Overstatement Quotes

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968 ~ Mark Kurlansky

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

A food processor, or even one of those small bowls that fit on a stick blender, is a real treasure. No, that's not an overstatement. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Those of you who have spent time with Australians know that we are not given to overstatement. By nature we are laconic speakers and by conviction we are realistic thinkers. ~ Julia Gillard

Between overstatement and understatement lies one hundred percent. ~ Sten Nadolny

Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man's Garden, observes that "it is not important for a garden to be beautiful" in everyone's eyes. But "it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden." Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth. ~ Vigen Guroian

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement. ~ Fred Allen

A friend of mine is a chef in Bali, and another friend said, 'God, he's like Brad Pitt,' and I said, 'Yeah, I think he's more like arm Pitt,' 'cause, you know, 'Brad Pitt' would be a bit of an overstatement. ~ Owain Yeoman

Overstatement, too, plays a considerable part in English social life. This takes mostly the form of someone remarking: 'I say…' and then keeping silent for three days on end. ~ George Mikes

Extraverted thinkers tend to exaggerate for the sake of emphasis, and the victim will be too outraged by the unfair overstatement to pay attention to the part that is true. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers

Love songs are nothing without exaggeration. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic. ~ Isaac Asimov

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times. ~ Dean Smith

Reserve is strength; overstatement is weakness. No one cares to hear the singer's topmost notes when the voice is 'nigh onto breaking. ~ John F. Carlson

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study ... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas. ~ Steven Pressfield

and in that she's not merely pretty. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, "a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment." Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it's perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others'), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana ~ Alena Graedon

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness
that, at least, we may be sure that we have
and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing. ~ John Ashbery

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement.
If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board ... ~ Mark Twain

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. ~ Susan Sontag

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we? ~ Neil Gaiman

The term itself - my life - is a desperate overstatement. ~ Don DeLillo

There's been this attempt to block Donald Trump, in primary candidates and Democrats, that - to try to make everything he says some sort of extreme overstatement. ~ Jeff Sessions

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing! ~ James Baldwin

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm. ~ E.B. White