Top 100 Quotes About Distinctions
#1. Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.
Jonah Goldberg
#3. drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of their long suits. Some of 'em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful things that happened to them as children
Anonymous
#4. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.
Harold Pinter
#5. To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
Joan Didion
#6. All distinctions of birth or of rank have been abolished. All citizens, whether native or adopted, are placed upon terms of precise equality. All are entitled to equal rights and equal protection.
James K. Polk
#7. This country must be governed, and can be governed, simply on questions of policy and administration and the French Canadians who have had any part in this movement have never had any other intention but to organise upon those party distinctions and upon no other.
Wilfrid Laurier
#8. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression ... by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained.
Victoria Woodhull
#9. What provokes me worst of all are our fateful bourgeois distinctions of rank. Of course I know as well as anyone that differences of class are necessary, and that they work greatly to my own advantage: but I wish they would not place obstacles in my way when I might enjoy a little pleasure ...
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#10. I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.
Donald G. Mitchell
#11. I think it is fine to have sports divided into men's and women's, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature.
Alice Dreger
#12. Recognize all mankind as one, whether Hindus or Muslims The same Lord is the creator and nourisher of all: Recognize no distinctions between them. The monastery and the mosque are the same, So is Hindu worship and Muslim prayer. Men are all one!
Amardeep S. Dahiya
#13. Each person is chargeable with the essential task to make his or her thought processes as refined as possible. Every person must declare what important distinctions will allow him or her to live a vivid and reflection filled life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#14. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.
Michael Rogin
#15. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.
Roger Kimball
#16. The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.
F. Sionil Jose
#17. I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.
Wayne Thiebaud
#18. I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.
William Landay
#19. For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.
Chiang Kai-shek
#20. It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.
John Dewey
#21. Seek the underlying harmonies of love and the overarching rainbow of hope, rather than the surface distinctions of creeds and of sects. Work for peace in religion.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#22. The distinctions between advertising and marketing are blurring, requiring new roles and new forms of consumer-centric marketing.
Saul Berman
#23. I like to think of mathematicians as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origin, race, creed, sex, age or even time ... all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.
Julia Robinson
#24. All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions.
Thomas Paine
#25. Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.
Carl Rogers
#26. The knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and the brutes.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#27. You can invest with less risk and make more money in the stock market. All you have to do is not be an average investor. Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.
Robert Kiyosaki
#28. Because life's dictates did not allow for quick and easy distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad. Choices were made between shades of gray, and there was healing and harm to be weighed on both sides of each.
Terry Brooks
#29. The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.
Oliver Goldsmith
#30. Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring.
Carol A. Elliott
#31. Her (India's) great curse is caste; but English education has already proved a tremendous power in levelling the injurious distinctions of caste.
Keshub Chandra Sen
#32. Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.
Olympe De Gouges
#33. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading.
Margaret Atwood
#34. Punishment is now unfashionable ... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
Thomas Szasz
#35. Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind.
Margaret Atwood
#36. The imprecision in the way languages express time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no one experiences time as coarsely as the handful of distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don't live by a mental stopwatch either.
Steven Pinker
#37. Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.
William J. Brennan
#38. They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
Andre Gide
#39. Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.
W. Somerset Maugham
#40. As most adults know, the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence.
David Foster Wallace
#41. Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#42. God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey
#43. Einstein said that all physicists were aware that the distinctions between past, present, and future were only what he called 'a stubbornly persistent illusion.' Not only did he believe in marvels and wonders, he also believed in the elasticity of time.
Deborah Harkness
#44. Ambition has developed into a passion which drives women, as well as men, to great works - and small deeds. Formerly competitors in the race for men, they are now competing in the race for social tasks and distinctions.
Ellen Key
#45. God cannot be so cruel and unjust as to make the distinctions of high and low between man and man, and woman and woman.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.
Garry Winogrand
#47. A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.
Errol Morris
#49. In this world, the greatest courage is to drop the mind aside. The bravest man is who can see the world without the barrier of the mind, just as it is. It is tremendously different, utterly beautiful. There is nobody who is inferior and there is nobody who is superior - there are no distinctions.
Rajneesh
#50. The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences.
Ken Robinson
#51. Nature has made men free and equal. The distinctions necessary for social order are only founded on general utility.
Marquis De Lafayette
#52. In a country which had accepted caste distinctions for many centuries, inequality had become an inborn mental concept.
Khushwant Singh
#53. I accept that it was a mistake to allow distinctions to be blurred between my professional responsibilities and my personal loyalties to a friend. Mr Speaker, I am sorry for this. I have apologised to the prime minister, to the public, and, at the first opportunity available, to the House.
Liam Fox
#55. I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books.
Emily Gould
#56. All our distinctions ire accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#57. The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
Tom Stoppard
#58. Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.
Ruth Ozeki
#59. I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.
John Polkinghorne
#60. Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.
Virgilia Peterson
#61. To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. We are not superior. There are no clear distinctions between us and animals.
Michael Fox
#63. Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.
Tim Crane
#64. We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, 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 favor
Samuel Johnson
#66. If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.
Carl Sagan
#67. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.
Virginia Woolf
#68. The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims "incapable of rational choice" and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#69. Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.
Robert Webb
#70. Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority; perfect equality affords no temptation.
Thomas Paine
#71. Death and the dice level all distinctions.
Samuel Foote
#72. Religious relativism is not the answer to disagreement between faiths; yet relativism, and a blurring of religious distinctions, all too often result when two deeply believing faith communities engage each other in the public arena on theological issues.
Meir Soloveichik
#73. Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.
Henry David Thoreau
#74. You should not be too much of a purist in your way of life, for you need to be able to accept all that is foul. You should not be too clear in making distinctions in social interactions, for you need to accept everyone whether they are good or bad, wise or foolish.
Zicheng Hong
#75. Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#76. Intelligence and stupidity have equal chance of taking a man to divinity! The blind nature has no such distinctions.
Thiruman Archunan
#77. Comfort becomes a goal when distinctions of rank are abolished and privileges destroyed.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#78. Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.
R.L. Trask
#79. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Thomas Paine
#81. The Holy Scriptures do not know any distinctions. They enjoin that all lead the life of monks.
Saint John Chrysostom
#82. Many persons have been confused and discouraged at the very outset of the study by the great variety and the delicate distinctions of the openings: and this has constituted a fault in many otherwise excellent manuals for the learner.
Howard Staunton
#83. Children judge each other harshly, but don't make nice distinctions among the grown.
Bill Holm
#84. To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.
George W. Bush
#85. God of Truth and Justice can never create distinctions of high and low among His own children.
Mahatma Gandhi
#86. All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
George Orwell
#87. The boundaries between you and not-you - what lies beyond your skin - relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others - really see them, wholeheartedly - springs open.
Barbara Fredrickson
#88. Music does not have a race or a disposition! Every instrument has a voice that contributes. Music is a universal language. A universal religion of sorts. Certainly it's my religion. Music surpasses all distinctions between people -Father
Pam Munoz Ryan
#89. Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.
Nancy Gibbs
#91. Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker
#92. Perhaps we know only by comparing, by drawing distinctions from and similarities to what we already know. But when we use our terms of comparison to shut off any understanding of our connections with one another as human beings, we risk becoming something less than human ourselves. (7)
Martha Minow
#93. Women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#94. When thought is in bondage the truth is hidden, for everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness. What benefit can be derived from distinctions and separations?
Sengcan
#95. I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care for money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin and my sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.
Albert Einstein
#96. The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#97. The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.
Albert Einstein
#98. Everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#99. All men will commence in their present rank and promotion will be open to all men alike, without any distinctions or qualifications, political or otherwise.
John Amery
#100. Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled "the meanest and worst of all forms of Government." For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.
Nancy Isenberg
