What Not To Say Quotes

Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say.
A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism. ~ Robert T. Pennock

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say. ~ Beryl Bainbridge

There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working ... for my own concerns. I have always had people advise me on what to say, but never on what not to say. ~ Andrew Young

I receive letters from readers who lost money thinking they bought my series. I'm protecting them and that's what trademarks are meant for. ~ Faleena Hopkins

One should be able to say anything to a close friend, he reflected, and yet part of friendship was knowing what not to say and when not to say it, ~ Lilian Jackson Braun

And when I stand
in the receiving line
like Jackie Kennedy
without the pillbox hat,
if Jackie were fat
and had taken enough Klonopin
to still an ox,
and you whisper
I think of you
every day,
don't finish with
because I've been going
to Weight Watchers
on Tuesdays and wonder
if you want to go too. ~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

One of the great skills in using any language is knowing what not to use, what not to say. There's that simplicity thing again. ~ Ron Jeffries

What is a book for if not to be read? ~ Rachel R. Smith

I don't know how these matters are supposed to go," she said finally, in the dark. "I was raised amid mountains and the Milky Way. But it seems to me that if a lady tells a gentleman she is in love with him, even if she's actually just a serf, he ought to either reciprocate the emotion or else leave the room."
"Oh? Is there not a third option? Perhaps, say, a thorough ravishment instead?"
"That is hardly gentlemanly. And I don't think you should call me Princess any longer, either. I'll be a countess, I suppose."
"No, beloved. Remember? A king."
"I'll settle for queen. ~ Shana Abe

Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature
an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control. ~ Deb Caletti

Children learn much more, far more quickly than adults. Do you know why that is? Because they're open-minded. Because they want to know and they want to learn. Adults, think they know it all. They grow up and forget so easily and instead of opening their minds and developing it they choose what to believe and what not to believe. You can't make a choice on things like that: you either believe or you don't. That's why their learning is slower. They are more cynical, they lose faith and they demend to know things that will help them get by day by day. They've no interest in the extras ... It's the extras that make life. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. ~ Dale Carnegie

They say love is blindness of heart; I say not to love is blindness. ~ Victor Hugo

I almost wish that I could replace their hideous flok dolls, as a gesture of my gratitude. Could you, perhaps, have one of the local women fashion a crude poppet out of, say, a wooden spool and some scraps of wool? Nothing fancy. Aesthetic standars for this particular collection were not high, believe me. "Ugly" and "ill-crafted" seem to be part of the key criteria. ~ Beth Fantaskey

The fact that these scientific theories have a fine track record of successful prediction and explanation speaks for itself. (Which is not to say that I don't directly discuss the work of those philosophers who would disagree.) But even if we grant this, many will argue that scientific knowledge in humans, and, indeed, reflective knowledge in general, is quite different in kind from the knowledge we see in other animals. ~ Hilary Kornblith

In marriage, we might say, we lose our independence in order to gain new freedom, so if we give ourselves to our God, our True Love, we will become more free than we can imagine. We will be free from fears, insecurity, and shame. We will be free to forgive, to love others, to face suffering in a way we could not before. ~ Timothy Keller

I have a directive not to kill anyone if I don't have to. Unfortunately, I've had to disobey that directive on numerous occasions. I don't like doing it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do." - Sam Fisher ~ David Michaels

Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't. ~ Bill Moyers

I wanted to come to Washington, D.C. and help be a transformative President. And I think history, when they look back, will say this is a fellow who knew how to make decisions, and made some tough ones, stood by them, wasn't driven by the latest opinion poll, but was driven by some core principles from which he would not deviate. ~ George W. Bush

All girls say men are the same but I'm different, I don't like calling girls hot or sexy because to me calling a girl that means you're looking something of them. So I like using the word beautiful because beautiful is a very strong word and I feel it's from the same category as love because love and beautiful come from the heart and not the eyes. ~ Anndrue Martin

You are not born racist. You are born into a racist society. And like anything else, if you can learn it, you can unlearn it. But some people choose not to unlearn it, because they're afraid they'll lose power if they share with other people. We are afraid of sharing power. That's what it's all about. ~ Jane Elliott

Don't you see?" she cried. "I cannot have been wrong that you don't have a heart."
He came toward her swiftly, grasped her wrist, and flattened her hand to his chest. Through his ribs, his heartbeats beneath her palm were fast and hard. "You are denying me this?" he said close to her brow, the depth of his voice coating her rawness. "Because it has been like this since you walked through the door of that inn four days ago. It was like this when you stood across your parlor in London refusing me. And in Edinburgh in April. And each time I have seen you for longer than I can say."
"Stop. Do not say this."
"I don't need to kiss you to feel this," he said. "You have been turning me inside out for years. ~ Katharine Ashe

I've had so much time to think down here, and I want to say that I think that the most important thing in life are thankfulness, forgiveness, and love. Mama taught me to always be thankful. And when you say thank you it makes other people feel happy. And forgiveness, because, life is too short to be cross. It's also not fun. And, last but not least, love- because when you have love in your heart, nothing and no one can take it away from you. ~ Sarah Jio

Life is too precious to be unhappy.' Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim. Suddenly ~ Kate Atkinson

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, The children are now working as if I did not exist. ~ Maria Montessori

IVY: Mom believes women don't grow more attractive with age. KAREN: Oh, I disagree, I - VIOLET: I didn't say they "don't grow more attractive," I said they get ugly. And it's not really a matter of opinion, Karen dear. You've only just started to prove it yourself. ~ Tracy Letts

There's not anything I can fix, change, make better its out to the world. I'd like to say that I like my records but it's for reasons other than enjoyment, it's more like a notch on my revolver, one more down. I am proud of my work, yes but its accomplishment to me and another year of schooling,in making records it can always be better! ~ Shelby Lynne

I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

The world is not black and white; there are lots of shades of grey. There are good things and bad things in every era, and I think it's kind of very blindfolded to say one era was wonderful, as it was wonderful, but there were a lot of bad things as well. ~ Iris Apfel

208. "Learn to distinguish what should be done and what not; The clever soul will always select his opportunity." ~ ~ Nagarjuna

Why is the public so interested in movies about the wealthy? My answer is that Shakespeare wrote about kings. That's where the action is. And it's the classic, cathartic thing. You get to indulge in a lifestyle you're not part of, a tragic error leads to a downfall, and you get to say, 'Thank God I'm not him.' ~ Nicholas Jarecki

Where did secular liberalism go wrong?

It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience - religion, ethics, and values - are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn't, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.

Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because "private" is equated with "personal" and "subjective," questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation.

…

… The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms. ~ Austin Dacey

I may say this is a deluded generation, veiled with ignorance, that tho[ugh] popery and slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; tho[ugh] I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. ~ Richard Rumbold

I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged. Now, if you please.

I don't mean to be difficult, but I can't bear to tell my story. I can't relive those memories - the touch of the Dead Hand, the smell of eel, the gulp and swallow of the swamp. How can you possibly think me innocent? Don't let my face fool you; it tells the worst lies. A girl can have the face of an angel but have a horrid sort of heart.

I know you believe you're giving me a chance - or, rather, it's the Chime Child giving me the chance. She's desperate, of course, not to hang an innocent girl again, but please believe me: Nothing in my story will absolve me of guilt. It will only prove what I've already told you, which is that I'm wicked. Can't the Chime Child take my word for it?

In any event, where does she expect me to begin? The story of a wicked girl has no true beginning. I'd have to begin with the day I was born.

If Eldric were to tell the story, he'd likely begin with himself, on the day he arrived in the Swampsea. That's where proper stories begin, don't they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?

But this isn't a proper story, and I'm telling you, I ought to be hanged. ~ Franny Billingsley

Our role models today
60 years ago would have been examples of what not to be ~ Prince Ea

In learning general relativity, and then in teaching it to classes at Berkeley and MIT, I became dissatisfied with what seemed to be the usual approach to the subject. I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student...would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that space-time is a Riemannian [curved] manifold. Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created. However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and [Quantum Field Theory]. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscuret he deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics...[My] book sets out the theory of gravitation according to what I think is its inner logic as a branch of physics, and not according to its historical development. It is certainly a historical fact that when Albert Einstein was working out general relativity, there was at hand a preexisting mathematical formalism, that of Riemannian geometry, that he could an ~ Steven Weinberg

With all respect, I'm sure that we have enough preachers in the world. Through my way of writing, I was capable of being able to say these things and yet not make a person feel as though they're being preached at. ~ Curtis Mayfield

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them. ~ Anne Carson

I think that there comes a point in the life of every young person to break away from the intimacy that they share with their parents. It is not to say that the intimacy is lost, but that it needs to change as children forge an autonomous identity and make their way into the adult world. ~ Polixeni Papapetrou

But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has appeared. If we think first of modern fictions, it can hardly be an accident that ever since Nietzsche generalized and developed the Kantian insights, literature has increasingly asserted its right to an arbitrary and private choice of fictional norms, just as historiography has become a discipline more devious and dubious because of our recognition that its methods depend to an unsuspected degree on myths and fictions. After Nietzsche it was possible to say, as Stevens did, that 'the final belief must be in a fiction.' This poet, to whom the whole question was of perpetual interest, saw that to think in this way was to postpone the End--when the fiction might be said to coincide with reality--for ever; to make of it a fiction, an imaginary moment when 'at last' the world of fact and the mundo of fiction shall be one. Such a fiction--the last section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is, appropriately, the place where Stevens gives it his fullest attention--such a fiction of the end is like infinity plus one and imaginary numbers in mathematics, something we know does not exist, but which helps us to make sense of and to move in the world. Mundo is itself such a fiction. I think Stevens, who certainly thought we have to make our sense out of whatever materials we find to hand, borrowed it from Ortega. His general doctrine of fictions he took from Vaihinge ~ Frank Kermode

Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive break ~ Hakim Bey

A few years ago I was involved with a man and when we stopped seeing each other I worried about what it meant to him. Will he remember me the way I remember him? Did I make a lasting impression on him the way he did on me? At some point I thought about that little sentence describing one woman's passion vs. a man's dalliance and seeing how well her passion served her in other ways, and I chose not to care. I don't care what he did or didn't feel. What he does or doesn't remember. I am a person and I count. It meant something to me, therefore it meant something. I will now take my passion and do what I damn well please. How extraordinary to be the passionate one. ~ Samara O'Shea

It was strange. When I had read the newspaper, I had been enraged by the revisionist educational system that had been poisoning our youth for so many years. But now that I actually had to criticize the teachers who taught us every day, I could not find anything really bad to say about any of them. ~ Ji-li Jiang

Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

I'm still of the same mind. For many years I've been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn. As time went on, I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live, and that we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. Yes, I've been ashamed ever since I have realized that we all have the plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. ~ Albert Camus

With the years and convulsions of history, the word-as reductionist as the dictionary itself-has undergone absurd metamorphoses. In some countries, they prefer the word "destabilization." Poor" countries no longer exist, just "disadvantaged" or "underprivileged" ones. We say "brainwashing" instead of "propaganda." And now we refer to revolutions in fashion, music and electronics, where ink flows but not blood. The point is profit, not truth ~ Elie Wiesel

It's one thing to protect yourself," Dad yelled at me during our very next lunch. "That I get. Have I ever told you not to defend yourself? No. But did you have to permanently maim him? I spent all that money on that on that fancy school for girls-not to mention all that money for the shrinks-and what did that get me?"
I shrugged. "A seven-figure civil suit? ~ Meg Cabot