"It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime."
Distance quotes
Distance
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Distance
Browse quotes that often appear alongside distance — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Distance quotes (page 29 of 106)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes."
"Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant."
"... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance."
"Now, as we stand three feet apart and stare at each other, I feel the full distance that comes with spending so much time apart, a moment filled with the electricity of a first meeting and the uncertainty of strangers."
"I make sure to keep a good distance between us, just in case she decides to get happy with a knife or something."
"From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance."
"He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320"
"When you pray, you open yourself to the influence of the power which has revealed itself as love. The power gives you freedom and independence. Once touched by this power, you are no longer swayed back and forth by the countless opinions, ideas, and feelings which flow through you. You have found a center for your life that gives you a creative distance so that everything you see, hear, and feel can be tested against the source."
"Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear."
"The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one dag sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance."
"No distance can keep anxious lovers long asunder."
"Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M."
"Shoot, after you've been through freeway traffic in Houston or Dallas, there's no road in the world that can scare you. Besides, we're pretty much used to driving long distances in Texas."
"Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert."
"I think that in order to achieve progress in the study of language and human cognitive faculties in general it is necessary first to establish 'psychic distance' from the 'mental facts' to which Köhler referred, and then to explore the possibilities for developing explanatory theories... We must recognize that even the most familiar phenomena require explanation and that we have no privileged access to the underlying mechanisms, no more so than in physiology or physics."
"Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush."
"There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near."
"Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines. The Pyramid is the name I apply to the lines which, starting from the surface and edges of each object, converge from a distance and meet in a single point."
"The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays."