Graft Quotes

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts. ~ Alan Sillitoe

In this day and age, there is a limitless plethora of readily available distractions just waiting to take your mind off what you were supposed to be doing, and instead keep you unproductive and unmotivated. With distractions so easy to come by, and society so geared towards instant gratification as opposed to "Hard graft" for results, it is little wonder that many people suffer from a condition most commonly referred to as laziness. ~ James Frankton

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. ~ Philip Wylie

Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive. ~ Westbrook Pegler

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these. ~ Paul Graham

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness. ~ Janet Fitch

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now ~ Upton Sinclair

The new political gospel: public office is private graft. ~ Mark Twain

My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it's proving.' Bisesa studied him. 'You'll have to tell me about your father. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

GENES
G raft of yourself
E endowment
N ew generation
E volution
S urvival
Kamil Ali ~ Kamil Ali

Others, however, perhaps overwhelmed by what they read, say Africa should be written off, that it's beyond repair. My experiences so far say we should put it in perspective. For instance, a new nation that has just won its independence from a colonial power struggles with internal graft and corruption, civil war and economic turbulence - more developed nations see it as a basket-case. Yet 200+ years later it emerges as the world's sole superpower. Yes, America. ~ Kevin Sites

If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. They would elect every clean candidate in the United States, and defeat every soiled one. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease. ~ Mark Twain

The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the old Teutonic word walthus, meaning 'forest.' Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of 'weald,' 'wald,' and 'wold,' which were used to designate both 'a wild place' and 'a wooded place,' in which wild creatures -- wolves, foxes, bears -- survived. The wild and wood also graft together in the Latin word silva, which means 'forest,' and from which emerged the idea of 'savage,' with its connotations of fertility.... ~ Robert Macfarlane

Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Put your head down and work hard. Never wait for things to happen, make them happen for yourself through hard graft and not giving up. ~ Gordon Ramsay

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it. ~ Willa Cather

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot ~ Ayn Rand

Moby-Dick is a long, grueling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconsious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chicked it aside and thought: wow - I really ought to read something good. ~ Andy Miller

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected. ~ Barry Unsworth

I was performing skin grafts and became interested in why skin wouldn't graft permanently. ~ Joe Murray

Rather than let their product compete fully and fairly in the marketplace, FalconStor resorted to bribery and graft to win important contracts in a scheme that reached the highest levels of the company. ~ Loretta Lynch

No doubt, what with all that graft and corruption filling your schedule. ~ Rob Thomas

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance. ~ Barbara Tuchman

IT WAS CUSTOMARY in the South for outside observers to interpret events in terms of ideology (usually racial ideology) and for local observers to interpret the same events in terms of money (usually graft). ~ Calvin Trillin

I liked the idea of being a writer and letting somebody else do the graft. ~ Siouxsie Sioux

The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry. ~ James Dyson

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into a new tongue.
~ Walt Whitman

As long as it was just a matter of graft and the lust for power, the British treated the people they robbed as human beings. It was religion that made them treat them like devils ~ Wendy Doniger

Forget the idea that inspiration will come to you like a flash of lightning. It's much more about hard graft. ~ Mark-Anthony Turnage

The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out. ~ Agnes Repplier

He pokes his katana through the
side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found
years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing
Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall
-- this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building --
but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power.
That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that
does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the
Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different
computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice,
it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very
precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are
connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the
Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down.
That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back.
Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating
katana. ~ Neal Stephenson

To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine. ~ William Booth

There are people who'll dismiss me as 'just' a singer. That's how it is, how it's always been, but just because I'm not hunched over a piece of paper with a pen in my hand doesn't mean I'm not putting in the graft. ~ Joe Cocker

We weren't treated as prima-donnas. We had to roll up our sleeves and graft with the groundsman. Kids don't have to do anymore. That makes you appreciate things when it turns in your favour and you become a successful professional. ~ Colin Cooper

I wasn't kidding about the flying-kids part. Or the talking-dog part.
Anyone who's up to speed on the Adventures of Amazing Max and Her Flying, Fun-Loving Cohorts, you can skip this next page or so. Those of you who picked up this book cold, even thought it's clearly part three of the series, well, get with the program, people! I can't take two days to get you caught up on everything! Here's the abbreviated version (which is pretty, I might add):
A bunch of mad scientists (mad crazy not mad angry- though a lot of them seem to have anger-management issues, especially around me) have been playing around with recombinant life-forms, where they graft different species' DNA together. ~ James Patterson

Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problems with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me. ~ John Kennedy Toole

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mi ~ George Eliot

What did "good government" really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There's no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of "honest graft" were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective - that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram's elite network - Langlie didn't so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn't opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn't want to have to break the law to serve them. ~ Jeff Sharlet

Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. ~ Ashim Shanker

But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left
behind. ~ Peter Watts

It hit me like divine inspiration. Religion is the greatest graft ever invented because no one ever loses money claiming to speak for the invisible man in the sky. People already believe in him. They already accept that they owe him money, and they think they'll burn in hell if they don't pay him. If you can't make money in the religion business, you need to give up. ~ Jake Hinkson

As more money flowed through Washington and as Washington's power to regulate our lives grew, opportunities and temptations for graft, influence peddling and cutting corners grew exponentially. Power breeds corruption. ~ Steve Forbes

Even dead, Scarlett seemed able to graft my thoughts onto yearnings a gentleman should never ever contemplate. But then again, no gentleman had ever lived a night wrapped in her cool limbs, savouring such sordid and delightful affections as I had. Scarlett's attentions had raised me above God, but so help me, in no time she had thrown me down to the devil. And then the killings had begun. ~ Cheryl R Cowtan

I've seen it over the years, the more intellectual they are, the more work they don't want to do. You have to do both, you have to be able to put in the graft. ~ Bertie Ahern

Ladies, a second piece of advice
do not marry; marriage is a graft; it may take hold or not. Shun the risk. ~ Victor Hugo

Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State. ~ Lincoln Steffens

Graft good Fruit all, or graft not at all. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system. ~ Howard Gardner

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials ... from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Gradually it became known that the new race had a definite purpose, and that purpose was to chart and possess the whole country, regardless of the rights of its earlier inhabitants. Still the old chiefs cautioned their people to be patient, for, said they, the land is vast, both races can live on it, each in their own way. Let us therefore befriend them and trust their friendship. While they reasoned thus, the temptations of graft and self-aggrandizement overtook some of the leaders. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman

I am a South African, a nation which is the result of an African graft on European stock and which is the product of its instinct and ability to maintain civilized values and standards amongst the aliens'. ~ Gary Player

It'd be hard to be a lead actor if I didn't have lips. Those are tough to graft back on. ~ David Walton

Assessing Miller's rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. Miller had, on some fundamental level, misunderstood the aims of the white men who sought to destroy Reconstruction. From Du Bois's perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of corruption. These were simply bywords embraced to cover for the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. The problem was not that South Carolina's Reconstruction-era government had been consumed by unprecedented graft. Indeed, it was the exact opposite. The very success Miller highlighted, the actual record of 'Negro government' in South Carolina, undermined white supremacy. To redeem white supremacy, that record was twisted, mocked, and caricatured into something that better resembled the prejudices of white South Carolina. 'If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,' wrote Du Bois, 'it was good Negro government. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tell me "The Subtle Briar" again,' she asked. She knew I would still know it by heart. I whispered to her in the dark.

'When you cut down the hybrid rose,
its blackened stump below the graft
spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.
It claws at life, weaving a raft
of suckering roots to pierce the earth.
The first thin shoot is fierce and green,
a pliant whip of furious briar
splitting the soil, gulping the light.
You hack it down. It skulks between
the flagstones of the garden path
to nurse a hungry spur in shade
against the porch. With iron spade
you dig and drag it from the gravel
and toss it living on the fire.

'It claws up towards the light again
hidden from view, avoiding battle
beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,
unloved, unfed, it clings and grows
in the wild hedge. The subtle briar
armors itself with desperate thorns
and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,
unquenchable, it now adorns
itself with blossom, till the stalk
is crowned with beauty, papery white
fine petals thin as chips of chalk
or shaven bone, drinking the light.

'Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,
Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,
Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,
Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,
Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,
Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,
Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,
Elizabeth Wein

In his attempt to graft my attributes onto his own belief system, one just would not take: my rabid feminism, which for me was the idea that no kind of sex is shameful and any kind of violence (including psychological, including societal mores) is. This is the unspoken reverse of American thinking in general, and of rich men in particular. I am often inappropriate. ~ Lisa Crystal Carver

Public Servant: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft. ~ Mark Twain

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain
All, all the stretch of these great green states
And make America again! ~ Langston Hughes

Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus? ~ Upton Sinclair

The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn't take. ~ Colson Whitehead

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower - even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system - that I forgot to simply water it. ~ Charles Martin

THE POLITICIAN
If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!
CATHERINE
Especially since you can't rob the people anyway.
THE POLITICIAN
Sure ... How was that?
CATHERINE
What you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.
THE POLITICIAN
That book should be in every home! ~ Preston Sturges

My well-beloved was stripped. Knowing my whim,
She wore her tinkling gems, but naught besides:
And showed such pride as, while her luck betides,
A sultan's favoured slave may show to him.

When it lets off its lively, crackling sound,
This blazing blend of metal crossed with stone,
Gives me an ecstasy I've only known
Where league of sound and luster can be found.

She let herself be loved: then, drowsy-eyed,
Smiled down from her high couch in languid ease.
My love was deep and gentle as the seas
And rose to her as to a cliff the tide.

My own approval of each dreamy pose,
Like a tamed tiger, cunningly she sighted:
And candour, with lubricity united,
Gave piquancy to every one she chose.

Her limbs and hips, burnished with changing lustres,
Before my eyes clairvoyant and serene,
Swanned themselves, undulating in their sheen;
Her breasts and belly, of my vine and clusters,

Like evil angels rose, my fancy twitting,
To kill the peace which over me she'd thrown,
And to disturb her from the crystal throne
Where, calm and solitary, she was sitting.

So swerved her pelvis that, in one design,
Antiope's white rump it seemed to graft
To a boy's torso, merging fore and aft.
The talc on her brown tan seemed half-divine.

The lamp resigned its dying flame. Within,
The hearth alone lit up the darkened air,
~ Charles Baudelaire

Eating a vegetarian diet, walking (exercising) everyday, and meditating is considered radical. Allowing someone to slice your chest open and graft your leg veins in your heart is considered normal and conservative. ~ Dean Ornish

Songs of myself
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,.. ~ Walt Whitman

Graft at your craft! ~ Andrew Thomas

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water. ~ Joan Miro

The only decent daily paper of record in France is the online 'Mediapart,' which exposes graft and corruption in high places and is feared by the establishment. ~ Tariq Ali

The good people of a nation always vote a bad leader as a president in Africa ~ Aboagye Williamson De-graft

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed. ~ Ayn Rand

Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique. ~ Peter Senge

You know the illusion of the cheap money is over and now Britain has to go out there and graft and earn its way and create wealth and prosperity in a very competitive world. ~ George Osborne

Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark ... ~ Vincent Van Gogh