountable because they are so helpful. Others because they get defensive. Others because they are intimidating. I don't think it's easy to hold anyone accountable, not even your own kids
Patrick Lencioni
#35. I am always and at once on the defensive, for example, when people speak of races and nations as if they were personalities and had souls and destinies and such like.
Christopher Hitchens
#36. The difference between a good defensive team and a bad defensive team is as little as three possessions
Brad Stevens
#37. There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much.
Jo Brand
#38. Aggressiveness carries with it an incalculable moral edge in any combat, offensive or defensive.
Jeff Cooper
#39. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.
Charles Stross
#40. One of my biggest concerns was how defensive the fans would be over The REV's drum throne. I'm grateful they have been welcoming.
Mike Portnoy
#41. My thought for today: Writing a letter to a friend today has helped clear a lot in my mind. It has taught me not to go on the defensive, instead to poke two fingers up to my critics who have no idea what restrictions there are when it comes to writing about a cold case".
Monica Weller
#42. In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, 'Don't be defensive,' meaning, 'You have no argument,' but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.
Mark Helprin
#43. We had a great preseason. The guys responded with what coach (George Karl) wanted early on in pace of the game, togetherness and defensive intensity. We've improved in those areas with a couple of setbacks, but we've improved each game.
Scott Brooks
#44. Sicknesses, especially those affecting nerves and head, are signs that the defensive strength of the strong natures is lacking; precisely this is suggested by irritability, so pleasure and displeasure become foreground problems.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy.
W. Somerset Maugham
#46. The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.
John Shelby Spong
#47. The official strategy is defensive pessimism, always.
Veronica Roth
#48. I care about all the characters I play, and I get quite defensive about them.
Ben Chaplin
#49. It was fun, having speed and being able to jump. Especially playing football. I played wide receiver and defensive back.
Jacoby Ellsbury
#50. Modern ecumenism rightly began in mission, but then lapsed into a merger mentality, then defensive bureaucracy, and finally into unrepresentative forms of extreme politicization.
Thomas C. Oden
#51. I'll tell you that for me, one when someone used to say something that was true, one way I knew it was true was that I immediately felt defensive. I blocked it off, and I went to war with them in my mind and suffered all that goes with it. And they were only saying what was true.
Byron Katie
#52. Rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive
John Edward Williams
#53. Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.
Augustine Of Hippo
#54. but its most important characteristic was an ability to analyze the emotional beats of a movie without any of its members themselves getting emotional or defensive.
Ed Catmull
#55. I was always being creative. I could never have played a defensive role because I would have been forced to destroy the other player's creativity.
Eric Cantona
#56. Cyber Command is supposed to be defending our critical infrastructure at home, but they are spending so much time looking at how to attack networks, how to break systems, and how to turn things off. I don't think it adds up as representing a defensive team.
Edward Snowden
#57. Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.
Theodore Parker
#58. You should always be defensive, but never be offensive. This will help you to preserve your reputation as a human being.
Saaif Alam
#59. The positions I played in football, being a quarterback and a defensive back, you had to kind of have a little independent thinking.
Hale Irwin
#60. Conservation is not a desperate, defensive effort. It is instead joyous and life-affirming. - from Zen Birding
Susan Guyette And David White
#61. It was so long in the past that it should not have mattered, but it did. It did. Once he had realized that these words and words like them were the truth, once they had broken through his defensive barrier of denial, then they became a part of him, burning their way into his soul.
J.N. Stroyar
#62. Excessive record-keeping is a symptom of insecurity and defensive thinking. It indicates that you are less concerned attaining objectives than you are with documentation, and that your thinking is oriented to the past, not the present.
Edwin Bliss
#63. When you play against an experienced opponent who exploits all the defensive resources at his command you sometimes have to walk time and again, along the narrow path of 'the only move'.
David Bronstein
#64. You are recognized by your bat. If you are the best hitting shortstop out there, that's how you win a Gold Glove. That's the way it is. It shouldn't be-it's a defensive award.
Jimmy Rollins
#65. All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.
Derek Jarman
#66. Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books ... "
"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.
Budd Schulberg
#67. Course aims: 1. Understanding the principles underlying defensive magic. 2. Learning to recognize situations in which defensive magic can legally be used. 3. Placing the use of defensive magic in a context for practical use.
J.K. Rowling
#68. It's a natural thing for people to say, you know, Who's in this book? I find myself get ting a little defensive. People come along and I'm waiting for that first question.
Hugh Leonard
#69. By fighting a limited, defensive war, America permitted the enemy to endlessly re-supply their field armies.
Nguyen Cao Ky
#70. And also I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive.
Uma Thurman
#71. I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page of my novel was about.
Joan Juliet Buck
#72. As the U.S., much of Europe, and the U.K. shift toward the political right, the rhetoric grows more insular, defensive, and protective.
Samantha Harvey
#73. I was a very defensive kid 'cause I was really sensitive underneath and didn't want people to know. So I came off as very tough and very angry.
Pink
#74. A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.
David Levering Lewis
#75. Her words sounded accusatory, and after the way she'd grabbed the binder, I couldn't help going on the defensive. I'd apologize, but I'm not happy about it either.
Myra McEntire
#76. Defensive players kind of have that two-faced kind of way of being able to be very aggressive on the football field and going out there and getting there job done. At the same time, from my own incidents and my own personality, I'm much a person that's very likable and lovable.
Ndamukong Suh
#77. Have we become so defensive that we cannot even tolerate a kind act?
Kyra Gregory
#78. You are completely at choice who you will be today in your interactions with others. Compassionate, kind, giving and forgiving will create one set of probabilities; angry, judgmental, critical and defensive will create another one altogether.
Marianne Williamson
#79. I don't think I was awake for much of my childhood. I did a lot of napping. This might have been a defensive measure against encroaching depression. Until about the age of eleven or twelve, I had zero interests other than trying to steal gumballs from supermarket gumball machines.
Michael Ian Black
#80. That's what I did, though - I had angry, defensive conversations in my head, got mad at things that hadn't even happened yet. Yet.
Gillian Flynn
#81. Here's my philosophy. Adopt it, and you'll make it out alive. Every man for himself. You watch your own ass. Your con goes orange? You fall back to defensive position. No heroics. And no stupidity. Got it?
Eve Silver
#82. Any defensive coordinator is worried about two things: a running quarterback and a deep ball. You know, don't get beat deep and don't let the quarterback run, because a big part of your defense can't account for the quarterback as a runner, so he gets a free run.
John Madden
#83. It is of course, entirely possible that men (or anyone who is relatively privileged) are most defensive, most obstinate and unseeing when they are worried about losing privileges ... In the reactions of husbands, I detect a haunting worry about what they will lose when true gender equality arrives.
Faye J Crosby
#84. Gold Gloves are nice to have people mention. They're basically saying you're a pretty good defensive player along with everything else. But I was about the offensive side.
Mike Schmidt
#85. War, in some instances, especially defensive, has been authorized by Heaven.
Ezra Stiles
#86. To be human is to be on the defensive, somewhere, somehow.
Corra May Harris
#87. [Every] hour of delay abates the fame and force of the invader, and multiplies the resources of defensive war.
Edward Gibbon
#88. When introverts sense invasion, we instinctively shut down to protect our inner resources. But in doing so, we lose access to ourselves. From this defensive position, we may feel that our only options are to practice extroversion, go underground, or go crazy.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#89. Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques
actually defensive bastions against community.
M. Scott Peck
#90. I see how you look at me," spits the hateful man. He thinks we look upon him with the evil eye when we are not looking at him that way at all. We are just looking at him. It's because he can't accept the hate inside of himself that he projects it onto us.
Kate McGahan
#91. When people saw that the film was called 'White People,' many got very defensive. I've been getting some very interesting emails - and I'm used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#92. I see more now. As far as concepts, I know where teammates are going, linemen are going. I can read defensive fronts. I can read the body language of linebackers. I study film to see who's a bull rusher and who's a finesse rusher. I think I've learned.
Brandon Jacobs
#93. Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.
Peggy Orenstein
#94. Once you can clearly describe what you are reacting to, free of your interpretation or evaluation of it, other people are less likely to be defensive when they hear it.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#95. Mindfulness is like a microscope; it is neither an offensive nor defensive weapon in relation to the germs we observe through it. The function of the microscope is just to clearly present what is there.
Chogyam Trungpa
#96. Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever apologize for anything.
Harry S. Truman
#97. I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.
Anthony Kiedis
#98. When PLO sniper fire is followed by 14 hours of Israeli bombardment, that's stretching the definition of defensive action too far.
Ronald Reagan
#99. But she didn't pull away from him. If anything, she seemed to sort of melt against him. It was the
first time she'd willingly accepted something from him without getting stiff and defensive and
generally annoyed
Maisey Yates
#100. Probably the most important aspect of individual defensive play is the 'close-out.' This approach to the ball should be made in a 'step-drag action' with advanced foot moving forward first and then the back foot in a boxer's type shuffling of the feet.
Tex Winter
