Top 100 Quotes About Distinctions
#1. The field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions.
Pierre Bourdieu
#2. If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.
Charlton Heston
#3. The Swaraj of my dream recognizes no race or religious distinctions.
Mahatma Gandhi
#4. The openness of such networked devices reflects our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library.
Jay David Bolter
#5. How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?
Ruth Kluger
#6. Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!
Zhuangzi
#7. In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.
Ambrose Bierce
#8. Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.
Harlan Stone
#9. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.
Anna Julia Cooper
#10. Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven are divisions and distinctions we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe.
Fanny Kemble
#11. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#13. Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.
Barack Obama
#14. There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.
Evelyn Waugh
#15. But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.
Samuel Johnson
#16. Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origens, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.
Christoph Wolff
#17. I'll take my alkaloid diuretics wherever I can get them. If there isn't a 7-11 in the vicinity, a Winchell's donut shop is Plan B. The joe at both places is almost indistinguishable, like the difference between Johnny Walker and Cutty Sark, but only cab drivers and hobos draw such fine distinctions.
Gary Reilly
#18. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#19. Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#20. When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.
Robert Bork
#21. There's a particular hierarchy in the prison - class distinctions, high-school cliques. You have to learn how to navigate.
Laura Prepon
#22. Modern invention has been a great leveler. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.
Ivor Brown
#23. Religious distinctions are deeply important for many of the problems in today's Middle East, particularly between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq.
Max Fisher
#24. One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives for self while the other acts to redeem society.
Joseph Campbell
#25. If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation.
Kristin Neff
#26. This type of gathering is unprecedented. The time has come for Christians to publicly affirm our Jewish roots, distinctions and oneness in Jesus Christ.
Bill McCartney
#27. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.
Herbert Spencer
#28. The heathen mythology not only was not true, but was not even supported as true; it not only deserved no faith, but it demanded none. The very pretension to truth, the very demand of faith, were characteristic distinctions of Christianity.
Richard Whately
#29. It's quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he's neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one's glimpsed the divine, one's left these man-made distinctions behind.
Karen Armstrong
#30. People should make distinctions between the office of the presidency and the person who occupies it. You can respect the office even as you lose respect for the individual.
David Greenberg
#31. Ours is supposed to be a government in which classes and distinctions melt into a harmonious whole. Until we reach this ideal of government, we will be a distracted, contentious people.
Timothy Thomas Fortune
#32. The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice - that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion.
Kang Chol-Hwan
#33. The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy
Gregory B. Sadler
#34. Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice.
Thomas Paine
#35. In a world of physical ease, brutal social equality, and reasonable economic equality, exclusiveness in frivolity becomes the most sought-after of all distinctions.
Roger Zelazny
#36. Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life
Elena Ferrante
#37. Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.
Mark Nepo
#38. Personal development is an ever-evolving process of making more and better distinctions about who you are and what you want.
Stevie Puckett
#39. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine
Cassandra Clare
#40. For our immigration policy to make sense, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it.
Barbara Jordan
#41. Borges was unapologetically smart and equally sentimental; a proto-geek, blind to distinctions between low pulp fiction and high criticism, experimental but never arch, and always playful, with a humor as dry as dust.
John Hodgman
#42. Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinctions for rank or creed.
Terry Pratchett
#43. Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.
John Le Carre
#44. Unlike furious thin-lipped feminists, I tend not to draw distinctions between men and women, apart from in bed where you really do need to spot the difference.
Jeremy Clarkson
#45. White magic or black, it doesn't make a difference. Natural and artificial? Obsolete distinctions
David Porush
#46. All through life there were distinctions - toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women - then, at the end, the graves are identical.
Leila Aboulela
#47. The darkness of the world made no distinctions; it entered its palaces as it did its huts.
Cornelia Funke
#48. Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions ...
Farley Mowat
#49. Meditation should not be a thing apart from life; it should be amidst life, it should be a part of life an organic part, nothing 'put separate'. The temple should exist exactly in the middle of the market, and all distinctions between the sacred and the secular should be dissolved.
Rajneesh
#50. Peace, prosperity, and democracy cannot endure if imposed from the outside. We should cease to make false distinctions between peacekeeping and prevention; they are in fact inextricably linked.
Susan Rice
#51. How fine our distinctions when we cannot choose
Robert Lowell
#52. I am very honored for all the distinctions and accolades, but what I am most sensitive to is my clientele and the fact they are pleased with my food and my restaurants.
Joel Robuchon
#53. Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly ...
Ada Louise Huxtable
#54. What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept "enemy" the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#55. One of the subtle distinctions between the different types of knowledge is what we might call knowing-that (for example, knowing that 7 + 3 = 10) and knowing-how (for example, knowing how to add 7 units to 3 units and end up with 10 units).
Lionel Fanthorpe
#56. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
William Hazlitt
#57. Good men, whether they be Christians or rationalists, do not desire to discriminate between races, but the distinctions implanted by Nature are too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses.
Arthur Keith
#58. It is impossible that God, who is the God of Justice, could have made the distinctions that men observe today in the name of religion.
Mahatma Gandhi
#59. Any individual is capable of realizing the truth at any time. No tradition is necessary, no chain, no lineage. Once you have realized the truth, once you have become consciousness itself, then you go beyond all such distinctions.
Frederick Lenz
#60. Since my residence at Tippecanoe, we have endeavored to level all distinctions, to destroy village chiefs, by whom all mischiefs are done. It is they who sell the land to the Americans.
Tecumseh
#61. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether.
Ralph Barton Perry
#62. Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.
Sydney Smith
#63. I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
David Antin
#64. The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society
William Graham Sumner
#65. An assembly of the states, a court of justice, shows nothing so serious and grave as a table of gamesters playing very high; a melancholy solicitude clouds their looks; envy and rancor agitate their minds while the meeting lasts, without regard to friendship, alliances, birth or distinctions.
Jean De La Bruyere
#66. No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?
Paul Lockhart
#67. Consumers today have become a cynical mob of buyers who believe the reviews and ratings of complete strangers much more readily than your brand's promises and distinctions.
David Brier
#68. Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#69. Death is a woman, and for that reason she's courageous and just, and never makes distinctions between mortals; she'll crush the ignorant, the arrogant, and the wise alike under her icy foot.
Rosario Ferre
#70. A squirrel is the same as a can, when there's a bb gun in my hand. Can't you see that I am just a man? With distinctions ... and comparisons.
Demetri Martin
#71. It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
#72. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors.
Thorstein Veblen
#73. The highest goal is not distinctions, but synthesis and harmony.
Alan Macfarlane
#74. Bat, pigeon, ravens - I don't care about distinctions right now. Any fluttery, flappy thing is not cool with me.
P.C. Cast
#75. Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.
Iris Chang
#77. Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols
it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
William Hazlitt
#78. Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.
John Dewey
#79. Glory darts her soul-pervading ray on thrones and cottages, regardless still of all the artificial nice distinctions vain human customs make.
Hannah More
#80. I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream
a dream yet unfulfilled.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#81. As long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.
Yukio Mishima
#82. Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.
William Blackstone
#83. I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me.
Sigmar Polke
#84. The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
W.C. Sellar
#85. Distinctions drawn by the mind are not necessarily equivalent to distinctions in reality.
Thomas Aquinas
#86. The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!
Patrick Henry
#87. During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men ... they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.
Howard Zinn
#88. What if the book (of Genesis) is describing a dawning awareness of the world? The anthropologist Edmund Leach has argued that the 'bit' or binary digit is the basic unit of pre-logical communication. Genesis is a sprouting of 'bits', ie elementary binary distinctions ...
Charles Hampden-Turner
#89. Whether the circus travels far up in the North, or down South, whether it takes place in a tent or in a building, it is always the same strange world that knows no distinctions of race or creed -- it is the same fantastic place of glitter, hard work, courage and heartbreak.
Patricia Bourne
#90. I, you, he, she, we
In the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true distinctions.
Rumi
#91. These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.
Bram Stoker
#92. What is this thing we call science? It is nothing but distinctions, growing ever more complex, between categories of phenomena, elements of matter, types of living forms.
Steve Szilagyi
#93. To the Japanese, Portugal and Russia are neutral enemies, England and America are belligerent enemies, and Germany and her satellites are friendly enemies. They draw very fine distinctions.
Jerome Cady
#94. I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.
Dorothy Allison
#95. In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own," Eliza Farrar wrote, "where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners." America's
Megan Marshall
#96. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.
Erich Maria Remarque
#97. The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.
Hans Morgenthau
#98. Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.
Thurgood Marshall
#99. In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
Gautama Buddha
#100. The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
W. H. Auden
