Top 62 Dictum Quotes
#1. Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know." Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
Rose Tremain
#2. Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.
Paul Johnson
#3. Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Edith Wharton
#4. The spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child
C. G. Jung
#5. Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#6. Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat ...
Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher
#7. When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt's famous dictum, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."5
Reid Hoffman
#8. The old dictum was backward. It should be "Better not to
have loved at all, than to love and have lost." I had done the
right thing, I reassured myself. So why did it feel like I had
made the biggest mistake of my life?
Amy Plum
#9. By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.
Paul A. Baran
#10. The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire
Don Winslow
#11. We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
Aldo Leopold
#12. The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.
Robert M. Pirsig
#13. I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum that a sustainable business can be a profitable business. We were the first sizeable company in the U.K. to prove that was the case.
Stuart Rose
#14. It was incomprehensible to her that anyone should be amused by such a circumstance, but both Gilly and Gideon plainly thought it excessively funny, so she smiled dutifully, realizing the truth of her mama's dictum, that there was never any knowing what stupidities men would find diverting.
Georgette Heyer
#15. The maxim is, that whatever can be affirmed (or denied) of a class, may be affirmed (or denied) of everything included in the class. This axiom, supposed to be the basis of the syllogistic theory, is termed by logicians the dictum de omni et nullo.
John Stuart Mill
#16. It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.
St.Athanasius
#17. One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.
Diana Gabaldon
#18. The dictum that "online you are the content you create and the content you share" takes on new shape and form and obviously power when it comes to Hangouts on Air
David Amerland
#19. I'm not one who goes for the 'all press is good press' dictum.
Jill Sobule
#20. I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'
Bruce Chatwin
#21. For she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.
Denis Norden
#23. I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.
Alan Garner
#24. Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.
Donald Phillip Verene
#25. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We
David Mitchell
#26. The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.
Lewis Mumford
#27. When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience.
John Pilger
#28. Unfortunately we did not attend Voltaire's dictum to define our terms before we began. The result was disagreement on all issues.
James Aldridge
#29. There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes.
William Poundstone
#30. Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down ...
Brian Aldiss
#31. Montesquieu wrote: "I have never known any distress that an hour of reading did not relieve." If one substituted the word music for reading, the exact same dictum applied to me.
Zhu Xiao-Mei
#32. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
#33. Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#34. The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
T.C. Boyle
#35. On my visits to America, I discovered that the old Marxist dictum, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," was probably more in force in America-that holy of holies of capitalism-than in any other country in the world.
Felix Houphouet-Boigny
#36. May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
Werner Herzog
#37. Hemingway had a handy dictum. You want to know if something is morally right? Listen to your stomach. If it sits like broken glass, then it's morally wrong.
Ken Bruen
#38. It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible ... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.
Brian D. McLaren
#39. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.
David Mitchell
#40. Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.
Frances Wright
#41. The rejection of sabotage in the metropole, based on the argument that it would be better to take things over instead of destroying them, is based on the dictum: The people of the Third World should wait for their revolution until the masses in the metropole catch up.
Red Army Faction
#42. The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable
Herbert Marcuse
#43. You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken. While it is said that everything is fair in love an war, the dictum is nullified when both love and war occur simultaneously ...
Salvador Plascencia
#44. a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller
Sam Miller
#45. The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#46. Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
John Le Carre
#47. My dictum has always been: 'This show is happening just here, just tonight, with these people who are in this hall, and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's done.'
Peter Hammill
#48. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Ray Bradbury
#49. German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.
Ludwig Von Mises
#50. Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.
Harper Lee
#51. CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, author of 'Cogito ergo sum' to demonstrate the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved 'Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum' 'I think that I think, therefore I think that I am' as close an approach.
Ambrose Bierce
#52. The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.
Henry Hazlitt
#53. To quote a dictum of Simon, what a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad.
Xenophon
#54. If I'm sure of a person and his potential in politics, and if I know he will live up to his promises, I wouldn't mind campaigning for him. I believe in the dictum, 'never say never.' You never know, I might end up joining politics.
Arjun Rampal
#55. It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.
Steven Spielberg
#56. It is undeniably easier to ignore the hardships of those who are too weak to demand their rights than to respond sensitively to their needs. To care is to accept responsibility, to dare to act in accordance with the dictum that the ruler is the strength of the helpless.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#57. The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
John Stuart Mill
#58. Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.
William Carlos Williams
#59. Saadi's dictum, in the Bostan: 'The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe
Idries Shah
#60. Charlie's dictum: All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.
Warren Buffett
#61. Be selfish, stupid and have good health. But if stupidity is lacking, then all is lost.
Flaubert's dictum for getting through life unscathed.
Gustave Flaubert
#62. An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad.
Jean-Marie Le Pen