Regrettable Quotes

#1. At least when Israel releases terrorists to gain the freedom of one of its soldiers, the country's leaders have the grace to treat the decision as a regrettable action made out of necessity and nothing to celebrate.

Jonathan S. Tobin

#2. Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we've yet to win. You'd think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven't actually produced the promised results.

Jack Campbell

#3. Deception to a noble end, though regrettable, was sometimes necessary for a greater good. Lying for selfish reasons was the fertile dirt of immorality, from which sprouted the tendrils of evil.

Terry Goodkind

#4. There's still a tremendous amount of homophobia in our culture. It's regrettable, it's stupid, it's heartless, and it's immoral, but there it is.

Rupert Everett

#5. I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

Larry Wall

#6. This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders
orders which are in this case self-generated.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#7. Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

E. M. Forster

#8. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.

Colson Whitehead

#9. There are things we can't undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

Gail Godwin

#10. There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.

Sam Harris

#11. When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

Harry S. Truman

#12. He lives at Balbec? crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

Marcel Proust

#13. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.

Tony Judt

#14. There is no such thing as a regrettable act of courage.

Tammy Rosenfeld

#15. Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

C.E.M. Joad

#16. Customs are formed, and the descendants of men are trapped therein. The generations pass without a chance to weed out the foolish from the essential - a regrettable situation.

Noriko Ogiwara

#17. Our problem as Americans
at least, among my race and gender
is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.

Parker J. Palmer

#18. A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.

Jeffrey Kluger

#19. After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship
marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

Martin Amis

#20. It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.

Paul Rusesabagina

#21. Sometimes our best action result in things that are most regrettable.

Diana Gabaldon

#22. Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

Janeane Garofalo

#23. There is never an embarrassing silence that can't be turned into a regrettable conversation.

Robert Breault

#24. It is a regrettable, but undeniable, fact that the most delightful people are seldom big money-makers.

Marjorie Hillis

#25. And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market - the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage . . . - JOHN UPDIKE, "Perfection Wasted

Carole Radziwill

#26. It is regrettable that many Christian psychologists talk more about such things as unconscious motivation and emotional damage than they do about sin and responsibility.

Larry Crabb

#27. Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

Richard Dawkins

#28. This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided.

Gary Bettman

#29. The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

Steven Weinberg

#30. When the old ways disappear, as perhaps they must, it is regrettable that so little is saved from them, so that those who practice them suffer the penalty of obsolescence, as the poor folk of a new and more efficient world.

Philip L. Wagner

#31. And yet," said Poirot, "suppose an accident-"
"Ah, no, my friend-"
"From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together - by death.

Agatha Christie

#32. I'm not sure that's such a great idea." Luke said.
"It's a fabulous idea." Jace dropped the paper back onto the table, and began to slide off his jacket. "I've got a stele we can use. Who wants to do me?"
"A regrettable choice of words," Magnus muttered.

Cassandra Clare

#33. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.

Cheryl Strayed

#34. Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.

William S. Burroughs

#35. Fenworth!'
Yes?'
You bore me with your prattle.'
Oh, regrettable that. Why don't you seek the company of someone who doesn't prattle? Seems like a good solution to your problem.

Donita K. Paul

#36. Regrettable was the gallantry of great men who risked themselves for others.

Michelle Franklin

#37. A regrettable situation," said Bierce, smiling, "for the Yuletide merchants who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!

Ray Bradbury

#38. We are disposable tonight.
We are regrettable tonight.
We can't touch one another without the world imploding, tonight.

Adrianna Stepiano

#39. I think that for humans, the most regrettable of omissions, along with unshed tears and unexamined lives, is untold stories, the things not shared, the lost opportunity to be honest about oneself and tender toward others.

Martha M. Moravec

#40. Humankind has no option but to protect and live in harmony with its natural environment. However, it would be regrettable if in putting an end to revolutionary extremism, we should then come to environmental extremism. We should not forget that all extremes are the same.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#41. Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

Theodore Sturgeon

#42. They'd fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It's addicts stayed addicts.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

#43. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Salman Rushdie

#44. But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.

Xavier Becerra

#45. The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.

Elena Ferrante

#46. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.

Eric Hobsbawm

#47. It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.

Charles Baudelaire

#48. The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.

Lewis H. Lapham

#49. I also discovered that I was a poet. From the standpoint of one's family this is probably a regrettable discovery ...

Dorothy Cottrell

#50. He looked like a walking, talking billboard for deliciously irresponsible behavior and a treasure trove of regrettable decisions.

Alexi Lawless

#51. We attacked selected military targets of the P.L.O. Around, civilians were hurt, I don't want to deny it. Very regrettable, very regrettable. We regret it deeply.

Menachem Begin

#52. Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

Robert Creeley

#53. It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#54. Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.

Susan Cain

#55. I don't know how many sacred cows there are today. I think there's a little confusion between humor and gross passing for humor. That's kind of regrettable.

Bob Newhart

#56. THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all

Richard Dawkins

#57. I think there's a little confusion between humor and 'gross' passing for humor. That's kind of regrettable, because they aren't the same thing.

Bob Newhart

#58. It is truly regrettable that a person will treat a man who is valuable to him well, and a man who is worthless to him poorly.

Hojo Shigetoki

#59. Sin is not an unfortunate slip or a regrettable act; it is a posture of defiance against a holy God.

Max Lucado

#60. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.

Francis Parker Yockey

#61. I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.

Randall Jarrell

#62. There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable.

Hillary Clinton

#63. Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?
Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.
Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?
Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?

Frank Herbert

#64. The essence of good manners consists in making it clear that one has no wish to hurt. When it is clearly necessary to hurt, it must be done in such a way as to make it evident that the necessity is felt to be regrettable.

Bertrand Russell

#65. Think goal setting is too laborious and time wasting? Try the goalless life and your regret will be unpardonably regrettable

John Kennedy Akotia

#66. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium ... It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays same forever.

Matt Ridley

#67. The possession of wealth leads almost inevitably to its abuse. It is the chief, if not the only, cause of evils which desolate this world below. The thirst for gold is responsible for the most regrettable lapses into sin.

Jules Verne

#68. There is no justice, and great harm, in diminishing the whole array of future opportunity to save a few people now from a regrettable fate.

Will Wilkinson

#69. I've got a stele we can use. Who wants to do me?"
"A regrettable choice of words," muttered Magnus.

Cassandra Clare

#70. Not everything that's inevitable is regrettable.

Scott Lynch

#71. If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.

Peter T. King

#72. When in a fight to the death, one wants to employ all one's weapons to the utmost. I must say that to die with one's sword still sheathed is most regrettable.

Miyamoto Musashi

#73. Well my own impression of my musical pieces is that no matter how long I've been at it, there's not much improvement. So that's kind of regrettable.

Nobuo Uematsu

#74. It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.

Henry Ford

#75. I understand it. People are very willing to say things about me, to make accusations about me that are - I don't get upset about them anymore, but they are very regrettable.

Hillary Clinton