Top 100 Quotes About Refusal
#1. It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.
Tom Perrotta
#2. Rejection of food: This was the first hurdle I encountered after parting with him. Refusing food is basically a refusal of relationships, and if it gets worse it can turn into a frightening illness, leading to a complete destruction of all human contact.
Kyung-ran Jo
#3. But the boy survived his refusal to believe...
Stephen King
#4. In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.
Margaret Halsey
#5. Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President.
Dan Harris
#6. A widow's refusal of a lover is seldom so explicit as to exclude hope.
Samuel Richardson
#7. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being a success in college
the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#8. Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.
Karl Popper
#9. Thousands of people may have been killed by hurricane Katrina and many more could die in its aftermath because of the President's refusal to heed the calls of governors for help in repairing the infrastructure in their states.
Charles B. Rangel
#10. People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.
Esther Perel
#11. The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
Albert Camus
#12. Her mouth has always lacked any type of filter, a problem exacerbated by her refusal to lie about anything. Two qualities guaranteed to turn every conversation into a battlefield.
Gena Showalter
#13. If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first instance; while a firm refusal will make them clearly understand that they must treat you more as equals.
Thucydides
#14. It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.
Zoe Heller
#15. Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
Carrie Snow
#16. Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion, a refusal to obey every single state-made law.
Mahatma Gandhi
#17. one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.
Christopher Hitchens
#18. It's the hunger; the hunger for an alternative and the refusal to accept a life of unhappiness...
Todd Field
#19. The refusal to acknowledge the scientific value of embryonic stem cell research is one more tragic misstep.
Lois Capps
#21. An important book for our times, in which one woman's determination and refusal to consent sets an example of courage and honesty.
Giles Foden
#22. Suppose you feel you cannot accept some fact about yourself. Then own your refusal to accept. Own the block. Embrace it fully. And watch it begin to disappear. The principal is this: Begin where you are-accept that. Then change and growth become possible.
Nathaniel Branden
#23. I am yet to meet the idiot at whose door success arrived as a direct result of his refusal to invest in the enterprise that made him rich.
Jonathan Wutawunashe
#25. When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
Bayard Rustin
#26. There is the refusal of style and the refusal of sentimentalism, there is this desire for clarity ...
Luc Delahaye
#27. These are the four abuses: desire to succeed in order to make oneself famous; taking credit for the labors of others; refusal to correct one's errors despite advice; refusal to change one's ideas despite warnings.
Confucius
#28. Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, with discipline and detachment.
Epictetus
#29. The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.
Victor Burgin
#30. Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
P. J. O'Rourke
#31. Given the lack of sexual activity in your apartment and your refusal to take even one peek at my knickers, I'm curious if you've ever had sex before. I mean, I know you have a daughter but you hear about these virgin births all the time.
Karina Halle
#32. Did she have to be so downright fetching in her refusal?
Taking Annie back, he struck a sterner pose in order to keep all comers at bay.
Laura Frantz
#33. The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
Sidney Hook
#34. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#36. Benefit performances, bad paintings and statues, philanthropic societies, Gypsies, schools, subscription dinners, carousing, the Masons, churches, books - no one and nothing met with refusal,
Leo Tolstoy
#37. No behaviour on our part is more self-centered than the demand to speak and the refusal to listen.
Robert E. Fisher
#38. The best philanthropy is not just about giving money but giving leadership. The best philanthropists bring the gifts that made them successful-the drive, the determination, the refusal to accept that something can't be done if it needs to be into their philanthropy.
Tony Blair
#39. The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.
Glenn Greenwald
#40. There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.
Zoe Heller
#41. There was drinking. There was animalistic growling and squawking. There was vomiting. There were flows of excrement. Thus far, this was indistinguishable from most parliaments, but it was the refusal to get down to any real work that galled Satan.
Jonathan L. Howard
#42. A resolute and wise refusal to take part in festivities will be an incentive for introspection and self-purification.
Mahatma Gandhi
#43. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
#44. The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#45. The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.
Lena Dunham
#46. True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Karl Popper
#47. I can't survive,' he once told me of his refusal to come indoors,'if I can't hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.
Steve Lopez
#48. My refusal to follow my husband's God-given leadership hurts the gospel, hurts the name of Christ, and repels unbelievers from finding the real love and real life that is only available in Jesus.
April Cassidy
#49. To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero; panache is therefore a timid heroism, like the smile with which one excuses one's superiority.
Edmond Rostand
#50. Now, what produces a want of demand? A refusal to take from other countries the commodities which they produce.
Joseph Hume
#51. For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret.
Elias Canetti
#52. Everything else falls away except for the family you're born into, choose, or make; the circle of love you'll die to protect and keep near you. The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present.
Karen Marie Moning
#53. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.
Teju Cole
#54. Mahatma Gandhi was a man of peace and non-violence and lived by the Hindu principle of ahimsa, action based on refusal to do harm. As his war-strewn presidency shows, George Bush knows nothing about ahimsa and non-violence. Bush should reconsider this cynical, disrespectful display of symbolism.
Kevin Martin
#55. A man assumes that a woman's refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it's no. When a woman says no, it's yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves.
Erica Jong
#56. Your refusal to forgive one who has sinned against you us a manifestation of hypocrisy - a telltale sign that either you have not experenced God's forgiving grace, or that you take such grace for granted.
Joe Thorn
#57. You can get people the qualifications; But you can't teach them the qualities they're going to need. You can't teach integrity, a drive for excellence, refusal to quit under pressure. It's too late to build that into people you're going to hire.
Roger Ailes
#59. Your suffering is shaped exactly by your refusal to open.
David Deida
#60. The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
#61. The refusal to choose is a form of choice; disbelief is a form of belief.
Frank Barron
#62. The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.
Evgeny Morozov
#63. When Charity is deeply rooted in the soul it shows itself exteriorly: there is so gracious a way of refusing what we cannot give, that the refusal pleases as much as the gift.
Therese Of Lisieux
#64. It is not optimism, Daniel Jackson, merely the refusal to fail.
Sonny Whitelaw
#65. South Africa does not have a poverty problem. Poverty is a result of denialism of the way corruption taxes poor people, the inefficiencies that undermine poor people's opportunities and our refusal to admit that we are part of the problem.
Mamphela Ramphele
#66. I've always admired your rather formidable will, your refusal to back away from difficulties, but sometimes strength isn't about perseverance. Sometimes it's about knowing when to quit.
Jennifer Donnelly
#67. Oh this young man has had a very trying rookie season, with the litigation, the notoriety, his subsequent deportation to Canada and that country's refusal to accept him, well, I guess that's more than most 21-year-olds can handle... Ogie Ogilthorpe!
Jim Carr
#68. In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.
Anne Rice
#69. Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect.
Thomas S. Monson
#70. Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#71. REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.
Ambrose Bierce
#72. Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.
Natalie Goldberg
#73. Of course, I'm aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred ... .
Yasmina Khadra
#74. There is no such thing as failure for an artist, unless failure is the refusal to attempt, the unwillingness to dream.
Laurence Overmire
#75. What I love about Indiana Jones is he always bites off slightly more than he can chew. The guy he's fighting is always slightly tougher than he is, but he just refuses to give up. And that's what makes Indiana Jones a hero: not his superpowers, but his refusal to be beaten.
Neil Cross
#76. Even if only 2 percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.
Albert Einstein
#77. The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.
Martin Buber
#78. When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.
C.S. Lewis
#79. Pity does not get you aid. Admiration at your refusal to give in does.
Suzanne Collins
#80. Belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In
Donna Leon
#81. But there is something appealing about it here too, a freedom, a refusal to belong to theses arbitrary categories we've made for ourselves.
Veronica Roth
#82. The biggest obstacle to making Christ magnificent is the refusal to make yourself small.
James MacDonald
#83. The refusal to be committed and the attitude of indifference can in fact never be neutral.
John Bertram Phillips
#84. While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#85. (Much of my callousness and invulnerability has come from my refusal to mourn the loss of a soft word and a tender embrace.) Blessed are those who weep and mourn.
Brennan Manning
#86. Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
Albert Camus
#87. Prejudice and bigotry are brought down ... by the sheer force of determination of individuals to succeed and the refusal of a human being to let prejudice define the parameters of the possible.
Condoleezza Rice
#88. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.
Paul Brunton
#89. I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing not how far away I was. Sin it seemed to me was the refusal to let God be God.
Sara Wheeler
#90. There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#91. She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.
Margaret Atwood
#92. The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the state's authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage.
John Rawls
#93. Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.
Edward Dahlberg
#94. The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.
Cesar Aira
#95. She forgot the small detail of the business she wanted to engage him on. She enjoyed saying no to him, repeatedly. Refusal was probably a new experience for him, too, but it was hard to tell.
A.W. Exley
#96. [T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
#97. The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of "self-impersonation," and betray our identities.2
Parker J. Palmer
#98. Our refusal to fear reminds the devil that he is finished!
Bill Johnson
#99. One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
Umberto Eco
#100. The mayor will be remembered because of his refusal to accept political favors and he kept his campaign promises.
Alicia Mendoza
