Collective Noun Quotes

The patter of rain is a chorus of raindrops. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

He wondered what the collective noun was for psychologists: a shortage of shrinks? A confession of counsellors? ~ Daryl Gregory

Evan chuckled and shook his head. "I should have known it would be another owl. What is it with you and owls? I'm surrounded by the bloody things. There's more of them than the spider plants."
"Don't listen to him," Rai said, standing and swivelling around to take in all his menagerie. Owlery? I made a mental note to Google the collective noun for owls later. "You're all precious snowflakes, my lovelies. ~ Josephine Myles

The greatest threat to our planet is the idea that someone else will save it. Once the majority of individuals have become aware of themselves and the effect that they have on the world, humanity as a whole will, without a doubt, become a conscious collective. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

A Chinese saying describes it well: "As far away as the horizon, and right in front of your face." You can run toward it forever, run faster and faster, and never get any closer. Only when you stop do you realize you are already there. That is exactly our collective situation right now. All of the solutions to the global crisis are sitting right in front of us, but they are invisible to our collective seeing, existing, as it were, in a different universe. When we are trapped in a story, we can only do the things that that story can recognize. Often we are aware of being trapped (the old story is ending) but don't have access to any alternative (we haven't yet inhabited a new story). ~ Charles Eisenstein

The possibility for such collective healing holds tremendous transformative power that remains as yet untapped. It is difficult for people to imagine the freedom and energy that would be released if our society were to seriously embrace this task of collective gender healing in community. ~ William Keepin

Golden sees parental uninterest in collective solutions as part of a larger "decline in the social contract" ... "As a scholar, I'm very disturbed that we have more [media] articles about toxins in the home than the fact that we don't have universal prenatal care, she says. "We've moved from collective concern about infant and child welfare into this very privatized focus on "my child" and this intensive child-rearing. ~ Emily Matchar

As in any machine, all the wires must be connected to the mains through one main wire. In the same way, you all must be connected to God individually so that you all are connected among yourselves. I have been saying this again and again and again because at the Sahasrara you are being blessed with this collective spirit. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

Elizabeth [Alexander] is right, of course. It's a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents of property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth- and the worlds they might have made had they been free. ~ Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Visual design is always a collaborative process between the director and the cinematographer. According to the best-case scenario, the director and cinematographer challenge each other as equals, and ultimately synthesize their differing approaches into a superior collective decision. But for this to be the case, the director must be as good a shot maker as the DP. If he is the weaker partner, then the look of the finished film will not be his ~ Gil Bettman

A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility. ~ Stephen Baxter

We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of life. ~ R.W. Van Bemmelen

Money was the blood of civilized society, its currents running through everything and everyone. Where money was insufficient, things withered. People starved, sickened and died, constructions eroded, even ideas perished. Where funds were plentiful, the same things blossomed with new life.
And money was, in the end, little more than the product of collective imagination. A slip of paper or a coin had no value beyond that of the material it was fashioned of. It only took on a life of its own when people as a whole collectively agreed that certain papers and coins were worth something.
Only then did people bleed and die for it. For a fantasy, a faith given form in hard, concrete numbers.
Then again, much of society was built on a series of shared delusions. Clothing was little more than scraps of particular materials with particular geometries, but people clung to the idea of fashion. Style. Good and bad fashion was another belief system, one which all members of a culture were indoctrinated into. Breaking certain conventions didn't only challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of others, but it challenged their sense of self. It reminded them, subconsciously, of the very pretendings they clung to.
Only those with power could stand against society's tides, flaunt the collective's 'safe' aesthetic. When one had enough power, others couldn't rise against them and safely say something calculated to reduce their own dissonance and remind the offending party of the u ~ Wildbow

It is incumbent upon each of us to improve spending and savings practices to ensure our own individual financial security and preserve the collective economic well-being of our great society. ~ Ron Lewis

The great danger is that in the confession of any collective sin, one shall confess the sins of others and forget our own. ~ Georgia Harkness

I also urge the Obama administration - both on its own and in cooperation with other responsible governments around the world - to use all legal means necessary to shut down WikiLeaks before it can do more damage by releasing additional cables. WikiLeaks' activities represent a shared threat to collective international security. ~ Joe Lieberman

The laws of economics and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our collective performance would improve. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective - all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers. ~ Rebecca Stead

Our labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor. ~ John F. Kennedy

The priority of the Democrats and Republicans ... is to preserve ... power when [they have] it, and to gain power when [they do not]. [Their] collective priority ... is to make sure that, together, they control the electoral process and under no circumstances allow an independent or third party to infringe on their exclusive franchise. ~ Jesse Ventura

The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code. ~ Donna J. Haraway

I suspect it was ... the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit. A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour. There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences. ~ Laurens Van Der Post

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic? ~ David Byrne

Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame ~ Allen Ginsberg

The nation is only as strong as the collective strength of its individuals. ~ Jeremiah Denton

One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. ~ Martin Amis

There is no individual salvation without collective salvation ~ Barack Obama

An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Awkward Day noun An antiholiday, Awkward Day is a heinous day filled with insecurity, vulnerability, and tension, created to highlight the newness of a romantic relationship and to test the living shit out of it. If you make it through Awkward Day, your relationship has legs. Good news is that it only lasts one day, if that long. Bad news is that it's tedious and you might not have that new boyfriend by the end of it. ~ Alexandra Koslow

I vow to ingest only items that preserve well-being, peace, and joy in my body and my consciousness ... Practicing a diet is the essence of this precept. Wars and bombs are the products of our consciousness individually and collectively. Our collective consciousness has so much violence, fear, craving, and hatred in it, it can manifest in wars and bombs. The bombs are the product of our fear ... Removing the bombs is not enough. Even if we could transport all the bombs to a distant planet, we would still not be safe, because the roots of the wars and the bombs are still intact in our collective consciousness. Transforming the toxins in our collective consciousness is the true way to uproot war (72-73). ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I think there's a collective consciousness around the world that there are things beyond our control that have the power to annihilate us, as a species, and it's all rather frightening. ~ Laurie Holden

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch. ~ Lily Tomlin

There is a lot of sixties-bashing going on these days that I don't agree with at all. I feel that extremely important ideals were brought to the forefront of the collective consciousness at that time. Granted, drug use was so pervasive that our generation did not as a group have the capacity to manifest our ideals to any great extent. But many of the people who were young in the sixties and who were most touched by that collective ethos are still touched. ~ Marianne Williamson

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory. ~ Buzz Aldrin

In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship. ~ Federica Montseny

There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to rise above those moments and behold the bigger picture in all of its complexity, complementarity, and temporal sweep, and to find in what we see not illusory consolation but the truest comfort there is: that of perspective. ~ John Steinbeck

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome. ~ Nhat Hanh

Marriage (noun): betting someone half your stuff that you'll love them forever. ~ Julie Johnson

Each person is oriented toward a quest for his personal invisible guide, or ... he entrusts himself to the collective, magisterial authority as the intermediary between himself and Revelation. ~ Ibn Arabi

It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

His concept of allochrony - initially introduced shyly as 'untimeliness', then later radicalized to an exit from modernity - is based on the idea, as suggestive as it is fantastic, that antiquity has no need of repetitions enacted in subsequent periods, because it 'essentially' returns constantly on its own strength. In other words, antiquity - or the ancient - is not an overcome phase of cultural development that is only represented in the collective memory and can be summoned by the wilfulness of education. It is rather a kind of constant present - a depth time, a nature time, a time of being - that continues underneath the theatre of memory and innovation that occupies cultural time. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

We live in a dynamic society and the collective conscience of the society is bound to change with time. ~ Shivanshu K. Srivastava

But witnesses incur responsibilities, as anyone who has ever seen a traffic accident and had to go to court to testify, knows. In the new world of globally televised war crimes, the defence of 'not knowing,' or neutrality, will dissolve for everyone. To be a witness or bystander is not a value-free choice but, inadvertently, a moral position; and in this sense the 'guilt' of people who live with the memory of crimes committed by members of their families, or communities, has been unwittingly extended to everyone who watches appalling pictures on the news. ~ Erna Paris

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. ~ Martha Graham

Trust is a collective mind - the corporate culture. You can't build and nourish trust without creating a conducive environment of trust. ~ Pearl Zhu

Even if humans feel lots of fear, remember God will take care of you. This is a collective message because fear is contagious ... This is a message of reassurance. ~ Pope Theodoros II

If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred. ~ Ralph Peters

We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we want connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary. ~ Russell Brand

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. ~ Naomi Klein

On a slightly unconnected note, I am sorry to report that babies, as a collective species, are largely oblivious to my charms. ~ Amruta Patil