Top 100 State Of Affairs Quotes
#1. Some people just think utopians are idiots who are imagining rivers of candy and not really engaging with the world's ills, and sometimes that's surely the case, but I think that imagining the perfected society is a way of expressing your disgust with the current state of affairs.
Christine Jennings
#2. For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.
Eva Figes
#3. The Germanic invasions in the West could not and did not in any way alter this state of affairs.
Henri Pirenne
#4. You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#5. Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.
Fred Saberhagen
#6. The concept of a 'just' or 'fair' price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality.
Ludwig Von Mises
#7. The paradox of life lies exactly in this: its resources are finite, but it itself is endless. Such a contradictory state of affairs is feasible only because the resources accessible to life can be used over and over again.
I.I. Gitelson
#8. Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs.
Hilary Mantel
#9. Japan and China are isolated and without intercourse with other countries; hence the President directed me to attend to or watch the state of affairs in China also.
Townsend Harris
#10. It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.
Jen Selinsky
#11. Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.
Mason Cooley
#12. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I got to see firsthand the sacrifices that Israelis make in the name of security because of the dangerous state of affairs there. I will always be a strong supporter of Israel.
Gabrielle Giffords
#13. Our current state of affairs reduces to poverty people born for better things.
Matthew Desmond
#14. It is striking how our language reveals the visual nature of our thoughts about the future state of affairs. When we invent the future, we try to get a mental picture of what things will be like long before we have begun the journey. Visions are our windows on the world of tomorrow.
James M. Kouzes
#15. A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler
#16. If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
#17. For a brazen Libertine, an adulterer, a sodomite, an atheist, a fornicator, rakehell, heretic, godless playmaker and debaucher of innocents, you're a sorry state of affairs.
Elizabeth Bear
#18. We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.
John Yoo
#19. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.
Charles Stross
#20. Instead of complaining about the current state of affairs, we need to offer better alternatives. [ ... ] we need to stop cursing the darkness and start lighting some candles!
Mark Batterson
#21. The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.
Dorothy Denning
#22. There are a lot of good books around. People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?
Lemmy Kilmister
#23. People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
Adam M. Grant
#24. In the struggle against that state of affairs criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. Depends on one's perspective whether my current state of affairs is considered hilarious. A stranger peering into my life would probably find it quite comical. I think it's tragically humiliating, to say the very least.
Sarah Noffke
#26. The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking.
Andrzej Wajda
#27. Women saw everything, and they thought about everything. The result was wisdom. For men, this was a frightening state of affairs, which is why they insist on holding on to power.
Tamar Myers
#28. The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery.
Eugene Wigner
#29. War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
#30. Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Contentment is a state of the heart, not a state of affairs.
Linda Dillow
#32. however as things stood nothing seemed to have been mentioned with regard to the abyss so one can only presume that it was currently keeping itself to itself which it must be admitted is the ideal state of affairs for an abyss generally
Stuart Estell
#33. The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God's peace which does not start here can do other than mislead.
J.I. Packer
#34. Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.
Dario Fo
#35. People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?
[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]
Lemmy Kilmister
#36. Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, - that of alchemy, operational success.
George Soros
#37. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society.
Andrew Goodman
#38. We are in a world of irredeemable paper money - a state of affairs unprecedented in history.
John Exter
#39. Authors go on writing books, and so we go on reading them. It is a sad state of affairs.
Elizabeth Aston
#41. Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
Simone Weil
#42. It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Institution that proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of opinion as to which are the superfluous books ...
Mary Kingsley
#43. In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#44. Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.
Raymond Pettibon
#45. It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.
Fay Weldon
#46. Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
Ludwig Von Mises
#47. The most damning revelation was that this state of affairs did not result from a lack of money. In Chuck's words: "Budget constraints are not the source of the problem.
James G. Burton
#48. A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.
Jerry Pournelle
#49. This state of affairs is not inevitable. Humans were able to employ science and law to transform common holdings into a commodity and then into capital; we also have the ability to reverse this path, transforming some of our now overabundant capital into renewed commons.
Fritjof Capra
#50. The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And - unlike the arts - they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.
Alastair Reynolds
#51. A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.
John D. Voelker
#52. We in the West think of peace as society's default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.
Kathleen Troia McFarland
#53. If the reader says the state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right, or is just, or is inevitable and if this must lead into further deterioration, then I will have no quarrel with it. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him.
T. S. Eliot
#54. It is impossible not to react to the current state of affairs through personal action and artistic production. We have been at war for three years. One desperately feels the need for someone to speak some sort of truth, either poetic or factual.
Casey Spooner
#55. In a way, the American side descended to Saddam's level, which happens often in these types of circumstances. That is why the people in Iraq do not accept the current state of affairs.
Dario Fo
#56. The use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.
Karl Popper
#57. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.
Bertrand Russell
#58. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx
#59. the real message of the Gospels is not a mere description of a state of affairs, but rather an invitation to taste and see how good is the Lord!, to "come and behold the wondrous deeds of God" (Psalms 46:8).
Ruben L.F. Habito
#60. The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That's the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#61. We seem to be heading for a state of affairs in which the determination of whether or not Doomsday has arrived will be made either by an automatic device ... or by a pre-programmed president who, whether he knows it or not, will be carrying out orders written years before by some operations analyst.
Herbert York
#62. The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history - the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen
Robert Greene
#63. The final state of affairs may not have been foreseen. Perhaps we are merely reading a plan into the world after the fact.
B.F. Skinner
#64. It's a sad state of affairs when I'm the one bringing sanity to the equation
M.A. George
#65. she would have been disappointed if he had not demonstrated such idealism, for he was yet to reach twenty-one; youth without optimism, without a strong sense of the possible, would represent a very sad state of affairs.
Jacqueline Winspear
#66. Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
Alan Watts
#67. It is a wholly deplorable state of affairs when specialists in any discipline talk only to each other, and accordingly I have sought to write a book which will communicate some of the fruits of research in a manner which will make them accessible to all.
Richard Fletcher
#68. All action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one.
Murray Rothbard
#69. We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said 'I think, therefore I am,' he had not discovered 'the most fundamental truth', Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to 'the most basic error'.
Oliver Burkeman
#70. On 'State of Affairs,' we're going after some names that you wouldn't think would traditionally do TV. A show that shoots in Los Angeles is such a rare bird in hand that I think we're gonna have the pick of the litter.
Joe Carnahan
#71. Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.
Fran Lebowitz
#72. The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.
Paul Klee
#73. Not upholding a persons legal rights is a form of abuse. Unfortunately, USA government abuse of the general public is a normal state of affairs in many areas.
Steven Magee
#74. Wisdom has lost repute because it so often applies to a state of affairs that no longer exists.
Mason Cooley
#75. I've never had my heart broken. It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all.
Sally Field
#76. Now no one can deny the fact that whatever is the state of the affairs in the country, you did not have the army controlling the country and you have a pluralistic society anyway.
Tariq Ramadan
#77. Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent.
John Carroll
#78. I don't know that human beings were meant to mate for life or be monogamous. But, for me, the aspect of marriage that is troubling is that it's a contract that is governed by the state, and I don't want the state to have control over my personal affairs.
Laura Wasser
#79. It is by far the best plan, therefore, to mingle leisure with business, whenever chance impediments or the state of public affairs forbid one's leading an active life: for one is never so cut off from all pursuits as to find no room left for honorable action.
Seneca.
#80. Ramil met Tashi's eyes with a mischievous look. "Now Wife we have a long voyage ahead of us with no interruptions, no affairs of state to sidetrack us." He brushed his fingers againist the lacings of her neck. "Isn't it time you returned that shirt to its owner?
Julia Golding
#81. In a 1931 speech, Butler recounted a story about Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, how he had run over a child with his car, and said, as he moved on, "It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of the State.
Smedley D. Butler
#82. The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#83. It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of a state?
Benito Mussolini
#84. When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.
Shane Claiborne
#85. I don't have a fear and urgency feeling inside myself about the state of the world affairs and everything collapsing.
Ram Dass
#86. My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.
Jennifer Gilmore
#87. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Pico Iyer
#88. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all - I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.
Paul Rusesabagina
#90. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Friedrich Engels
#91. [The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.
Allen W. Dulles
#92. In France a woman will not go to sleep until she has talked over affairs of state with her lover or her husband.
Cardinal Mazarin
#93. This is a great country and requires a good deal of all of us, so I can imagine nothing more important than for all of you to continue to work in public affairs and be interested in them, not only to bring up a family, but also give part of your time to your community, your state, and your country.
John F. Kennedy
#94. Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?
Barry Goldwater
#95. Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a very large country, a very old country, a very disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons and in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.
Winston Churchill
#96. The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.
William Scranton
#97. Even in the most richly communicative and reciprocal love affairs, it is nearly impossible to sustain that initial state of rapture beyond a few weeks.
Ian McEwan
#98. Fine wits destroy themselves with their own plots, in meddling with great affairs of state.
John Selden
#99. First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.
Benjamin Tucker
#100. In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Walter Lippmann
