Unsympathetic Quotes

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies.
"Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth."
"Right, like geologists."
"Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..."
"So, it's like oceanography or hydrology."
"And the atmosphere."
"Meteorology, climatology..."
"It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet."
"How is that different from ecology or environmental science?"
"Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--"
"Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci."
"Some geographers specialize in different world regions."
"Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department."
"They're not."
(Long pause.)
"So, uh, what is it that do study then? ~ Ken Jennings

The rich eat life, the poor eat death; so what is the problem they ask? ~ Anthony Liccione

They don't feel right," he said. "A tear for your discomfort," Andrew said, completely unsympathetic. "And you said I have no team spirit," Neil muttered. "Never claimed I did either." Andrew grinned and shrugged. "You're the fool who gave him your game. Reap what you sow or burn the field down, the choice is yours. Be smarter next time, would you? ~ Nora Sakavic

Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic". Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole". Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter's response: "Okay, then." The Walters of the world don't mid being assholes; what matters to them is being right. ~ Tim Kreider

Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on.
In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a strange
a fierce, bald, very dark Negro
glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me.
The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. ~ John Howard Griffin

And remember that striptease of hers, just remember how deeply she was experiencing it! It was the saddest striptease I've ever seen. She was passionately trying to strip and at the same time she still remained in the hated confinement of her nurse's uniform. She was trying to strip and couldn't. And although she knew that she wouldn't strip, was trying to, because she wanted to communicate to us her sad and unrealizable desire to strip. Chief, she wasn't stripping, she was singing the elegy of stripping, singing about the impossibility of stripping, about the impossibility of making love, about the impossibility of living! And we didn't even want to hear it. We looked at the floor and we were unsympathetic. ~ Milan Kundera

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. ~ Alain De Botton

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.

The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

It's your serve.

Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?

Eith ~ Daniel C. Dennett

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to. ~ Matthew Macfadyen

So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

Kids have to be tough to survive on the streets of Kathmandu, where older gang members often beat and rob them. They face cold winters, hunger, homelessness, and unsympathetic police. But under each hardened shell there is still a child. ~ Craig Kielburger

Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply. ~ Tony Judt

And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person's soul in the virtue of which he or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called psysiognomical. Since then, whenever in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting it, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness. ~ Marcel Proust

Hardy Cates," I said, coming into the room, "you behave, or I'll step on your tube."
The nurse seemed taken aback by my unsympathetic bedside manner. But Hardy's gaze met mine in a moment of bright, hot voltage, and he relaxed, reassured in a way that cooing sympathy could never have done.
"That only works if it's a breathing tube," he told me. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Vast migrations of people - some voluntary, most not - have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth's climate changes in the coming decades, there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us. * ~ Carl Sagan

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between. ~ Glen Duncan

Topper was making her realise how calculatingly cruel and unsympathetic she was, how stubborn as a wife and inadequate as a friend. No ~ Thorne Smith

Eighty percent of our criminals come from unsympathetic homes. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. ~ H.G.Wells

I'm not unsympathetic. But do you like me? Because this being gay business doesn't mean you can just throw yourself at any guy and it'll be fine because he's not a girl. There are still people you like and people you don't. ~ Cassandra Clare

The hemming and hawing is courtesy of Mrs. Duchamps, head of nursing, a small, snippy woman who always seems to know best. She's French: she should have stayed in France. Arrogant and unsympathetic, but she does have a cute French accent. ~ Hendrik Groen

There wasn't space to mood-up. I think Rose Byrne was just extraordinary. Talk about a character that could be really unsympathetic at times. She just jumped in these scenes that go from anger to hysteria to crying to laughing and back to anger. I just marveled. ~ Susan Sarandon

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. ~ H.G.Wells

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate. ~ Rick Moody

maybe god created us because his own awareness of beauty and truth was so overwhelming that he couldn't keep it to himself any longer, like an artist who bubbles over with desire to communicate to someone else. but god isn't limited to smaller forms like we are.

if he desired at all to create it must be so intensely beautiful as to surpass human imagination. they say that everything was made for his glory, and this has often been presented as a sterile or an unsympathetic thing. but when you have found beauty or created it, you desire to share it with someone else, and maybe he created us to be admirers of this intricacy as well.

and the beauty would somehow be only a token of knowing him. ~ Benjamin DeVries

It is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Most expositions of Aristotle's doctrines, when they have not been dictated by a spirit of virulent detraction, or unsympathetic indifference, have carefully suppressed all, or nearly all, the absurdities, and only retained what seemed plausible and consistent. But in this procedure their historical significance disappears. ~ George Henry Lewes

Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour - in ten minutes - these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men "after our own heart." Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread. ~ C.S. Lewis

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

the late 1940s, hospitals in many states set up abortion committees to which a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy could appeal.9 It was a humiliating process, which could involve multiple physical examinations and interrogations by unsympathetic doctors. ~ Katha Pollitt

Everyone has a masculine and feminine side; masculine qualities and feminine qualities. We've all got these sides to ourselves. And clothes can tell that story. People would think this is very unsympathetic, but I would always say to people, you don't actually need to go through with an operation, can't you just be? You are who you are! But then people say to me, "Oh, you're really dreadful, how would you know?". ~ Vivienne Westwood

Some people (like singularly unhelpful and clearly underqualified physical therapists, unsympathetic GPs, and that supremely irritating second cousin who ate all the stuffing at Christmas) assumed that a lack of feeling in certain body parts shouldn't affect sleep at all. Her insomnia in such situations, they said, was something she could easily overcome. Chloe liked to remind those people that the human brain tended to keep track of all body parts, and was prone to panic when one of those parts went offline. Actually, what Chloe liked to do was imagine hitting those people with a brick. ~ Talia Hibbert

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic. ~ Diane Setterfield

Lars is played by Ryan Gosling, the Prince of Tics, whose idea of acting is to wait a few beats before reacting to other people's remarks, as if acting were merely a matter of adhering to the seven-second delay rule. Jack Nicholson has made a career out of doing this sort of thing, as did Paul Newman, as did Marlon Brando (who the other two learned it from), but they didn't do it all the time and they were more fun to look at ... Lars And The Real Girl joins a number of other recent films in the category of motion pictures where the director doesn't know that his protagonist is unsympathetic. ~ Joe Queenan