Top 78 Quotes About Deference
#1. A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to be wrong he must confess it at all costs and atone for it.
Mahatma Gandhi
#2. There are very many characteristics which go into making a model civil servant. Prominent among them are probity, industry, good sense, good habits, good temper, patience, order, courtesy, tact, self-reliance, many deference to superior officers, and many consideration for inferiors.
Chester A. Arthur
#3. He has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest, in listening to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us resist.
Wilkie Collins
#4. One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint - that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid 'legislating from the bench.'
Jeff Greenfield
#5. First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.
Virginia Woolf
#6. If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
Karl Popper
#7. Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.
Alexander Hamilton
#8. Not everyone could have the blissful equanimity of Lamen, who seemed to pay the Prince no deference of rank, a piece of very good acting. Charls
C.S. Pacat
#9. It would be impossible for women to stand in higher estimation than they do here. The deference that is paid to them at all times and in all places has often occasioned me as much surprise as pleasure.
Frances Wright
#10. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.
Edward Gibbon
#11. High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.
Anne Fadiman
#12. Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.
William Shenstone
#13. We show deference to the civil authorities when they respect the divine origin of their power and when they serve the people with objective reference to the law of God.
Angelo Scola
#14. The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton Wilder
#15. With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#16. Washington society has always demanded less and given more than any society in this country
demanded less of applause, deference,etiquette, and has accepted as current coin quick wit, appreciative tact, and a talent for talking.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#17. A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.
William Shenstone
#18. Sidious bowed his head in deference. "In the annals of Sith history, you will be known as Plagueis the Wise." Plagueis quirked a cunning smile. "You flatter me.
James Luceno
#19. The tall monk who came striding down the shadowed monastery corridor was surprisingly young, barely thirty. As he swept past the novices, his dark robe flapping wildly around his legs, they bobbed their heads in fearful deference.
Michelle Frost
#20. A rich dress adds but little to the beauty of a person. It may possibly create a deference, but that is rather an enemy to love.
William Shenstone
#21. Most of our fellow-subjects are guided either by the prejudice of education or by a deference to the judgment of those who perhaps in their own hearts disapprove the opinions which they industriously spread among the multitude.
Joseph Addison
#22. [On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.
Ouida
#23. It was before Vatican II and the liberalization of church doctrine. You weren't meant to eat meat on Friday in deference to Christ, who died on Friday. If you did, you went to hell, . That way, Hitler would be in hell alongside someone who ate meat on Friday. I thought there was no justice there.
Christopher Durang
#24. The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.
Lawrence Goodwyn
#25. What I find is with all due deference to - deference to our male colleagues, that women's styles tend to be more collaborative.
Susan Collins
#26. The superior man has nothing to compete for. But if he must compete, he does it in an archery match, wherein he ascends to his position, bowing in deference. Descending, he drinks the ritual cup.
Confucius
#27. The best thing to give
your enemy is forgiveness;
to an oponent, tolerance;
to a friend, your heart;
to your child, a good example;
to your father, deference;
to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you;
to your self, respect;
to all men charity.
Swami Sivananda Radha
#28. Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.
Charles Dickens
#29. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Theodor Adorno
#30. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone.
Jane Austen
#31. Out of deference to tradition I did wear a hat to church, weddings, ceremonial occasions, and when my head was cold.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#32. They spoke politely and with deference to the adults, whereas it went against my nature not to speak plainly. To many people speaking plainly is the same as speaking rudely. Whereas to me, if one was direct, it saved time and misunderstanding.
Theresa Breslin
#33. The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#35. The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ?
Christopher Hitchens
#36. There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.
William Shenstone
#37. Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.
Jean Dubuffet
#38. Countries are effectively paid deference in direct and indirect ways if they're huge oil suppliers.
James Woolsey
#39. A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a pimp, before a husband is allowed to correct it," he said seething. "You would only tinker with it," she said fearless, though fearing.
Edna O'Brien
#40. [F]riends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
#41. It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves.
Luc De Clapiers
#42. Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.
David Hume
#44. Gentlemen, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color.
Louisa May Alcott
#45. People who expect deference resent mere civility.
Mason Cooley
#46. The more deference there is, the narrower the band of judgements on which organisations rely. Deference acts like the fatty deposits that build up in arteries, restricting the flow of fresh, oxygen-enriched blood across the system.
Robin Ryde
#47. Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
William Shenstone
#48. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#49. Bastions of wealth
are no deference for the man
who treads the grand altar of Justice
down and out of sight.
Aeschylus
#50. The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.
Katha Pollitt
#51. The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all others, charity.
Benjamin Franklin
#52. A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
William Hazlitt
#53. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.
Red Smith
#54. Man pays deference to woman instinctively, involuntarily, not because she is beautiful or truthful or wise or foolish or proper, but because she is a woman, and he cannot help it. If she descends, he will lower to her level; if she rises, he will rise to her height.
Mary Abigail Dodge
#55. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
Ambrose Bierce
#56. Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
Peggy Noonan
#57. We paused to nod in deference to a just-arrived mom of six who placed third in her age group in the Ironman and has a successful catering business, No Small Affair. Everyone suspects she's on meth but still, the woman commands respect.
Elisabeth Egan
#59. In all our times together so far, this was the first time I felt we were enjoying ourselves, without strain or any sense of difference of age or deference, concession or inequality. It was, I thought afterwards, the first time we had met as ourselves, untrammelled, unguarded and in tune.
Aidan Chambers
#60. It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.
Jacqueline Carey
#61. I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.
William Stanley Jevons
#62. I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others - of resigning my own judgement in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect.
Jane Austen
#63. There is a silent deference for one another, a distance that is kept, and lines that aren't crossed, but in their sharing, they each try to pay tribute to the bond in their own way. As often as possible, they open up a little and give what they can.
Dan Groat
#64. The president's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.
Warren E. Burger
#65. As a proof of friendship, and of deference for her judgement, a great pleasure;
Jane Austen
#66. Dewar's rule in his laboratory was as absolute as that of a Pharaoh, and he showed deference to no one except the ghost of Faraday whom he met occasionally all night in the gallery behind the lecture room.
Kurt Mendelssohn
#67. They're here, though; not a creature failed,
No blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me,
The Queen of Calvary.
Emily Dickinson
#68. Later, concealment of pride in humility came to be recognized as a deliberate and useful tactic which Sophia - renamed Catherine - used when confronting crisis and danger. Threatened, she drew around herself a cloak of meekness, deference, and temporary submission.
Robert K. Massie
#69. Near the centre of that State of New York lies an extensive district of country, whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys.
James F. Cooper
#70. Deference and intimacy live far apart.
Moliere
#71. In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
Jennifer Lee
#72. The fear of man, the trust in man, the deference to the opinion of man, is the merest worship of a rag-stuffed idol.
George MacDonald
#73. The kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor's return gifts.
Henry Kissinger
#74. I'm not the first to have raised these democratic concerns. Many have faulted the court for its lack of clarity in certain cases and many have criticized its recent lack of deference to decisions made by state legislatures and Congress.
Mike DeWine
#75. With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.
Sean Brady
#76. Nothing is too difficult unless you decide to keep shifting it to tomorrow till you can't do it any longer.
Israelmore Ayivor
#77. He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.
Geoff Dyer
#78. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.
Jane Austen
