Insisting On Quotes

#1. Most actors make themselves unhappy by searching for their sanity, by insisting on their normalcy; it's a grave mistake.

Michael Shurtleff

#2. ...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.

Terrence Real

#3. Keeping Christ in Christmas is like showing up at someone's house every year, insisting on a party they never planned and never agreed to.

Rebecca McKinsey

#4. Obama liberals, in their incalculable arrogance, believe they are smart enough to defy everything we know about human nature, economics and history by insisting on separating financial efforts from rewards and pretending this can bring prosperity.

David Limbaugh

#5. As I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.

Helen Simonson

#6. The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.

Eula Biss

#7. Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Doris Lessing

#8. Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

Ann Oakley

#9. He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

Angela Carter

#10. In this world, unity is achievable only by learning to unite in spite of differences, rather than insisting on unity without differences. For their total eradication is an impossibility. The secret of attaining peace in life is tolerance of disturbance of the peace. (p. 99)

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

#11. Faith is not accepting the world as it is but insisting on building the world God wants.

Shane Claiborne

#12. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

David Guterson

#13. No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

Benjamin Graham

#14. Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.

Fulton J. Sheen

#15. In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly.

James Q. Wilson

#16. Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool

Patrick Califia-Rice

#17. Echo placed the expertly folded blanket back on the couch and smoothed it several times, insisting on finding perfection in a world where none existed.

Katie McGarry

#18. Wealthy parents today, she argues, are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while at the same time insisting on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influences that can create "intense feelings of shame and hopelessness" in affluent children.

Paul Tough

#19. He lay in darkness, like a sacrifice; he could hear the teeth of his leprosy devouring his flesh. There was a smell of contempt around him, insisting on his impotence. But his lips were bowed in a placid smile, a look of fondness, as if he had come at last to approve his disintegration.

Stephen R. Donaldson

#20. If a religious principle is worth anything, it applies to a million of human beings as truly as to one; and the difficulty of insisting on its wider application does not furnish any proof that it ought not to be so applied.

Henry Parry Liddon

#21. It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them

Ernest Gellner

#22. We are such sticklers for tradition in insisting on an amateur captain, regardless of the question of whether he can pull his weight as a player. The time is coming when we will have to change our views [...] when there will be no amateurs of sufficient ability to put into an England side.

John Berry Hobbs

#23. Stop insisting on clearing your head - clear your fucking heart instead.

Charles Bukowski

#24. In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

Terry Eagleton

#25. These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn't be human.

Hanif Kureishi

#26. The young man is currently standing in the hallway, dripping on the handmade silk rug that the Emperor of the Indies presented to His Majesty's grandmother. He is insisting on speaking with His Majesty."
"It's a very ugly rug," Mendanbar said. "That's why we put it in the entry hall.

Patricia C. Wrede

#27. Choose your battles. If rapid development is truly top priority, don't shackle your developers by insisting on too many priorities at once.

Steve McConnell

#28. Wondering where Ranger was now, when I needed him. Why wasn't he here, insisting on locking me up in a safe house? Now that my hamster's cage was clean, I'd be happy to oblige.

Janet Evanovich

#29. Witches can generally come to terms with what actually is, instead of insisting on what ought to be.

Terry Pratchett

#30. I reached for my bag but Logan refused, insisting on carrying it. Because he just had to do perfect gentlemanly things that made me like him even more. That bastard.

Cara Lynn Shultz

#31. For me, what's compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray us or rescue us by insisting on their own non-negotiable truths. Anything but frank or pragmatic.

Catherine Brady

#32. When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.

Michael Graves

#33. I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

#34. I didn't make any friends in New York by insisting on moving the league headquarters to Cincinnati. The fact was that my son Bill was in school. His mother had passed away, and I didn't want to take the boy away from his school and to a strange city.

Warren Giles

#35. So, to get to play somebody who was insisting on it, in spite of all the evidence was very liberating and exciting. It went quite deep. I suppose I reference a kindness and humility that I would have seen in my parents' generation, a little bit more than now.

Brendan Gleeson

#36. People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it

Edith Schaeffer

#37. Insisting on living in your past will kill your future. Let it go.

Tony Evans

#38. An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

Jack Kirby

#39. Cover each with plastic wrap (you see, I hope, that I am no mere antiquarian, insisting on barefoot walks through unimproved sculleries. I am as grateful as anyone for real progress as any modernist. More so, perhaps. Anything that preserves freshness for the pot is on the side of the angels.

Robert Farrar Capon

#40. Prayer is repeating the victor's name (Jesus) into the ears of Satan and insisting on his retreat.

S.D. Gordon

#41. I was very strenuous for retaining and insisting on it [law of nature], as a resource to which we might be driven by Parliament much sooner than we were aware.

John Adams

#42. Use a different approach to meet women than offering them a drink, stop insisting on dates that cost money, and show that you care for your woman by the way that you treat her, how you look at her, what you say to her, how you hold her, etc., instead of by buying her things.

W. Anton

#43. Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.

Ermanno Bencivenga

#44. By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people's lives, and help solve many of society's major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone's freedom to choose.

Richard H. Thaler

#45. By not having sex before marriage, you are insisting on your right to take these things seriously, when many around you do not seem to. By reserving a part of you for someone else, you are insisting on your right to keep something sacred.

Wendy Shalit

#46. The hardest thing to attain ... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

George Saintsbury

#47. I've been trying not to be a big baby by insisting on holding his hand in front of the angels, but the urge is strong. I don't want to embarrass him even when he's unconscious. But now that the others are gone, I sit beside him and hold his hand. It's warm, and I pull it to my chest to warm me up.

Susan Ee

#48. If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.

Bryan Stevenson

#49. We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#50. We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he'd turn into one.

Anna Funder

#51. Some men use no other means to acquire respect than by insisting on it; and it sometimes answers their purpose, as it does a highwayman's in regard to money.

William Shenstone

#52. Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

Marilyn French

#53. Final cut is overrated. Only fools keep insisting on always having the final word. The wise swallow their pride in order to get to the best possible cut.

Wim Wenders

#54. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

Cheryl Strayed

#55. Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another.

Peggy Orenstein

#56. It is not easy, she thinks, to make your way in the world while insisting on a new path.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#57. It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Helen Fielding

#58. I was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they're insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we're not the funniest people.

Daniel Bruhl

#59. Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you.

Ana Castillo

#60. There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.

Fred Rogers

#61. I'm not the perfectionist anymore. It's my staff. They're the ones always insisting on doing something better and better.

Walt Disney

#62. It may not be replicable: One of the hardest transition that a developing country can make is the transition to middle-class status. Governments have to let go, people start insisting on following their own lights, etc.

Charles R. Morris

#63. Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.

Rebecca Solnit

#64. I wish I could somehow recover all those years I wasted waiting around for him to deal with his issues." Save yourself that sadness if you can, by insisting on nothing less than complete respect.

Lundy Bancroft

#65. Let's keep refusing to accept the world as it is and insisting on building the world we dream of. Don't let the haters have the last word.

Shane Claiborne

#66. Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.

Naomi Klein

#67. Cooperation - To get cooperation, you must give cooperation. Always seek to find the best way rather than insisting on your own way.

John Wooden

#68. for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.

David J. Anderson

#69. Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective.

Bill Nye

#70. Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer.

David Graeber

#71. I pity him who refuses to leave the minatory of his refutable Judgments and still insisting on producing his light to lit our worlds.

Annie Ali

#72. Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#73. Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

Rebecca West

#74. How often do we lose sight of what we're really after, insisting on all or nothing, when there is so much abundance wherever we are and so many opportunities that can help us on our way?

Mark Nepo

#75. And a cool four thousand, Pip!
I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

Charles Dickens

#76. Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord's totem pole, it's very brave of you to invite the "resident atheist" of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you.

Ruth Hurmence Green

#77. I love the feeling of being on the hunt - the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.

George Saunders

#78. Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.

E. J. Dionne

#79. If one takes responsibility for the mistakes, he is the true person, isn't it? Do not insist. Instead of insisting, instead of blaming others, take the responsibility of the mistakes on your head!

Dada Bhagwan

#80. To be free of insistence [free of forcing one's own opinion] is the path of Vitragta [attachment-free state, the enlightened one]. Quit insisting at all places. To even insist on the truth, God has considered it as ignorance. There is no insistence in 'Us' whatsoever!

Dada Bhagwan

#81. One of the big problems in America's economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can't be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

Michael Hudson

#82. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and 'clean' versions be made for them to carry.

Trent Reznor

#83. In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.

Camille Paglia

#84. Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

Philip Slater

#85. [W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#86. The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems.

Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall

#87. If i listen hard enough, i can hear that voice: that small quiet whisper in the back of my head that keeps on insisting "My will, or i won't".

Matthew Woodring Stover

#88. I'm insisting, quite unapologetically, on the need to have these appropriate security measures in place to protect the voters, which is my principal charge.

Kevin Shelley

#89. That's how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they're on the moral high ground

Neil Strauss