Temerity Quotes

My world was ordered, calm, and controlled, then you came into my life with your smart mouth, your innocence, your beauty, and your quiet temerity ... and everything before you was just dull, empty, mediocre ... it was nothing. ~ E.L. James

All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small. ~ Peter Medawar

With temerity and defiance, obstinance and patience, she chipped away at every hard edge of me until there was nothing left but the truths I feared. The bent and broken. ~ K. Bromberg

If you have the temerity to try to dramatize a theme that involves any particular social controversy currently extant ... then you're in deep trouble. ~ Rod Serling

To judge by the event is an error all commit: for in every instance courage, if crowned with success, is heroism; if clouded by defeat, temerity. When Nelson fought his battle in the Sound, it was the result alone that decided whether he was to kiss a hand at court or a rod at a court-martial. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon. ~ Kary Mullis

If I didn't know better, I'd swear he was trying to charm her. Of course the transgenically-enchanted Alka Alon, male and female, were beings of surpassing beauty in human eyes, I'd learned. But few humans would have the temerity to even consider such a liaison. Tyndal apparently had a secret temerity mine somewhere I didn't know about. "What ~ Terry Mancour

this particular category of asshole compounds temerity with obliviousness. ~ Eduardo Sacheri

There are five options in war: fight, defend, flee, surrender, or die. You have proven inept at the first two, and now have the temerity to surrender. Death is all you deserve! ~ Sima Yi

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Have the faith you are enough, the temerity to realize you are worthy, and the hunger to be the man or woman people will adore and appreciate fully. ~ Robert J. Braathe

The temerity of [Christian Grey] is astounding. E.L. James has managed to create one of the most blatantly antagonistic sociopaths I've ever seen, yet women everywhere are gobbling it up like he's the best thing since the vibrator. ~ Katrina Passick Lumsden

Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!
Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal. ~ Stewart Lee

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal. ~ Bill Bryson

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity. ~ William Blackstone

Virtue with some is nothing but successful temerity. ~ Seneca The Younger

Theologians are all alike, of whatever religion or country they may be; their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men's consciences; they therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to tell the truth. ~ Frederick The Great

The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day. ~ Dan Simmons

Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

Understand that when the beast within you
succeeds again in paralyzing into unending
incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make
its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its
rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you. ~ Frank Bidart

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. ~ David Hume

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science. ~ Ian Plimer

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. ~ Jo Walton

Just remember you have to bear my choice with the same grace and even tempered temerity I've shown with yours. (Shahara)
Good. I get to whine and bitch. Can't wait. (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Yes, I have a website that puts out conservative news. Yes, I am part owner of a gun company. Yes, I'm a Republican who was cast into the limelight for having the temerity to confront Barack Obama on the question of redistributing wealth ... But I'm a working man, and I'm working. ~ Joe Wurzelbacher

[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself. ~ Dorothy Parker

I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren't dead, all because - I regretted I wasn't! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you're sorry? ~ Tamsyn Muir

Consumerism has become a new religion, complete with its high priests at Which? and its fatwas against anyone with the temerity to try to sell anything at more than cost price ... It is a depressingly medieval outlook on economic life. ~ Sean O'Grady

At the inception of this writing project, I considered the wisdom of executing a purposeful slaughtering of my egotistical self. If I do screw up the temerity to commence with an autopsy of a soulful self, I might lack the fortitude to stay the course to dissect the nature of my being. Without deep-seated faith, I risk faltering at the operating table and never rising again. Will I suffer from a desertion of boldness? Alternatively, will a stunning lack of talent and criminal absence of cognitive insight, perception, and discernment along with a paucity of intellectual and practical acumen betray me when I attempt to whisk up incomplete mental fragments previously abandoned to simmer in the deepest recesses of my animalistic being? Overwrought by a hovering sense of terror concerning what filthy rubbish I might discover lurking within the hallways of my afflicted soul, I am hesitant to descend into the labyrinth of the unknown. I might not endure to write about what fate awaits me when I attempt to harpoon protean personal thoughts steeped in fear and disgust. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.[17 ~ Charlie Brooker

…and the mousesized mousecolored spinster trembling and aghast at her own temerity, staring across it at the childless bachelor in whom ended that long line of men who had had something in them of decency and pride even after they had begun to fail at the integrity and the pride had become mostly vanity and selfpity: from the expatriate who had to flee his native land with little else except his life yet who still refused to accept defeat, through the man who gambled his life and his good name twice and lost twice and declined to accept that either, and the one who with only a clever small quarterhorse for tool avenged his dispossessed father and grandfather and gained a principality, and the brilliant and gallant governor and the general who though he failed at leading in battle brave and gallant men at least risked his own life too in the failing, to the cultured dipsomaniac who sold the last of his patrimony not to buy drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life he could think of. ~ William Faulkner

Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken. If they behave justly, they will be protected from my attacks and those of others. I separate the just from the wicked (who are the subject of my discourse), since not all men are bad and not all women are good. ~ Arcangela Tarabotti

She pressed the controls to lower the ramp. "All right, Syn. One cubbyhole coming up. Just remember you have to bear my choice with the same grace and even-tempered temerity I've shown with yours." He snorted. "Good. I get to whine and bitch. Can't wait."
-Shahara & Syn ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

While the hardware of civilization - iron pots, blankets, guns - was welcomed by Native people, the software of Protestantism and Catholicism - original sin, universal damnation, atonement, and subligation - was not, and Europeans were perplexed, offended, and incensed that Native peoples had the temerity to take their goods and return their gods. ~ Thomas King

Peculiar as I was, and remain, I was trained to be practical. I'm still amazed at the radical temerity of my friends, you included, Julie, who choose poetry as their vocation. I envy your faith. ~ Debra Dean

It is not fitting that God, before whose tribunal we must all finally stand, be subjected to our judgment - or rather to our foolish temerity. God ~ John Calvin