Quotes About Pronouncements

#1. All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

Tony Judt

#2. The kind of man who always thinks that he is right, that his opinions, his pronouncements, are the final word, when once exposed shows nothing there. But a wise man has much to learn without a loss of dignity.

Sophocles

#3. Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.

Donna Tartt

#4. No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Louise Bogan

#5. Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.

Thomas Sowell

#6. There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God.

John Cornwell

#7. Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of "perfect" and "vile," / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness

David Rakoff

#8. One of the century's most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

William Styron

#9. They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.

John Shelby Spong

#10. Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

Rene Daumal

#11. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues - in short, our lack of grace - may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs.

Philip Yancey

#12. What people take for granted is usually more important than their pronouncements or manifestoes.

Henry F. May

#13. And I give you this picture because it fairly captures our nearly fifty-year happy marriage, during which I have offered up an astonishing number of foolish pronouncements with absolute assurance, and Ruth, with only limited rancor, has ignored almost every one. A

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#14. Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.

Rob Sheffield

#15. That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

H.P. Lovecraft

#16. I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me.

John Barton

#17. The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

Jay Parini

#18. The United States government approaches patient choice in medication as Singapore does free speech: its pronouncements sound reasonable and tolerant until you threaten its prerogatives.

Virginia Postrel

#19. But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncements that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore." "Perhaps you have been looking in the wrong places," suggested Dumbledore.

J.K. Rowling

#20. The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements.

Evan Osnos

#21. uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything

Elena Ferrante

#22. I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

Paul Fry

#23. Love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

#24. I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.

Sally Brampton

#25. I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.

Nicholson Baker

#26. Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay.

Emile Zola

#27. Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.

James Jeans

#28. Libby wasn't a big talker - Michelle and Debby seemed to hog all her words. She made pronouncements: I like ponies. I hate spaghetti. I hate you. Like her mother, she had no poker face. No poker mood. It was all right there. When she wasn't angry or sad, she just didn't say much.

Gillian Flynn

#29. I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.

Sheri S. Tepper

#30. But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.

John Podhoretz

#31. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

Robert A. Heinlein

#32. Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

Edward Abbey

#33. Though public pronouncements of Israeli officials emphasize peace and mutuality, unilateralism actually drives Israeli actions.

Douglas Feith

#34. Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Christopher Lasch

#35. A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

Eric Hoffer

#36. Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

Gao Xingjian

#37. But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked
About by body: there's in things a void-
Which to have known will serve thee many a turn,
Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt,
Forever searching in the sum of all,
And losing faith in these pronouncements mine.

Lucretius

#38. Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth.

Daniel Silva

#39. We have to replace our focus on personalities with a focus on ideas so that the opinionated and self-serving pronouncements and forms of cyber-bullying are replaced by thoughtful dialogue and open-minded conversation.

Anthony Carmona

#40. Polyamorous people are wary of having others' values inflicted upon themselves, and so tend to stay very far away from making such pronouncements, to the point that they will actively ignore predatory behavior that is affecting their own community.

Anthony D. Ravenscroft

#41. I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Penelope Lively

#42. I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be yours.

Jane Austen

#43. Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?

John Kennedy Toole