Amok Quotes & Sayings

Stay out of this, Zebulon. (Dolophoni)
You guys come to my town, you don't call. You don't write. And you expect me to just let you run amok in front of the humans? Really, Deimos, don't tread here unless you want to bleed. (ZT) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He'd wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Instead of letting our emotions run amok with our minds, we can use our minds as tools that allow us to build realities that serve us better,
and we attract what we are meant to attract because we are aware and self-empowered enough to choose most of the time. — Jay Woodman

Children are our future. We cannot allow them to run amok.
-pg. 167 The Collected Sayings of the Emperor The Demon's Daughter — Emma Holly

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples ... small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep. — Hunter S. Thompson

Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for theeany better melody in the April woods at dawnthan what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awakeo'night in his comfortless attic, might perchancebe aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch? — Robert Bridges

There have been times in my life that I've had a ton of vices, and my demons have run amok for years and years and years. — Ron White

Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What's worse is that he is now running amok. — Salman Rushdie

Abortion and gay marriage are the political hot-buttons of the day. There are lot of things going wrong in the world, hate is running amok, so why just focus on these two hot-buttons and not everything else? — Robert Hood

I had always been fascinated by the whole idea that Australia was this different ecology and that when rabbits and prickly pears and other things from Europe were introduced into Australia, they ran amok. — David Gerrold

Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television. — Joko Beck

As a human being with notoriety and a big mouth, I've felt most threatened during the first Bush Administration. Whenever there's a Bush in the White House, many people die, and the rest of us are threatened. I just didn't think it would happen quite so quickly. The so-called USA Patriot Act, and the announcement of trying people in military tribunals if Bush or Rumsfeld's or Ashcroft's people think they somehow qualify as terrorists, basically, this is McCarthyism run amok. — Jello Biafra

They have no discipline. They'll still need us."
"Ha!" said Postel. "No discipline? Behold!!!! My cat has written a book! ...And she's published!" - Amok 2015 — Fred Barnett

It appears to be a case of revenge run amok. — Dianne Feinstein

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? — Thomas Sowell

I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok. — Dick Gephardt

The issue isn't gun control but state control
obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties. — George Jonas

I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable. — Bono

Las Vegas is the therapeutic ethos of our time run amok, our socio-psychological promise to ourselves to be eternally young writ large on the landscape of aging self-indulgence. — Hal Rothman

That ... that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting ... but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance. — Stefan Zweig

The visual palette suggests the creepy pastel paintings of Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams); the fantasy battles with monsters and samurais echo the muscular landscapes of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. The movie is like an arrested adolescent's Google search run amok. — Richard Corliss

The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about the power of women's sexuality run amok. — Rebecca Traister

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics. — Cornel West

The "Higher Self" camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be "one's own choice" - the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens - this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit. This is not Eros; this is Phobos - a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It) - as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma - each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All. — Ken Wilber

Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight, they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with words and calms their passion. — Virgil

I think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok. — Rand Paul

Smudge continued running laps, flames flickering like tiny orange banners on his back. He was never wrong about danger, but he couldn't tell you if that danger was a meteorite streaking toward the roof or an amorous moose running amok in the parking lot. — Jim C. Hines

There's some sort of Soothsayers' Code that prevents soothsayers from soothsaying on a day-to-day basis, when it might, you know, avert this kind of ordinary, everyday tragedy. Something about the laws of causality being broken and the order of creation overturned, resulting in a world run amok, river running backwards, the run rising in the west, cats and dogs getting married ...
I don't know; don't ask me.
I don't pretend to understand ( ... ) But I guess it didn't rise to the standard required to break the Soothsayers' Code since no sooth was said. — Jacqueline Carey

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. — Henry David Thoreau

...all intolerable local situations have become world situations, with the result that the whole world has become a local situation, here, under your nose, staring at you, and when your sensitivity is still alive and not dulled, that is, when you are young, if all you can do is stare back at it helplessly, you run amok, you blow up, you smash whatever is at hand, you express yourself, you seek a release. — Romain Gary

This so-called animisn that not so much the Fan Nannies but everybody else around here subscribes to. can we really just write it off as primitive superstition run amok? Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can't we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine in them as in some ol' anthropomorphic Sunday school Boom Daddy with imaginary long gray whiskers and a platinum bathrobe? Are we capable of entertaining the possibility that there may have been a holy entity in the cross as well as on it? — Tom Robbins

You don't run amok for long with impunity, you're bound to be struck down in the end ... — Stefan Zweig

The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correction run amok. — Allegra Goodman

Neither limits nor adversity are what ruin men. Under pressure, they handle themselves pretty well. It's the lack of limits they can't handle. That's when they run amok. So, if you really want to see what a man is made of let him think he can get away with something. — Bill Bonner

This isn't about fans, greed or money. It's about being morally right or wrong. Nobody is governing the way music gets from artists to fans. It's all running amok. — Lars Ulrich

The surveillance state has run amok. Technology that's enabled us to send selfies 24/7 - not that valuable - has also enabled us to be spied upon us 24/7. — Alexis Ohanian

...causing her eyes to bulge and her tongue to flick from behind her luscious lips, scaring away insects." - Amok 2015 — Fred Barnett

Do you want to know what General Putnam is thinking? It's this. He's thinking that he can't win the war if he doesn't keep the people on his side. He's thinking that he can't keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population - raping the women, stealing cattle, burning houses. He is determined to scare the wits out of the troops to keep them in line. And he's thinking that it doesn't matter very much who he executes to do it. So many men have died, so many mothers have wept, so many brothers and sisters have cried. He is thinking that in the long run if he executes somebody, he'll shorten the war and save more lives. It doesn't matter to him very much who he executes; one man's agony is like another's, one mother's tears are no wetter than anybody else's. And that's why he's going to have Sam shot. — James Lincoln Collier

I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this. — David Wojnarowicz

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time. — Lucia Berlin

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. — Camille Paglia

Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind — Wole Soyinka

Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others. — David Plotz

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines. — Arnold Aronson

In today's society, people use those qualities - I call them qualities - for all things. It is for self-gratification. It is for sex. It is for excitment. This kind of fervor servers it's own purpose. It doesn't obey rules. It runs amok. You see it on the news everyday, but society cannot hang it's moral and ethical values on me to survive. i do what I must in all ways, and I'm proud of it. The necessity to be myself passes all moral barriers. — Richard Ramirez

I only speak the truth. I quite despise myself for these desires that run amok. But run amok they do. I daresay for the rest of my life I will dream of being fondled by you. — Sherry Thomas

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet to run amok and tilt at all I meet. — Alexander Pope

The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily - or he thinks he acts voluntarily - he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as "fate". This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances. — Nick Joaquin

That thing in you that you think is a demon is actually a bodyguard that's run amok — Duncan Trussell

There isn't a town in the world I haven't run amok in. — Joe Strummer

I've noticed that 'news' is not what's happened. It's what's happened on camera. If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it's not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it's not news. But if it's a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded. I find myself wondering if last week's Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn't been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion. — Jeremy Clarkson

I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance. — Barack Obama

My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter. — Gary Reilly

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know. — P. J. O'Rourke

Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path. — Reed Albergotti

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, they feared unfettered democracy and believed totalitarianism was the natural consequence of mass democracy run amok. They — Kim R. Holmes

Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world. — Tom Scholz

Love of colors bewilders the eye and it fails to see right. Love of harmonies bewitches the ear, and it loses its true hearing. Love of perfumes fills the head with dizziness. Love of flavors ruins the taste. Desires unsettle the heart until the original nature runs amok. These five are enemies of true life. Yet these are what men of discernment claim to live for. They are not what I live for. If this is life, then pigeons in a cage have found happiness! — Zhuangzi

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not ... You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok. — George McGovern

After a decade of war you have this Pentagon-military apparatus run amok using resources that they shouldn't be to try to manipulate U.S. public opinion. — Michael Hastings

Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the Tea Party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The Tea Party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern. — Juan Williams

About a week earlier I had finished a book (on the Hell's Angels, scheduled this fall by Random House) and I felt that I needed about a week of total degeneration to cool out my system. To this end I went down to Big Sur and Monterery and filled my body with every variety of booze and drug available to modern man. For six or seven days I ran happily amok - spending money, sitting in baths, and futilely hunting wild boar with a .44 Magnum revolver. At one point I gave my car away to a man who paid $25 for the privilege of pushing it off a 400-foot cliff.
- to Max Scherr editor, Berkley Barb 7/20/1966 — Hunter S. Thompson

The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up. — Henry Miller

The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn't work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster - and who couldn't admit they were wrong. — Bethany McLean

We need to graduate from the ridiculous notion that greed is some kind of elixir for capitalism - it's the downfall of capitalism. Self-interest, maybe, but self-interest run amok does not serve anyone. The core value of conscious capitalism is enlightened self-interest. As Jim Cramer on CNBC says, "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered." — Patricia Aburdene

Images of African Americans as bad mothers, ineffective mothers, and matriarchs...conceal and justify the difficult conditions in which they work and raise children. But oddly enough, these same women, who are said to run amok in their own communities, are thought to be entirely competent at parenting the children of the elite-as mammies during slavery, as domestic workers during segregation, or as child care workers today. — Leith Mullings

New technologies are a good thing but we must consider how they will impact on us so that, when they become achievable, they aren't allowed to run amok. — Jonathan Trigell

This world is full of dangerous beasts - but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok - like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly decides to start sampling his contraband. Yes — Hunter S. Thompson

The solutions like freezing zygotes, fertilized eggs, of all kinds of animals and so on, or keeping them in zoos and having arboreta where we have trees, all these things have been promoted. Even getting the complete genetic code of various fishes so we can let them pass away and then we'll pull them back. That is science fiction run amok. — E. O. Wilson

Control Master Theory proposes that most psychological problems are the result of our altruistic impulses run amok. — Lewis Engel