Unwitting Quotes

Senator Ted Kennedy said with regards to MK-ULTRA that "the Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens ~ Todd A. Thies

That's what I thought" he said. "It doesn't change anything, Zinzi". He moved to kiss me, but as I tilted my head up, he pressed the mango against my lips instead. "Idiot" I said, wiping my mouth, mainly to hide my smile. "Adulterer", he grinned. "Unwitting accomplice!" "You weren't so unwitting last night. And besides polygamie is legal in Congo." "Did I call you an idiot already?" "Only as much as I deserve." This time he did kiss me. I handed over twelve bucks for the mango and tucked myself under his arm, forcing Sloth to shuffle over begrudgingly. "Are we a terrible cliché?" "Isn't everybody?" he said. ~ Lauren Beukes

Since the beginning of storytelling, he explained, Death has called on the unwitting. In one tale or another, it arrives quietly in town and takes a room at an inn, or lurks in an alleyway, or lingers in the marketplace, surreptitiously. Then just when the hero has a moment of respite from his daily affairs, Death pays him a visit. This is all well and good, allowed the Count. But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern. Hadn't it paid such a visit to Mishka? Hadn't it found him hiding behind his books, lured him out of the library, and taken his hand on a secluded spot overlooking the Neva? ~ Amor Towles

Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered. ~ Bryant McGill

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting
the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun. ~ Wendell Berry

The Spy Act strikes a right balance between preserving legitimate and benign uses of this technology, while still, at the same time, protecting unwitting consumers from the harm caused when it is misused and, of course, designed for nefarious purposes. ~ Cliff Stearns

Once again I was thunderstruck - but this time by a feeling of profound relief, for I had been redeemed from oblivion. More, the error that caused me to live as an unwitting impostor for so many years had been corrected at last. I had been made whole as a person - not again but for the very first time. ~ Daniel Quinn

Lirael almost apologized, but she held it back. She did feel sorry for Nick. It wasn't his fault he had been chosen by an ancient spirit of evil to be its avatar. She even felt sort of maternal to him. He needed to be tucked in bed and fed willow-bark tea. That thought led to the idle speculation of what he might look like if he were well. He could be quite handsome, Lirael thought, and then instantly banished the notion. He might be an unwitting enemy, but he was still an enemy. ~ Garth Nix

They mislead the unwitting masses. ~ Huang Huahua

He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting. ~ Dexter Palmer

Fathers are unwitting objects of fascination for their daughters, and the interlude of their childhood leaves a bittersweet taste: never again, for anyone else, will we be domestic demi-gods, greeted like long-awaited saviours when we come home for dinner at the end of the working day. The years go by and their joy becomes less and less palpable, until one day they fail to greet us at all. This time is past and the countdown reaches zero. We had known it would happen, we just hadn't expected it to happen so quickly ~ Antoine Laurain

Gansey thought of one hundred things that he could say to Adam about how it would be all right, how it was for the best, how Adam Parrish had been his own man before he'd met Gansey and there was no way he'd stop being his own man just by changing the roof over his head, how some days Gansey wished that he could be him, because Adam was so very real and true in a way that Gansey couldn't ever seem to be. But Gansey's words had somehow become unwitting weapons, and he didn't trust himself to not accidentally discharge them again. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought. ~ Jack London

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god ~ Ali Shariati

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene. ~ Sri Aurobindo

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

When we start raising different inconsistent truths, life may tip into bewilderment and the brain may go haywire. The confrontation between what is, not is, and maybe is, might embed an enduring showdown, harboring an intense apprehension, and bring us sometimes unwittingly to our knees ("The hidden sides of his character" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

People lift their hand to rebel against the Most High only to find that their rebellion is unwitting service in the wonderful designs of God. ~ John Piper

I have to smile, remembering myself as a very much younger man. I was still looking for a way to say -- whatever it was, if anything, I had to say.

"Although it didn't feel that way at the time, those years were a blessing, heavily disguised. Or, say, the kind of gift the enchantresses Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch bestow on the unwitting recipient. Perhaps we have to serve an apprenticeship to life before we can serve one to art. We can't begin doing our best for children until we ourselves begin growing up. ~ Lloyd Alexander

Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Among the lessons learned in my lifetime is the ease with which corruption can enter high places in the mask of friendship. Sometimes the recipient is not aware of the barbed hook under the gift; often, he who gives may not know but be the unwitting agent of a craftier mind. ~ Carlos P. Romulo

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that. ~ Anna Quindlen

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells? ~ John Masefield

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, ... it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker. ~ Yann Martel

What agony he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were moving, behind the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment tasting with the stranger.
And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own house had lost its sharpness when it lost its uncertainty, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, at that first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost within his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light, caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room into which, when he would, he might force his way to surprise and seize it; or rather he would tap upon the shutters, as he had often done when he had come there very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices; while he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing at him, as sharing with that other the knowledge of how effectively he had been tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they believed to be a mile away, but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to tap upon the ~ Marcel Proust

Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly. ~ Khaled Hosseini

It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities. It is comforting for us to think that, in totalitarian societies, where troublesome people are often psychiatrically hospitalized, the indigenous mental health professionals are themselves aware that their behavior is nakedly political and actually aimed at social control rather than the health of the person. Bus what is the possibility that American mental health workers are themselves vulnerable to what amounts to the goals of adjustment couched in notions of health, and which lead to equal - and probably equally unwitting - exercises of social control? ~ Robert Kegan

In August 1977 Canadians reacted with horror and revulsion when they learned that in the 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most eminent psychiatrists in the country had used his vulnerable patients as unwitting guinea pigs in brainwashing experiments funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.

Behind the doors of the so-called sleep room on Wards 2 South, Dr. Ewen Cameron, the director of Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute, exposed dozens of his own patients to barbaric treatments from which some never fully recovered. Operating under the belief that he could wipe brains clean of "bad behavior" and program in new behaviour, Cameron kept patients in a chemical sleep for weeks and months at a time exposing them to massive amounts of electro-shock and drugs such as LSD, and forced them to listen to tape-recorded messages repeated endlessly through headphones.

Cameron was not alone in his desire to reprogram the human brain. The U.S. intelligence establishment found in him an eager collaborator, and funded his work substantially and covertly. Eventually, after years of stonewalling by the CIA, nine of the dozens of victims were at last given a chance to claim restitution for Cameron's "treatments" by taking the powerful U.S. intelligence agency to court. ~ Anne Collins

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths - even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision - are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

The people are just the unwitting slaves of their representative governments, the best of which are like insatiable leeches that suck the lifeblood from their populations. The people then foolishly and euphorically rejoice when the body politic belches up a modest excess of their own blood for them to take back. ~ Volker G. Fremuth

Jury trials are really nothing more than poorly written stage plays. You've got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them. ~ Elizabeth L. Silver

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments. ~ Noam Chomsky

If you're going to play what-if
which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism
you have to play it both ways. If you're going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did. ~ Jefferson Bass

Bragging is often merely a ladder we build for ourselves out of words when we are afraid we are not tall enough in the eyes of the world. It is an unwitting confession to low self-esteem. ~ P. M. Forni

I've succumbed to the absolute power of the man that pulls, culls, calls my unwitting submission. And I've embraced the power of my submission to draw him in further, to have him kneeling and worshiping what he's conquered. I've known surrender and strength with him. True freedom. And a hell of a lot of orgasms. ~ Willow Madison

The right place at the right time never comes to people standing still. - CHLOE TODD, A.K.A. BABY T-REX, OLYMPIC HOPEFUL, UNWITTING IMMORTAL ~ Kresley Cole

All the arbitrary things we need to remember add up to unwitting tyranny ~ Don Norman

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance. ~ Heinrich Heine

This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all. ~ William Faulkner

The finding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it's the number one study strategy of most people - including more than 80 percent of college students in some surveys - and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning. Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn't result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. ~ Peter C. Brown

Once upon a time, mystery fans had to solve puzzles on their own; now, you not only didn't need to be the one to solve it, you didn't even need to be hanging around on the website where someone else had solved it. An Ana Lucia flashback episode in the second season showed Jack's father, Christian, visiting a blonde Australian woman. Not long after it aired, I saw someone on the Television Without Pity message boards passing along a theory they had read on a different site suggesting that this woman was Claire's mother, that Christian was her father, and that Jack and Claire were unwitting half-siblings. I hadn't connected those dots myself, but the theory immediately made sense to me. When I interviewed Cuse that summer, he mentioned Christian Shephard, and I said, "And he's Claire's father, too, right?" Cuse looked like he was about to have a heart attack. ~ Alan Sepinwall

It also makes me worry about photos of me that exist that I might not even know about. How do I appear in these unwitting photographs? Who is taking them, without my knowledge or consent, and from where? ~ Keith Murray