Taken quotes
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"Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."
"What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?"
"Since social media has become so big, body image has taken a downward spiral. Especially in surfing, because we're in bikinis all day, we're really critiqued. After a competition, social media will just be talking about who looked better in a bikini instead of who surfed better. It's not even about the results anymore, so much is body. And that's really frustrating at times."
"I'm really not for famous people who design a line for a company, when you know it's not really them creating it but a team of designers, especially when there are so many talented people who've taken the time to go and study fashion."
"It hasn't taken them long, they began by telling us they would have a positive and patriotic case and they're back to project fear within minutes. There they go again they have nothing positive to say."
"As Israel prepares to enter, my position is well known. It is one that I have taken at previous Olympics. It is wrong that the IOC refuses to have a minute's silence for Israeli athletes that were slaughtered in Munich."
"It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical."
"The man who has successfully solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds of data and symbols is a man who has no beliefs. With regard to the problems of practical life he entertains a series of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument. In other words, symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas, nor should any system be regarded as more than a provisional convenience."
"In Cuba, what we do not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; this is the real truth."
"No, thank you, I don't mind the rain,' I said. I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise."
"And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously."
"It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap."
"When you take of a man's time, you've taken a part of his life."
"Much of the present difficulty in industrial relations arises from the fact that too many employers as well as too many legislators take the Labor Leader more seriously than he deserves to be taken, while taking the ordinary, everyday, middle-of-the-road wage-earner less seriously than he deserves to be taken."
"A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too."
"I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."
"Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous."
"We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom."
"We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness."
"Oh dear me, the Booker people don't like me. I don't care. I have been given an award for being taken not seriously, and I am very, very pleased about that."
