Willy Nilly Quotes

#1. Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.

Gerald Stern

#2. People willy-nilly borrow for consumption. Civil servants willy-nilly borrow for consumption and then wonder why they don't have enough money at the end of the month.

Najib Razak

#3. You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die ... Willy-nilly.

Rumer Godden

#4. There were real reasons that you were attracted to somebody originally. The brain doesn't pick willy-nilly. Unless you part ways hating each other for some reason, that mechanism could get triggered again. You can literally fall in love again.

Helen Fisher

#5. In my view, the money is poorly spent and given willy-nilly to people unlikely to get on the winning rostrum.

Geoff Capes

#6. As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.

Robin Marantz Henig

#7. In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Nathan Myhrvold

#8. My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there's not much deserving about the matter.

Orson Scott Card

#9. Seconds ebb and wane. She's not afraid of her voice anymore, but she's not entirely sure she trusts it. She's seen the damage caused with a single word. Right now, each one is a weapon, a conduit of war, and she won't just throw them out there all willy-nilly.

Laura Kreitzer

#10. Prince Charles is very relaxed at the table, throwing his salad around willy-nilly. I didn't find him stiff at all.

Madonna Ciccone

#11. The legendary Tuatha De Danaan had come! And what did the grand Keltar laird do?
Fainted like a willy-nilly peahen.

Karen Marie Moning

#12. There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly.

Henry Miller

#13. As it turns out, if you freeze improperly packed human remains (i.e. balling them up willy-nilly and jamming them under a couple frozen turkeys and a max pack of Hot Pockets,) just like with animal remains...

E.V. Iverson

#14. We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

Marcel Proust

#15. The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

Jan Morris

#16. immersed in a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts, coming willy-nilly one after another in rapid succession.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#17. You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating.

Bill Keller

#18. Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Omar Khayyam

#19. My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.

Lynn Margulis

#20. I respect your right to differ, but that doesn't change reality. I cannot have people thrown through windows willy-nilly in my county.

Ilona Andrews

#21. We shouldn't be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community.

Tony Abbott

#22. The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down.

Stephen Crane

#23. Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God.

Victor Hugo

#24. A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.

Kate Braestrup

#25. Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.

Germaine Greer

#26. They [left-wingers] willy-nilly throw around the accusation of Nazism and comparisons to Hitler whenever confronted by any opposition, yet they are today's Nazis in their determination to shut down by threats or violence free speech and assembly.

Steve McCann

#27. We live in a crowded and stifling world, my dear sir; just to be able to walk, we have to push and shove others willy nilly!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#28. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

Michael Lewis

#29. The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.

Sonia Sotomayor

#30. Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.

Sun Tzu

#31. People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

Carson McCullers