Top 100 Quotes About Absolutes
#1. There are no absolutes in this world, and there will always be mistakes that are made within brokerage firms; there will always be people who set out to deceive the regulators and even deceive their own senior management.
Mary Schapiro
#2. The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
Marshall McLuhan
#3. If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.
Duff Goldman
#4. It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
John Ralston Saul
#5. Secularism does not accept many things as absolutes. Its principal objectives are pleasure and self-interest. Often, those who embrace secularism have a different look about them.
James E. Faust
#6. There are no absolutes for something so relative as a human life.
There are no rules for something so gentle as a heart.
Hugh Prather
#7. There are no absolutes in golf. Golf is such an individual game, and no two people swing alike.
Kathy Whitworth
#8. The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
#9. Those of religious faith see time as evidence of god. For surely nothing could be created without a creator. Nothing could be universal and not be divine. All absolutes are part of the One Absolute.
Alan Lightman
#10. When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti.
Wayne LaPierre
#11. Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Pope John Paul II
#12. Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.
Peter Kreeft
#13. In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.
Pearl S. Buck
#14. All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience.
Ronald Rolheiser
#15. Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational.
Frank Herbert
#16. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes
Ayn Rand
#17. Ardent believers hide within the safety of their absolutes, for much more courage is needed to abandon their cozy security for the questioning of ones own beliefs.
Galen Watson
#19. After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibilities.
Jodi Picoult
#20. in the absence of a biblical morality a new elite will always come forward to dictate arbitrary absolutes to society
Francis A. Schaeffer
#21. Words like 'always' and 'never' were meaningful to my father, who thought in absolutes and whose mind consequently made great leaps in antagonistic directions when it leapt at all.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
#22. When you find your definitions in God, you find the very purpose for which you were created. Put your hand into God's hand, know His absolutes, demonstrate His love, present His truth, and the message of redemption and transformation will take hold.
Ravi Zacharias
#24. The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.
Charles Jencks
#25. The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.
Ravi Zacharias
#26. If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
Paul Johnson
#27. Doing the right thing at all costs is an absolute, and only a sith deals in absolutes.
Dave Filoni
#28. I trust that absolutes have gradations.
Jane Austen
#29. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence.
Walter Kirn
#30. What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.
Jeffrey Kluger
#31. Good and bad aren't absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.
Steve Hagen
#32. If we don't believe in moral absolutes and then we get into a cultural-political debate, how are we going to win?
Randall Terry
#33. I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
Raymond Chandler
#34. Obsoletes and absolutes are the stock in trade of religions that place their faith in an 'unchanging' god while faced with the reality of an ever-changing world.
Stifyn Emrys
#35. There are no absolutes, and your way is neither the only way nor the right way.
Stephen Richards
#36. Therefore it does not help to sneer at the imperfection of today's reality or to preach absolutes as a daily agenda.
Gustav Heinemann
#37. There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.
S.A. Reid
#38. Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.
Berkeley Breathed
#39. There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
John Updike
#41. There are no absolutes in raising children. In any stressful situation, fathering is always a roll of the dice. The game may be messy, but I have never found one with more joys and rewards.
Bill Cosby
#42. How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real ...
Jack Vance
#43. If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon - that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.
Francis Schaeffer
#44. But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
Roger Penrose
#45. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse
Cormac McCarthy
#46. Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
Alan Greenspan
#47. It is my belief that there are "absolutes" in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be "absolutes."
Hugo Black
#48. If musicians and artists have no absolutes, they end up caring more about the way the thing is told than about the thing itself, and they slide deeper and deeper till it's their means rather than the ends that matter.
Ravi Zacharias
#49. Today we are putting our hopes in materialism, in technological progress, and in freedom from moral absolutes. They have all failed. They've failed because they've been powerless to change the human heart. What is the answer? There is hope, if we will turn to God.
Billy Graham
#50. Rule makers always draw up their precious rules and regulations in safety and comfort, not out in the field, where those same absolutes are supposed to be applied. At those times we have to rely on our own minds and feelings.
Alan Dean Foster
#51. His anguished mind writhed with contradictions. He was a man of parts and halfs, in a time of wholes and absolutes.
Alexander Rose
#52. What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes.
Edward Sapir
#55. Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#56. Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes
Sidney Howard
#57. There are no absolutes in relationships. You can't take anything for granted. You can count on absolutely nothing but the unexpected. You only get in trouble when you start thinking that you're some kind of exception to the rule.
Emily Giffin
#58. There's no absolutes in life - only vodka.
Mick Jagger
#59. I used to exercise an hour every day - no excuses. I live in absolutes: I either exercise every day, or I let myself off the hook. I'm trying to find that balance of working out three or four days a week and sticking to it.
Anna Kendrick
#60. People who think in absolutes usually don't listen to anyone but themselves. They resist new ideas and try to preserve the status quo ...
Jennifer James
#61. If I can't, then that would make it an absolute and you said there aren't any absolutes." "That's different." "How is it different?" "It's the government." "You mean, there aren't any absolutes except the government?" "I mean, if they say it's important, then it is.
Ayn Rand
#62. The surest way to lose democracy is to take it for granted. Every citizen must contribute to its advancement in some way. No nation or culture can long survive the absence of transcendent values and absolutes.
Carl F. H. Henry
#63. In place of moral absolutes, they promote moral relativism and sometimes even question the very existence of truth and reality. To them truth and reality are what we subjectively perceive them to be.
Ben Shapiro
#64. Never say never," he said urgently, rolling back on top of her and using all of his unusually heavy mass to press her deep into the cocoon of her little girl bed. "The gods love to toy with people who use absolutes.
Josephine Angelini
#65. Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers.
John Owen
#66. People often indiscriminately use absolutes in their utterances: every, everyone, everything, all, always, never, no one, nothing. Rarely are these absolute terms justified.
Robert J. Gula
#67. I don't know yet. I might be. Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.
T.M. Goeglein
#68. One of the great weaknesses of standard libertarian theory is that it tends to push too hard by elevating presumptions into absolutes.
Richard Allen Epstein
#69. If you want absolutes, you have to invent them yourself.
Marty Rubin
#70. There is no such thing as winning or losing. There is won and there is lost; there is victory and defeat. There are no absolutes. Everything inbetween is left to fight for.
Derek Landy
#71. I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed.
Martin Buber
#72. Truth, justice ... I always thought they were absolutes, like God. And Mom. And apple pie.
But you could make apple pie from Ritz crackers. You could make cakes without sugar. We learned how to fake things, during the war.
Judy Blundell
#74. Morality - like velocity - is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.
David Gerrold
#75. We'd had to find each other to finally understand that love could not be controlled. Predictions, assumptions, and absolutes were illusions. My love for him was volatile, uncontrollable, and overpowering, but ... that was love. Love was real.
Jamie McGuire
#76. The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.
Keith Olbermann
#77. We don't deal in absolutes. We deal in probabilities.
Seth Klarman
#78. There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.
John Dewey
#79. It takes a very strong brain to resist the absolutes, the myths that the media and the politicians peddle - the idea that if you are too kind, where does it all end? That not to help someone is somehow a good idea.
Peter Mullan
#80. The spectral density of black body radiation ... represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.
Max Planck
#81. We have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.
Ellen Goodman
#82. [A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
Azar Nafisi
#83. Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions ... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue ...
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#84. There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck to it, we're out, too.
Mario Testino
#85. All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. There are very few certainties that touch us all in this mortal experience, but one of the absolutes is that we will experience hardship and stress at some point.
James Dobson
#88. Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.
Siri Hustvedt
#89. Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better.
Joseph Heller
#90. Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth.
Deepak Chopra
#91. Are you absolutely sure there are no absolutes?
Patrick Friar
#92. I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.
Arthur Koestler
#93. As noble as our intentions might be as we assume a leadership role, we are always one errant, unthinking action or careless word away from getting outside the boundaries of good judgment or even the moral absolutes that must frame all decisions.
Tim Irwin
#94. There are no absolutes.' 'I think there are,' said Sidney. 'Fairness, justice, toleration, support for the weak, care for those in need, truth and love.
James Runcie
#95. In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation.
Adam Gopnik
#97. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
Emile M. Cioran
#98. Miracles are statistical improbabilities. And fate is an illusion humanity uses to comfort itself in the dark. There are no absolutes in life, save death.
Amie Kaufman
#99. The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.
Emily Giffin
#100. The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.
Suzanne Fields
