Top 100 Refused Quotes
#1. A crafty nightrunner died of late,
And found himself at Bilairy's Gate.
He stood outside and refused to knock
Because he meant to pick the lock.
Lynn Flewelling
#2. I guess we were kinda poor when we were kids, but we didn't know it. That's because my dad always refused to let us look at the family's financial records.
Frankie Boyle
#3. After the Ankara bombings on October 10, people were asked to hold a minute of silence, but many refused. Our society can't even unite in grief to honor the victims. We've lost our empathy. That's maybe the worst.
Elif Safak
#4. Logan had been there earlier and refused to leave, but Mason made him go. He wanted alone time with me when I woke. He said he pulled Boyfriend Rank. It would've been nice to see Logan, but I understood.
Tijan
#5. It is true that I once refused to eat haggis in Scotland and this did not sit well with the local population.
Rick Riordan
#6. I was admonished ot adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.
Joan Of Arc
#7. If you were a young kid, 19, 20 years old who has two children and a third one on the way and refuses to leave them. A kid who was on welfare, because he refused to steal anybody's property or take anybody's money. You found life a lot tougher.
Barry White
#8. Girls' education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.
Nicholas Kristof
#9. My father was convinced the Taliban would hunt him down and kill him, but he again refused security from the police. 'If you go around with a lot of security the Taliban will use Kalashnikovs or suicide bombers and more people will be killed,' he said. 'At least I'll be killed alone.'
Malala Yousafzai
#10. A man is bound to make for himself in this world, that fortune which heaven had refused him at his birth.
Alexandre Dumas
#11. Then too, motherhood is broken because in this place, to be a good mother is to give yourself completely. It is to erase yourself. This is what I refused to do.
Nayomi Munaweera
#12. I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.
Margaret Atwood
#13. I firmly believe today that the only way to stop violence against women is to speak out and refused to be silenced.
Zainab Salbi
#14. There was no one with whom to share his world, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. In business he could do anything, achieve anything, he refused to accept failure - but he couldn't create a woman, and he couldn't fall in love with one who simply wasn't there.
Quent Cordair
#15. The White House again refused to turn over discussions Vice President Cheney had with Enron officials over energy policy. Cheney said if he had to disclose every time some business donated a ton of money then came in to write its own policy to govern itself, he wouldn't get any work done.
Dennis Miller
#16. He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
Dante Alighieri
#17. When he had gone home, he had been frightened, he had refused to face what he saw. But he had not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a pas; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream.
Nick Joaquin
#18. What would happen if all the populations on the planet simply refused to fight human beings they did not even know?
Gladys Taber
#19. The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone De Beauvoir
#20. In the summer of 1952, when I was 30, the Army assigned me to an infantry unit fighting in Korea. Meanwhile, though, there was other news in my family: My father had become the Republican presidential nominee. As an ambitious young major, I refused any offers for other assignments.
John Eisenhower
#21. I don't despise you for what you allowed to happen to me. I despise you because when I was released, you refused to be found and I needed you more than anything in my life. Not to mend my broken bones, Arjuro. I needed my brother to mend my broken spirit.
Melina Marchetta
#22. It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.
Graham Joyce
#23. Her soft trailing fingers would continue to attempt a connection that I refused to allow; that I couldn't allow if I wanted to survive.
J.D. Stroube
#24. When the kite was finished, it refused to fly and kept slamming into the ground as if it wanted to destroy itself, and finally it threw itself in the march. Sophia put it outside Grandmother's door and went away.
Tove Jansson
#25. It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.
Richard Pryor
#26. I refused to conform to an image that a lot of people thought a president's brother should adopt.
Billy Carter
#27. If you had a friend you refused to talk to, eventually you couldn't keep calling that person a friend anymore.
Craig Groeschel
#28. I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.
Terry Pratchett
#29. There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.
Marcel Proust
#30. I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.
Louis Zamperini
#31. The more I read and watched about the meat industry, the more determined I became to keep meat out of my diet. The things I saw in slaughterhouse exposes made me feel sick and I refused to just ignore what I now knew.
Renee Olstead
#32. They would beat him and hammer him
and drill him. He bobbed, and ducked, and refused to fall. They struck out, as if they were driving nails into him, and with every blow he felt more like himself
Ivan Vladislavic
#33. She had read about people-where? she could not remember this either- who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to not be yet of the earth, suspeded still between two worlds.
Kim Edwards
#34. My own success was attended by quite a few failures along the way. But I refused to make the biggest mistake of all: worrying too much about making mistakes.
Kemmons Wilson
#35. There was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people's problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.
Terry Pratchett
#36. The Nazis victimized some people for what they did, some for what they refused to do, some for what they were, and some for the fact that they were.
John Horton Conway
#37. No one shrieked, 'We want Bung Hatta.' I did not need him. Just as also I did not need Sjahrir, who refused to show himself at the time of the reading of the Proclamation. Indeed, I could do it myself, and indeed, I did it alone.
Sukarno
#38. This soldier had been taken prisoner in some remote part of Asia, and was threatened with an immediate agonising death if he did not renounce Christianity and follow Islam. He refused to deny his faith, and was tortured, flayed alive, and died, praising and glorifying Christ.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#39. It's a little bit like my inability to read a guide book before I go anywhere. I can read it after I've been there and by the same logic I refuse to accept any technical stunts from anybody. I refused to learn more than I knew and I confess I missed a great deal.
Ben Shahn
#40. Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.
Anonymous
#41. The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.
Stieg Larsson
#42. The whole of the American Dream has been based on the chance to get ahead, for one's self or one's children. Would this country have ever reached the point it has if the individual had always been refused the rewards of his labors and dangers?
James Adams
#43. Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.
Gao Xingjian
#44. In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.
Lakhdar Brahimi
#45. Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.
William J. Brennan
#46. As I grew up, I always refused to cook Indian food very vehemently, and to this day, I don't cook chapatis at home. I'd always say, 'Why do I have to do it? Why don't the men do it?'
Gurinder Chadha
#47. It's monstrous that Europe, which is fighting for human rights, refused seriously sick Slobodan Milosevic treatment.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
#48. So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#49. When it comes to the health of our families, Barack refused to listen to all those folks who told him to leave health reform for another day, another president. He didn't care whether it was the easy thing to do politically - that's not how he was raised - he cared that it was the right thing to do.
Michelle Obama
#50. They used to laugh at me when I refused to ride on all those double decker buses, all because there was no driver on the top.
Joni Mitchell
#51. What is the definition of "love"? Jesus answered that by depicting a man meeting material, physical, and economic needs through deeds. Caring for people's material and economic needs is not an option for Jesus. He refused to allow the law expert to limit the implications of this command to love.
Timothy J. Keller
#52. I refused then like I do now to let anybody tie me down
Ray Lamontagne
#53. I absolutely refused to make out with the gorgeous male model.
Trisha Yearwood
#54. God is a sore loser. Me and him made a bet, and when he lost, he refused to pay up.
Lionel Suggs
#55. She refused to die like an animal locked in a cage. Like a girl with nothing to save her name. Better to die by the sword. Better to die at the mercy of the nightbeasts. To die in the night air. Free.
Renee Ahdieh
#56. I was certain I wouldn't sleep again. But I must have, because at four a.m. a different nurse shook me awake and brusquely said, "You can go now. We got what we needed." She refused to tell me exactly what it was they'd gotten and I started to suspect it was my kidneys.
Jenny Lawson
#57. I forgot Dumbledore trashed Hogwarts, refused to resign and ran off to the forest to make speeches to angry trolls.
J.K. Rowling
#59. Was it possible to fall for someone you'd met only once and communicated with only through phone, chat, and text? I had sleepless nights wondering, and every time I thought about it, the answer was yes, yes, yes! And I refused to think of it as infatuation.
Claire Betita De Guzman
#60. There was something almost regal about him, I thought; a defiance I admired. He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchman at the end of the world.
Ransom Riggs
#62. I have been offered the highest paid contracts in the world. I refused them all. It's not my thing. I don't want to cheat people.
Azzedine Alaia
#63. It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world.
Barack Obama
#64. Most presidents have been controlled by forces that control money and special interests. When Donald Trump refused their money, he refused their control. This made him dangerous.
Louis Farrakhan
#65. Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched ...
Janet Fitch
#66. The lapis lazuli worry beads, draped over his rear view mirror, swung back and forth like the hips of Scheherazade, Mohammed's favorite belly dancer, who refused, in spite of the war, to leave Baghdad.
Leslie Cockburn
#67. No, thanks,' said Sam, who had never understood why he often refused drinks he would have liked to accept.
Sophie Hannah
#68. When Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cracked down on illegal immigration without getting permission from Obama, they threatened to revoke his 287(g) status. When Sheriff Joe refused to balk, they filed suit against him with a frivolous civil rights claim.
Russell Pearce
#69. On this one long, blessed night we refused to worry, allowing only hopes and dreams for the future of the human race, held in the miniscule hands of these newborns.
A.B. Shepherd
#70. If free men refused to look at dead bodies then brave men will have died in vain.
John Shaw Billings
#71. My analyst refused to hear my dreams. This was years ago.
Jeanne Moreau
#72. The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.
Suki Kim
#73. The Obama administration has consistently refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israeli territory, let alone as the capital of Israel.
Ben Shapiro
#74. The mildest allegiance was proof one parent was the rightest and the most beloved, and I refused to call the winner and the loser in their war.
Joshilyn Jackson
#75. They persistently refused to support either armed party and believed that both sides were but the reflection of one reality, and the true enemies were not people, but ideology, hatred, and ignorance.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#76. Much to their annoyance, Calvin refused to answer any of their questions. He remained on the ground, silently bleeding at them.
Brian Cramer
#77. He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.
Charles Edison
#78. Though the day of my Destiny 's over, And the star of my Fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find.
Lord Byron
#79. There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.
Victor Hugo
#80. Sabrina suggested they burn their orange monkey sweaters and blue heart covered pants but Daphne refused. Granny took Sabrina aside and apologised for the outfit, saying that Mr. Canis might not have been the right choice to shop for girls. After all, he was colour-blind.
Michael Buckley
#81. We were crazy two years ago. Crazy in love. The words haunted my soul and refused to be buried in the darkness anymore.
Elle Casey
#82. I'm here today because I refused to be unhappy. I took a chance.
Wanda Sykes
#83. Although both men were full of resolve, the defender could not keep his doubts out of his mind, while the attacker refused to entertain any doubts. (Rommel vs. Eisenhower)
Stephen E. Ambrose
#85. Cole, who had kissed me. Cole, who had refused to discuss it afterwards. Okay, fine. I had refused. Cole, who was driving me flipping crazy.
Gena Showalter
#86. The spine that refused to bend at all was often the most malleable once it gave way.
Robert Jordan
#87. She refused to back away, but looked down at him as if he were something disgusting she had found stuck to a lavatory seat.
J.K. Rowling
#88. I don't want my fans to have the same disappointment as me when I was refused by some players to sign my notebook when I was young.
Ronaldo
#89. In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower.
Terry Pratchett
#90. Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing live only in private clubs and at charity events, where she presumably believed the pressure on her was less intense.
Scott Stossel
#91. I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the "problem" as anything other than an artistic one.
Toni Morrison
#92. The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;
David Mitchell
#93. It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it ... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression.
Joyce Cary
#94. President Obama had lunch with Republican leaders at the White House today and had to do without salt, pepper and butter. Not for dietary reasons. The Republicans refused to pass anything.
Jay Leno
#95. John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
Richard Flanagan
#96. She thought she was a sensible girl. But some kind of love had taken hold of her and refused to let her go, and it wasn't a happy, easy, joyful thing, it had her in a vice-like grip.
Harriet Evans
#97. Quinn would do anything for his son.
Including mate the one person he refused to want.
Her.
Carrie Ann Ryan
#98. Abuse isn't just physical or ... or sexual, you know." I felt my throat getting tight but I refused to let my pain show on my face. "There is such a thing as mental and emotional abuse too.
Evangeline Anderson
#99. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Ron Chernow
#100. Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.
Ayelet Waldman
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