Excesses Quotes

To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard! ~ Jean De La Bruyere

The body, enervated by the excesses of the preceding day, weighs down and prostates the mind also. ~ Horace

The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There ~ Victor Hugo

My sin grew sleek on my excesses. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips ... p 72 ~ Alexandra Fuller

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. ~ Chuck Schumer

The professional study of economics has become ideological brainwashing. It is a defense of the excesses of the capitalist system. ~ David Korten

In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres ... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave. ~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

When excesses such as lax lending standards become widespread and persist for some time, people are lulled into a false sense of security, creating an even more dangerous situation. In some cases, excesses migrate beyond regional or national borders, raising the ante for investors and governments. These excesses will eventually end, triggering a crisis at least in proportion to the degree of the excesses. Correlations between asset classes may be surprisingly high when leverage rapidly unwinds. ~ Seth Klarman

You have been offered "the gift of crisis". As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek root of the word crisis is "to sift", as in, to shake out the excesses and leave only what's important. That's what crises do. They skae things up until we are forced to hold on to only what matters most. The rest falls away. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind; Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily; Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness; Sometimes one is up and sometimes down. Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency. ~ Laozi

Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present. With its seemingly endless excesses, its ravenous appetites. Ever the same rules, ever the same game. ~ Steven Erikson

I'm of those who believe that excesses in all matters are not a good idea, whether it's formation of bubbles, whether it's excess in the financial market, whether it's excess of inequality, it has to be watched, it has to be measured, and it has to be anticipated in terms of consequences. ~ Christine Lagarde

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple. ~ George Clooney

Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses. ~ Jim Hightower

The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next. ~ Lillian B. Rubin

Society secretly delights in crime, excesses, and violated prohibitions of all sorts. ~ Bernard Tschumi

For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that "feeding your face" was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have "foodies" and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive "spirituality" probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game. ~ Dallas Willard

Down close to certain flowers
all excesses are sufficiencies ~ David Giannini

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. ~ James Baldwin

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. ~ Barack Obama

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. "Bind me with the chains of Illusion," he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police - seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal's old "abêtissezvous," the Solitary's tragic device.
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the ~ Emil M. Cioran

It is customary for columnists to complain about the excesses of Premiership footballers, whenever - as happens regularly - there is an incident involving some combination of sex, drugs, drink, violence and the constabulary. But modern footballers have a lot of both money and disposable time, a combination that has proved a recipe for personal disaster throughout history. And these incidents take place generally round night clubs rather than football clubs. The average Premiership player who turned up for work drunk would have a career-expectancy measurable in minutes. ~ Matthew Engel

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market. ~ Ron Chernow

A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. ~ William E. Gladstone

The very forces of matter, in their blind advance, impose their own limits. That is why it is useless to
want to reverse the advance of technology. The age of the spinning-wheel is over and the dream of a
civilization of artisans is vain. The machine is bad only in the way that it is now employed. Its benefits
must be accepted even if its ravages are rejected. The truck, driven day and night, does not humiliate its
driver, who knows it inside out and treats it with affection and efficiency. The real and inhuman excess
lies in the division of labor. But by dint of this excess, a day comes when a machine capable of a hundred
operations, operated by one man, creates one sole object. This man, on a different scale, will have
partially rediscovered the power of creation which he possessed in the days of the artisan. The anonymous
producer then more nearly approaches the creator. It is not certain, naturally, that industrial excess will
immediately embark on this path. But it already demonstrates, by the way it functions, the necessity for
moderation and gives rise to reflections on the proper way to organize this moderation. Either this value
of limitation will be realized, or contemporary excesses will only find their principle and peace in
universal destruction. ~ Albert Camus

He sees that only the gospel can really help us avoid the painful excesses in the tug-of-war between the need for liberty and the need for order. He knows, for instance, that true law enforcement depends on the policing of one's self. If the sentry of self fails, there are simply not enough other policemen to restrain those who will not restrain themselves, and beating the system will become the system. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

[O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist­ ence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the'subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people). In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately 'defensive'. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens 'normalize' the state and accept that its violence is merely a matter of contin­ gent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic reforms). ~ Slavoj Zizek

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal. ~ Chloe Thurlow

What do the good know?' he said. 'Except what the bad teach them by their excesses? ~ Clive Barker

As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter. ~ Howard Warren Buffett

It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let the beast in man devour man. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, questions all, and thus, learns and grows. The weak, narrow mind makes its beliefs – whatever form they take – sacrosanct, defending them with violence if necessary. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control or make conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.
They use language in its most evil, twisted form. They appeal to the lowest form of understanding, on a level I hesitate to allow for the term 'human intelligence' to be associated.

Children, fertile minds ripe for molestation. Now they will be taught what to think, not ~ Daniel S. Fletcher

Our vices are the excesses of our virtues. ~ Pleasant Rowland

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed. ~ Dervla Murphy

Over time, researchers who look at the adolescent brain have therefore alighted on a variety of metaphors and analogies to describe their excesses. Casey prefers Star Trek: "Teenagers are more Kirk than Spock." Steinberg likens teenagers to cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes. "And then parents are going to get into tussles with their teenagers," says Steinberg, "because they're going to try to be the brakes. ~ Jennifer Senior

East Germany may have been a giant penitentiary administrated by the Russians, the Stasi may have embodied the worst excesses of German authority and bureaucratic thoroughness, and anyone with brains and spirit may have fled the country before the Wall went up, but the inmates who'd remained behind to expiate the country's collective guilt had paradoxically been liberated from their Germanness (...) Humble, unpunctual, spontaneous, and generous with what little they had. (...) their real loyalties were to one other, not to the state. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Your thoughts of Christ, be very careful that they are conceived and directed according to the rule of the word, lest you deceive your own souls, and give up the conduct of your affections unto vain imaginations. . . . [But] we are not to forego our duty [to contemplate Christ] because other men have been mistaken in theirs, nor part with practical, fundamental principles of religion because they have been abused by superstition. . . . Yet I must say that I had rather be among them who, in the actings of their love and affection unto Christ, do fall into some irregularities and excesses in the manner of expressing it . . . than among those who, professing themselves to be Christians, do almost disavow their having any thoughts of or affection unto the person of Christ.297 ~ Timothy Keller

The hole in the shoulder of his T shirt was not a cute hole. The excess material in the seat of his seersucker shorts, the excess length of the shorts themselves, were not cute excesses. ~ J.D. Salinger

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.' ~ Ingmar Bergman

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself. ~ Arundhati Roy

Abortion ... was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Introduction!" And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something besides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared). So be assured - the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only won't stand in your way, I'll even agree with you! The novelet "Ender's Game ~ Orson Scott Card

Alice leaned first one way and then the other, down the line of children. She said, Is everybody understanding this?"
One child said, "The misuse of power is the root of all evil?"
Alice said, "Well ... "
Another child said, "There is no justice on the earth?"
Alice said, "Well ... "
Another child said, "We are all alone in the world?"
Alice said, "Well ... "
Another child said, "The greatest depth of our loss is the beginning of true freedom?"
Alice said, "Well ... "
Another child said, "The disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted?"
These were all phrases Alice had put on the chalkboard after other field trips. It occurred to Alice, hearing these phrases now, that she might have attempted to do too much with a class of fourth graders. She was willing to admit to some excesses.
Alice said, "Just listen. ~ Lewis Nordan

In Stalin's famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number. ~ Alex Von Tunzelmann

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve. ~ Iain M. Banks

What we should be very concerned about is the excesses and the abuses. Where we see hunts where the fox is torn away out of the hole and thrown to the hounds, we have to be very concerned. Where we have hunts where foxes are bred for the sport of it, that is not pest control. That is pure bloody sport. ~ Huw Irranca-Davies

What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization: we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself.

Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed, like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent memories as we do from our travels. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Let the mind be cheerful but calm. Never let it run into excesses, because every excess will be followed by a reaction. ~ Swami Vivekananda

In the Gaia theory air, water, and soil are major components of one central organism, planet Earth. What we typically think of as life - the plants and animals that inhabit the earth - has evolved merely to regulate the chemistry of the biosphere. Humans are insignificant participants, far less important to the life cycle than termites. Even the imbalance that we have created by adding massive quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere may be brought back to acceptable levels by other organisms functioning in their capacity to correct excesses. ~ David Easton

Well, as you know, we're working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now as we work off some of the past excesses. But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system. ~ Henry Paulson

My early windfall was a result of the excesses of the S&L era. ~ Jeff Greene

Reason without emotion is often a mask for cruelty; emotion without reason can allow people to excuse all sorts of excesses. ~ Nalini Singh

I wept for my family, all if us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into extraordinary carelessness. We'd been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as though we had taken for granted the fact that there would be more where we had come from too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke, Bridget or Bill. ~ Brooke Hayward

Enjoy the necessities of life but eschew the excesses. ~ Ian Gardner

The greatest factors making for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. The talk of the agitator does not advance socialism one step. The great captains of industry and finance ... are the chief makers of socialism. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. ~ Betsy Lerner

[After a period of separation, Phaeton and Daphne are cuddling.]

Diomedes, meanwhile, was leaning to look behind Helion, staring with open fascination at the display Phaethon and Daphne made. "I have not seen non-parthenogenic bioforms before. Are they going to copulate?"

Atkins and Helion looked at him, then looked at each other. A glance of understanding passed between them.

Atkins put his hand on Diomedes's elbow, and pulled him back in front of Helion. "Perhaps not at this time," Atkins said, straight-faced.

"They are young and in love," explained Helion, stepping so as to block Diomedes's view. "So perhaps the excesses and, ah, exuberance of their, ah, greeting, can be overlooked this once."

Diomedes craned his neck, trying to peer past Helion. "There's nothing like that on Neptune."

Helion murmured, "Perhaps certain peculiarities of the Neptunian character are thereby clarified, hmm…?"

"It looks very old-fashioned," said Diomedes.

Helion said, "It is that most ancient and most precious romantic character of mankind which impels all great men to their greatness."

Atkins said, "It's what young men do before they go to war."

Diomedes said, "It is not the way Cerebellines or Compositions or Hermaphrodites or Neptunians arrange these matters. I'm not sure I see the value of it. But it looks interesting. Do all Silver-Gray get to do that? I wonder if Phaethon would mi ~ John C. Wright

One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out ... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone! ~ Anne Rice

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. ~ Amory Lovins

We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so. ~ Tertullian

I love the excesses of beauty,
there is never enough sunlight
in the world I will live in,
never enough room for love. ~ Eric Gamalinda

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these middling men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures. But ~ Gordon S. Wood

I, too, am among those unable to step outside the realm of worldly distinctions. I hide my excesses of joy and sorrow beneath a robe of false contentment and drown in a pool of tears unseen by others. How I envy those naive enough to covet the glory of others. Do they not realize that tears fall not only on the sleeves of worn and tattered kimonos? The jewels that spill, glittering, onto my brocade are the very water of life, but they are mistaken for mere ornament. Although no one notices, my heart is shattered into a thousand pieces. ~ Shikin Shimizu

This thing isn't "natural" to us, you know? Some of the worst excesses against men were never - in my opinion anyway - perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks "curbed." This can't have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before - it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it's not "natural" to us to live like this. It can't be. I can't believe it is. We can choose differently. ~ Naomi Alderman

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses. ~ Camille Paglia

With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez. ~ Joaquin Sorolla

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain. ~ Samuel Johnson

If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints. ~ Bill Watterson

Male leaders are celebrated for their successes, while their excesses are typically excused as the necessary and expected price of masculine ambition. ~ Kara Cooney

Ignorance, as well as disapproval for the natural restraints placed on market excesses that capitalism and sound markets impose, cause our present leaders to reject capitalism and blame it for all the problems we face. If this fallacy is not corrected and capitalism is even further undermined, the prosperity that the free market generates will be destroyed. ~ Ron Paul

We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia. ~ Bill Moyers

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. ~ Edward Snowden

These days the integrity of our small but ancient civilization is endangered by the excesses of a country whose wartime budget is larger than that of the other nine leading military powers of the world, combined. ~ Julian Aguon

Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses. ~ Rembrandt

When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. ~ Stanley Milgram

Winter's palette is clear and spare, restrictive enough to curb the excesses of even the most daring gardeners. ~ Rosemary Verey

Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that "I am"; external freedom is based on the fact that "I have." But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong place, so there can be a deordination of the desire for property until it becomes greed, avarice, and capitalistic aggression. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

There are lots of planned economies-the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk ourselves as a "free market", but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts--like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publically funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. ~ Noam Chomsky

Only a very small proportion of us take those excesses with us into later life. In the age before everyone had a camera, it was worthwhile, in my opinion, to record those excesses. Sometimes, many times actually, the young people I photographed were only dressed that way for one night; that one night that they got snapped by me. ~ Derek Ridgers

Such indeed is the superior longevity of the fair females of Surinam, compared to that of the males (owing chiefly, as I said, to their excesses of all sorts) that I have frequently known wives who have buried four husbands, but never met a man in this country who had survived two wives. ~ John Gabriel Stedman

A healthy mind and body are essential. No excesses. Proper food. The body is like a Rolls-Royce. With care, it could last 200 years. It's a dynamo; the more you use it, the more you recharge it. ~ Oleg Cassini

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses. ~ George Will

Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance. ~ Eric Hoffer

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. ~ David Graeber

The excesses of identity politics pale in comparison to the monolithic normative realities that dominate our culture. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There were excesses in science and there were excesses in religion. A reasonable man wouldn't be stampeded by either one. There were many interpretations of Scripture and many interpretations of the natural world. Both were created by God, so both must be mutually consistent. Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian - maybe both - hasn't been doing his job. Palmer ~ Carl Sagan

The best approach to religious codes that have become rigid and absolute is to acknowledge their arbitrariness and use them, if we use them at all, as a private discipline for ordering our own chaos. When they are proclaimed as the bearer of absolute and unchanging truth, defended in the traditional way, they enslave the human spirit rather than protect it from its own excesses. Jesus' vision burned through the external systems to the anxious human heart that lay beneath them and called for its transformation into a perfection of love. ~ Richard Holloway

While pimples are not as simple as too much milk or sugar in your diet, both have a significant impact. Nutritional deficiencies as well as excesses can worsen acne. ~ Mark Hyman

I'm the guy who's started businesses, I've been a small business owner. I've employed hundreds of Pennsylvanians. I know how to get jobs moving in the private sector, rein in the excesses in Washington, and bring some balance to a town that's lost all balance. ~ Pat Toomey

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite. ~ Charles Baudelaire

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as
equal with all men ... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to
discover to you. ~ Blaise Pascal

In Switzerland, we have a centuries-old tradition of living together in one confederation and one society. That holds us back from excesses. We are a civilized and enlightened community and, by practising multicultural tolerance, we manage to stop extreme developments from going too far. ~ Klaus Schwab

The strengths a young person finds in adults at this time-their willingness to let him experiment, their eagerness to confirm him at his best, their consistency in correcting his excesses, and the guidance they give him-will codetermine whether or not he eventually makes order out of necessary inner confusion and applies himself to the correction of disordered conditions. He needs freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that he cannot, in fact, make a choice. ~ Erik Erikson

It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics. ~ Paul Wellstone

We would have to make clear to our German ally our disagreement on three points: treatment of the occupied countries, excesses towards the Jews, and relations with the Papacy. One ought to try to create a true European federation respectful of each nationality. ~ Ugo Cavallero