Quotes & Sayings About Axes

Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness. — Robert Bly

I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis. — Deborah Smith

The centre of gravity of any cylinder is the point of bisection of the axis. — Archimedes

We are taught all this [the motion of the earth on its axis and around the sun] by the order of succession, in which those phenomena (various planetary happenings) follow each other, and by the harmony of the world, if we will only, as the saying goes, look at the matter with both eyes. — Nicolaus Copernicus

Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole. — Richard Serra

A document from the reign of King Henry VIII described one of the two actual axes used for the beheadings. The story was that the relic was displayed in the church; it gave both the church and the street their odd names. In the early 1560s refugees from Spain used it as a place of worship but by then it was in a state of disrepair. It was demolished shortly thereafter, taken down to the foundation. Another building, the one which Thomas and Belinda Russell owned today, was built in 1620 on the ruins of the ancient church. — Bill Thompson

I've been playing the CNN Drinking Game, have you ever played that? Where you do a shot every time George Bush says the word "evil"? Oh, I'm a wreck! You gotta do a double shot every time he says "evildoers". Chug the bottle for "axis of evil". Are you a president or an exorcist?! — Doug Stanhope

Thanks for everything."
"As you wish," the captain said. If axes could frown, I'm sure he would have.
"Stay sharp," Carter told him. — Rick Riordan

an Afghan archaeologist followed the Taliban through the museum, "pleading for mercy as if begging for the lives of [his] own children."14 Such pleas were meaningless to those who felt their axes swung with God's weight behind them. — Karima Bennoune

As I told you, I'm not the settlement midwife. I've not birthed one baby." "But you are an herbalist." "I suppose I am. The woods and Ma Horn have been my teachers since I was a girl." She looked away from him, embarrassed. Here she was, considering him a quack, and he was unraveling her own lack of expertise fast as a spool of thread. "I'm finding the settlers here a superstitious lot. I dinna doubt you are much the same." She sat up straighter. "What do you mean?" "Axes under the bed tae cut the pain of childbirth. Garlic charms and spells. Boiling beaver tails tae cure snakebite. No' tae mention the misuse of useful herbs." Her own face clouded. "I do none of those things." He looked doubtful. "Prove it." "How do you expect me to do that?" His steely eyes held a challenge. "Work alongside me. — Laura Frantz

You live long enough in a world spinning on its axis, you learn to spin in the same direction. — Robert Breault

Note savages, eh? They live in mountain caves and dress like wild men. They walk about in woolen petticoats, which they are not in the least modest about casting aside when they need their sword arms free. Dash me, can you even begin to imagine the sight of a horde of naked, hairy-legged creatures charging at you across a battlefield like bloody fiends out of hell - screaming and flailing those great bloody swords and axes of theirs like scythes? Not savages? — Marsha Canham

brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he'd been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn't ten. — Gillian Flynn

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. — Susan Sontag

Yeah, it's terrible really. Little fucking minions in there hacking away with their teeny individual pick axes, tearing away the lining of my uterus piece by piece, basking in glory every time I let out a little cry of pain. — Laurel Ulen Curtis

Give the wilding an axe, why not?" He pointed out Mormont's weapon, a short-hafted battle-axe with gold scrollwork inlaid on the black steel blade. "He'll give it back, I vow. Buried in the Old Bear's skull, like as not. why not give him all our axes, and our swords as well? I mislike the way the clank and rattle as we ride. We'd travel faster without them, straight to hell's door. Does it rain in hell, I wonder? Perhaps Craster would like a nice hat instead."
Jon smiled. "He wants an axe. And wine as well."
"See, the Old Bear's clever. If we get the wildling well and truly drunk, perhaps he'll only cut off an ear when he tries to slay us with that axe. I have two ears but only one head. — George R R Martin

The following passage is one of those cited by Copernicus himself in his preface to De Revolutionibus: "The Syracusan Hicetas, as Theophrastus asserts, holds the view that the heaven, sun, moon, stars, and in short all of the things on high are stationary, and that nothing in the world is in motion except the earth, which by revolving and twisting round its axis with extreme velocity produces all the same results as would be produced if the earth were stationary and the heaven in motion ... " — Marcus Tullius Cicero

In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography - in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate. — Jared Diamond

Dothraki hooves had torn the earth and trampled the rye and lentils into the ground, while arakhs and arrows had sown a terrible new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted their heads and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men moaned and prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved among them, the mercy men with their heavy axes, taking a harvest of heads from the dead and dying alike. After them would scurry a flock of small girls, pulling arrows from the corpses to fill their baskets. Last of all the dogs would come sniffing, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never far behind the khalasar. — George R R Martin

Count the day won, when the earth, turning on its axis, imposes no additional taxes — Franklin P. Adams

Awesome axes," Josh said. "Where did you - " "Your mom gave them to me," Janet said. "After I fucked her." "Why - " "Because she enjoyed it so much. — Lev Grossman

We've all but abandoned soaps in our own culture. I lost my beloved 'Guiding Light' in 2009, and 'One Life to Live' was just the latest casualty to fall beneath the programming axes. — Teresa Medeiros

We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. — Peter Watts

During those years he met his seminars,
went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,
paid insurance & taxes;
but his mind was not on it. his mind was elsewheres
in an area where the soul not talks but sings
& where foes are attacked with axes. — John Berryman

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession. — Roman Jakobson

Sometimes I think if we didn't have these problems the whole world would stop spinning on her axis, we'd all stop spinning on our axises, axes, or whatever you want to call them, and then we'd have to settle into the nasty business of finding a way to be happy. — Daniel Clausen

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction. — John Kenneth Galbraith

True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can't. Need is not quite belief. — Anne Sexton

They lift their axes and slice through Raffe's wing joints. They . . . . . his wings . . . I don't know if Raffe yells out in his pain, because all I hear is my own scream. Raffe falls. — Susan Ee

The world had a fragile liquid quality, running at the edges and spinning on previously unrevealed axes. — Scott Lynch

SATAN, n. One of the Creator's lamentable mistakes, repented in sashcloth and axes. Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back. "There is one favor that I should like to ask," said he. "Name it." "Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws." "What, wretch! you his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul - you ask for the right to make his laws?" "Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them himself." It was so ordered. — Ambrose Bierce

It means understanding that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can't liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality - the fact that along different axes, we're all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged. — Shiri Eisner

Nothing good has ever been written about the full rotation of a racecar about its roll axis. — Carroll Smith

Axes bit wood into pieces and hammers nailed it back together. Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces. — Robin Hobb

Generally speaking, I'm much more in favour of penises entering vaginas than axes entering skulls. But the world seems to accept the violence a lot easier than the sex. — George R R Martin

Master Li, how are we going to murder a man who laughs at axes?" I asked.
We are going to experiment, dear boy. Our first order of business will be to find a deranged alchemist, which should not be very difficult. China," said Master Li, "is overstocked with deranged alchemists. — Barry Hughart

Everybody favours free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground. — Heywood Broun

I could hardly see him in the darkness, but knew he wore a leather jerkin and had a sword at his side. The rest of us were in leather and mail, had helmets, and carried shields, axes, swords, or spears. Tonight we would kill. Sihtric, — Bernard Cornwell

The Completer and Wu Wang all used spears and battle-axes in order to succor their generation. The SSU-MA FA says: If one man slay another of set purpose, he himself — Sun Tzu

Emperor held court from his Iron Throne, made from the personal weapons of all those monarchs the Emperors of the past had conquered and deposed, each glazed and guarded against rust. The throne itself was over six feet tall and four feet in width; a monolithic piece of furniture, it was so heavy that it had not been moved so much as a finger-length in centuries. Anyone looking at it could only be struck by its sheer mass - and must begin calculating just how many sword blades, axes, and lance points must have gone into the making of it ... None — Mercedes Lackey

Has it ever occured to you, Master Ninefingers, that a sword is different from other weapons? Axes and maces and so forth are lethal enough, but they hang on the belt like dumb brutes. But a sword ... a sword has a voice.
Sheathed it has little to say, to be sure, but you need only put your hand on the hilt and it begins to whisper in your enemy's ear. A gentle word. A word of caution. Do you hear it?
Now, compare it to the sword half drawn. It speaks louder, does it not? It hisses a dire threat. It makes a deadly promise. Do you hear it?
Now compare it to the sword full drawn. It shouts now, does it not? It screams defiance! It bellows a challenge! Do you hear it? — Joe Abercrombie

Found a dead body when I was 12, saved the Enterprise a few times, Ran the Axis of Anarchy, broke up Penny and Leonard. Currently running the non-lethal weapons lab at Global Dynamics. — Wil Wheaton

Get rid of their mast, knock holes in the hull, then get back on board."
"You want us to sink her?" Gundar asked, and Halt shook his head.
"No. I want her badly damaged but capable of making it back to port. I want the word to go out that the strange ship with the red falcon ensign" - he gestured to Evanlyn's ensign, flying from the mast top - "is manned by dangerous, hairy maniacs with axes and is to be avoided at all costs."
"That sounds like us," Gundar said cheerfully. — John Flanagan

Logging is most dangerous if you're impatient; saws and axes, peavys and cant dogs - these tools belong in patient hands. — John Irving

Again the girls assented. The words of command having been thus explained, he set up the halberds and battle-axes in order to begin the drill. Then, to the sound of drums, he gave the order "Right turn." But the girls only burst out laughing. Sun Tzu said: "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame. — Sun Tzu

There is no tomorrow. There is only a planet turning on its axis, and a creature given to optimistic fancies. — Robert Breault

You are axes, in a world of wood. And the wood remembers when it has been cut, even if the axe forgets. — John Amaechi

Okay, our next stop is the hardware store." Marin's lips curved into a hint of a smile. "Yippee. Axes, duct tape, lamp oil, and a shovel, here we come." "It's disturbing how quickly you came up with that shopping list." And that made her grin outright. ~*~ — Kate Baray

Crete was heavily fortified, but Nicephorus brushed aside the waiting Arab army by sending in his marines - terrifying Norse warriors whose terrible double-bladed axes could smash through armor and bone alike. — Lars Brownworth

Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not. One reason that people confuse the two concepts is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists debate to what degree). Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts. In other words, you can be a shy extrovert, like Barbra Streisand, who has a larger-than-life personality and paralyzing stage fright; or a non-shy introvert, like Bill Gates, who by all accounts keeps to himself but is unfazed by the opinions of others. — Susan Cain

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. — Gore Vidal

If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it? — Hans Christian Von Baeyer

I have never agreed with President Bush's argument regarding the axis of evil. Unfortunately, fundamentalists in Iran have used this as an excuse to brand us as allies of Mr. Bush. — Shirin Ebadi

We must wake up to the insane reality of our time. We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned. — Thor Heyerdahl

Well, well, the world must turn upon its axis, And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, And as the veering winds shift, shift our sails. — Lord Byron

Most people are quite dense. They like little white houses with big stained-glass churches and prefer to do their killing with looks and words behind one another's backs."
He paused.
"Welcome to my house. No secrets allowed. Here we all do our killing with guns and axes and knives. It's more bloody than what most people are accustomed to, yes, but it's far less brutal. — Ted Dekker

It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger. — Confucius

The fear came then. The shield wall is a terrible place. It is where a warrior makes his reputation, and reputation is dear to us. Reputation is honour, but to gain that honour a man must stand in the shield wall where death runs rampant. I had been in the shield wall at Cynuit and I knew the smell of death, the stink of it, the uncertainty of survival, the horror of the axes and swords and spears, and I feared it. And it was coming. — Bernard Cornwell

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. — Steven Pinker

You have business and pleasure to attend to. As an expert in both, allow me to advise you to put them aside for the next ten minutes. Why?

"Because the world is about to transform, and you will want to be able to say you saw it happen. The axes of our little universe are about to flip, and you'll want to get your magboots set. — G.S. Jennsen

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously ... But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to trumpet our own opinions, to win attention by broadcasting our laziest and cruelest judgments, to grind axes in public. It has made us feel, in some perverse sense, that we are entitled to do so. — Steve Almond

I think if you're going to do a movie about Reagan, you do it about the fact that he created the huge deficit, that he armed the Mujahideen, that he armed Saddam, that he armed Iran, that he armed two-thirds of the Axis of Evil, and that he funded terrorists in Central America. He was, in my mind, a terrible president. — Al Franken

States like (Iraq, Iran, & North Korea), and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. — George W. Bush

It doesn't do to rely on those in charge completely. That's one thing the Yanks always got right. You've done a bit of history in school, haven't you? Well, now. Imagine if the National Guard had surrendered their arms, and the Germans had invaded after all. We'd have been fighting with broom handles and axes like hairy medievals while they ran over us with tanks. Your — Sarah Hall

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying. — C.S. Lewis

Perhaps it was smartest, after all, to collar your memories and isolate them, sedating the irascible ones, banishing the grotesques, systematizing the rest; maybe coaxing a lion into a wheeled cage on occasion and pulling it eminently around town for the neighbors to see. Maybe it was best to let only the shadows of your impounded memories touch you; shadows usually being safer than their begetters, as for example axes and icicles and porcupines. — Amy Leach

Do not focus your thoughts among the confused wheels of secondary causes, as -'O if this had been, this had not followed!' Look up to the master motion of the first wheel. In building, we see hewn stones and timbers under hammers and axes, yet the house in this beauty we do not see at the present, but it is in the mind of this builder. We also see unbroken clods, furrows, and stones, but we do not see the summer lilies, roses, and the beauty of a garden. Even so we do not presently see the outcome of God's decrees with his blessed purpose. It is hard to believe when his purpose is hidden and under the ground. Providence has a thousand keys to deliver his own even when all hope is gone. Let us be faithful and care for our own part, which is to do and suffer for him, and lay Christ's part on himself and leave it there; duties are ours, events are the Lord's. — Samuel Rutherford

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. — Jane Goldman

But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there. — Eleanor Catton

Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases. — Jared Diamond

By threatening war against Iran, Iraq and North Korea in his now-famous "Axis of Evil" address, the president painted himself into a corner. Either Bush now goes to war against one of these regimes, or he will be humiliated and exposed as a bellicose bluff. — Pat Buchanan

Oil the saw, sharpen axes,
Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest-
there are hundreds-
Learn by heart the drainages between
Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe in the lukewarm water. — Gary Snyder

The centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures. — Robert Bellarmine

Soon the earth will tilt on its axis and begin to dance to the reggae beat to the accompaniment of earthquake. And who can resist the dance of the earthquake, mon? — Peter Tosh

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue! — Jean Cocteau

I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it's just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose. — Peter Jennings

What can stars do? Nothing..But sit on their axis! — Charlie Chaplin

The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immobility of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to conservate corals on the North Pole. — Immanuel Velikovsky

Finally, "industrial society," to use a genteel euphemism for capitalism, has also become an easy explanation for the environmental ills that afflict our time. But a blissful ignorance clouds the fact that several centuries ago, much of England's forest land, including Robin Hood's legendary haunts, was deforested by the crude axes of rural proletarians to produce charcoal for a technologically simple metallurgical economy and to clear land for profitable sheep runs. This occurred long before the Industrial Revolution. — Murray Bookchin

I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart. — Djuna Barnes

After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again. — Reinhold Messner

Margaret Fuller was already a celebrity, travelling around the world. Emerson, who was the axis around which that whole community turned, just didn't like Fourier's ideas very much. He thought it was all too rigid and programmatic. He said, "Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely life." He thought it was an inhumane system - the day is scheduled too precisely. He didn't think it would work, and he was right. — Christine Jennings

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day. — Mario Van Peebles

Interviews are usually a follow-up, like a press junket or a publicity junket, or something like that, and I'm not doing any of that right now. I don't have any axes to grind. — Michael Nesmith

I don't lecture and I don't grind any axes. I just want to entertain. — Gregory Peck

Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters. — Michael Dirda

If theme parks, with their pasteboard main streets, reek of a bland, safe, homogenized, whitebread America, the Renaissance Faire is at the other end of the social spectrum, a whiff of the occult, a flash of danger and a hint of the erotic. Here, they let you throw axes. Here are more beer and bosoms than you'll find in all of Disney World. - Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times — Rachel Lee Rubin

The funny thing is, this is what everyone assumes, that anybody who talks has an axe to grind. I've been around a long time, and yes, there obviously are people who disagree with policy who talk to me, but it's less axes to grind than people who are really motivated. One of the terrible things about this Administration is that nobody wants to hear bad news. — Seymour Hersh

No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung,Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.Majestic silence. — Reginald Heber

Why do we love to grind our axes so much? How does schlepping that heavy load of medieval weaponry around affect those we encounter in our daily routines? What if it makes us more likely to provoke others?

What is so appealing about grinding our axes anyway? Why is it so difficult to stop? How would we interact with people differently if we didn't do it?

What other tools might we cultivate if most of us were willing to lay down our axes, even just for a little while? How much more energy might we have if we weren't so encumbered?

What would you do with that energy? — David Beem

I think it[3D] should be used as a new artistic form, not as a gimmick, not to impress you but the existence of an environment that you view as a theatrical dramatic experience is - you don't just have the X-Y axis, you have the Z and that makes a difference. You still have the framing, you still use lenses, so most of the cinematic rules and languages still apply but I think it's a different existence. — Ang Lee

That bit where that lad sprang backwards right across the room with them axes in his hands was impressive, though."
"Yeah."
"You didn't ought to have stuck your sword out like that, I thought."
"He's learned an important lesson."
"It won't do him much good now where he's gone. — Terry Pratchett

The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture. — Pope Paul V

us?" Hal's analytical brain was working hard. "It can't be a personal grudge. You get along with everybody. You haven't any personal enemies. It can't be political - you don't mix in politics. There are lots of revolutionaries in these Latin American countries with axes to grind, but you've never had anything to do with that sort of thing. So it must be economic." "What — Willard Price

I think that's his point," April said. "Not dumb, maybe. Just naive. I mean we come from a cynical age. Suspicious of everything. Maybe thats the advantage we have."
"Yeah our bad attitudes versus their swords and axes and giant wolves," Christopher said darkly. — Katherine Applegate

One of the things 'Minecraft' is most noted for is the freedom it gives the players to build and experiment with the tools. You start off with simple objects; axes, torches, helmets and swords. With a little time and experimentation, you move to switches, complex machines, mine carts, glass. — Rob Manuel

I've come off horses and fought in medieval battles using axes, hammers and swords as well as fists. Getting your teeth knocked out is an occupational hazard. — James Cosmo

More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Humility has such power. Apologies can disarm arguments. Contrition can defuse rage. Olive branches do more good than battle axes ever will. — Max Lucado

You think you're prepared. You think you've done everything you're supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then-whoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that'll knock your little world off its axis. Something that'll either change your life for the better, or end it forever. Chaos. — James Michael