Quotes & Sayings About Bad Conditions

Writing's not precious to me. It's not a thing that requires specific environment. You know, it's my job. Just like anybody with a job, you have to do your job when you don't feel like it, regardless of how good or bad the conditions are, regardless of how good or bad you might feel on any particular day. — James Frey

Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future. — Immanuel Kant

Unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. — Robert Harris

Robert A. Bjork It is natural for people to think that learning is a matter of building up skills or knowledge in one's memory, and that forgetting is a matter of losing some of what was built up. From that perspective, learning is a good thing and forgetting is a bad thing. The relationship between learning and forgetting is not, however, so simple, and in certain important respects is quite the opposite: Conditions that produce forgetting often enable additional learning, for example, and learning or recalling some things is a contributor to the forgetting of other things. — Aaron S. Benjamin

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them - while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease. — Eckhart Tolle

In Kendall's mind, there were only three types of women: good, bad, and fallen. Being a journalist muddied my position in his moral hierarchy, but Kendall tried to ignore that inconvenience and slot me into the first group. It was cold comfort. I'd read that in a man like this, afflicted with the conditions Dr. Stone had mentioned, admiration was intertwined with hatred. So labeling a person "good" meant he would almost automatically see her as withholding approval. Any resulting feelings of stress or shame then morphed immediately into overwhelming rage. That — Claudia Rowe

As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage
but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £ 150)
overlooking 'the town'
sitting there like the Memphite lord of
all Creation
...
It is not bad
to be pissed off — Charles Olson

Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks. — Sharon Lawrence

There is a great advantage in training under unfavorable conditions. It is better to train under bad conditions, for the difference is then a tremendous relief in a race. — Emil Zatopek

Referring to the bad sun conditions in left field at the stadium: It gets late out there early. — Yogi Berra

We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. — Yuval Noah Harari

By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Like Job's three friends, we naturally conclude that good people get good stuff and bad people get bad stuff. The idea that bad people get good stuff is thickly counterintuitive; it seems terribly unfair and offends our sense of justice. Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace. ... Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no "but"; it is unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. — Preston Sprinkle

Think of yourself as being a car and passion is the fuel. The more you have the further you'll go-and without it you go nowhere! The gas stations are books, workshops, seminars, influential people and anything else that can inspire you to take action. Keep filling yourself up and you will keep moving towards your goal. Now on the other hand the fuel drainers are things like: negative people, bad diets, unfulfilling working conditions, garbage movies/music and basically anything that doesn't produce value for your life. You want to stay far away from these drainers especially if you are PurposeSearching. Chapter — Rob Howze

There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions. — Jodi Picoult

If you threw a brick at someone you would be responsible for them feeling pain, presumably,' Libby said. 'But if you do the right thing and it makes someone feel bad, isn't that their problem? Then again, how do you even know what the right thing is? Who decides?' 'It's so confusing. I am sure about Mark, but I was sure about Bob before that, and Richard before that. Maybe Mark isn't for ever, I just think he is now when I can't have him. I have to face up to this about myself. I fall in love like that.' She clicked her fingers. 'I always have. For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else. Good metaphor, huh? — Scarlett Thomas

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad. — Claire Tomalin

Bad weather friends were as undependable as fair weather friends in a crisis, the relationship in both cases being dictated by conditions of fortune instead of mutual tastes. — Dawn Powell

When God doesn't conform to our expectations, we're tempted to betray what we believe in. Like Judas, we're in it for what we can get out of it. So when God doesn't grant our wishes like a divine genie in a bottle, we are tempted to turn our back on Him.

This is what separates the boys from the men. Or maybe I should say the sheep from the goats! How do you react when God doesn't meet your expectations? If you truly accepted the invitation to follow Jesus, you'll keep going on through hurricanes, hail, and hazardous conditions. If you have simply invited Him to follow you, you'll bail out at the first sign of bad weather. — Mark Batterson

I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions. — David Foster Wallace

Whereas once it was the customer who favored the merchant by dealing with him, conditions changed until it was the merchant who favored the customer by selling to him. That is bad for business. Monopoly is bad for business. Profiteering — Henry Ford

Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don't attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don't. — Ken Robinson

I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically nothing about. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Examine the life of the best and most productive men and nations, and ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly skywards can dispense with bad weather and storms. Whether misfortune and opposition, or every kind of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, severity, greed, and violence do not belong to the favourable conditions without which a great growth even of virtue is hardly possible? — Friedrich Nietzsche

I did not care if Ella went to Princeton, if she was exceptionally pretty, if she grew up to marry a rich man, or really if she married at all - there were many incarnations of her I felt confident I could embrace, a hippie or a housewife or a career woman. But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good luck and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. Above all, I wanted my daughter to understand that many people were guided by bitterness and that it was best to avoid these individuals - their moods and behavior were a hornet's nest you had no possible reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Government does create prosperity and growth by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive; balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism - it's essential to it. — Nick Hanauer

There were always such dwellings
the abode of the cook or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment
the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations. — Alexander McCall Smith

So you see, old age is really not so bad. May you come to know the condition! — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression. — Ludwig Von Mises

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions. — Jonathan Kozol

Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless. — Thomas Malthus

Those who travel with God feel free; they feel that they have nothing to fear, that they are not subject to control, but on the contrary that everything is subject to them because everything works together for their good, whether favorable or unfavorable circumstances, good or bad. They feel that everything belongs to them because they are God's children; that nothing can limit them, because God belongs to them. They are not subject to conditions but always do what they want because what they want is to love, and that is always within their power. Nothing can separate them from the God they love; and they feel that even if they were in prison, they would be just as happy, because there is no way that any power in the world could take God away from them. — Jacques Philippe

The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts. — Mortimer Adler

Cause and effect, in the Buddhist sense, though. Any action you undertake creates a seed that will sprout when the conditions are right, creating a good or bad result."
"Do you believe in it?"
He doesn't allow even a pause. "Very much so. — Jacquie Underdown

Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it. — Peter Singer

But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn't seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of this during Einhorn's days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should ail you since you're resigned to accept all conditions. — Saul Bellow

I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. & now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts! — Helen Keller

The more there are suffering, then, the more natural their sufferings appear. Who wants to prevent the fishes in the sea from getting wet?
And the suffering themselves share this callousness towards themselves and are lacking in kindness towards themselves. It is terrible that human beings so easily put up with existing conditions, not only with the sufferings of strangers but also with their own.
All those who have thought about the bad state of things refuse to appeal to the compassion of one group of people for another. But the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope. — Bertolt Brecht

It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis. — Karl Marx

One cannot say that a major poet writes better poems than a minor; on the contrary the chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.... To qualify as major, a poet, it seems to me, must satisfy about three and a half of the following five conditions.

1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range in subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. He must be a master of verse technique.
5. In the case of all poets we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work, but [the major poet's] process of maturing continues until he dies.... — W. H. Auden

The poor, no less than the rich, stay tuned in to the Dream Machine in bad times as well as good ... By 1995, millions of the poor were left without housing, medical care; jobs, or educational opportunity; six million children-one of every four kids under 6 years of age in America-were officially poor. Mired in Third-World conditions of poverty while video-bombarded with First-World dreams, rarely has a population suffered a greater gap between socially cultivated appetites and socially available opportunities. — Charles Derber

Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means - hard as it is to believe - that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods. — Tim Harford

We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people who break them as private-life criminals. We think it automatically, one of those truths that just is to us: breaking a promise is a bad, bad thing. A promise can be as buoyant as whispered words or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure and untouchable when it should never be either of those things. If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be layered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those promises, and whether we like it or not, it ought to be something we can snatch back, that we should snatch back, if those rules are violated. — Deb Caletti

Does evil come from inside ,from the dark depths of the human soul or does it come from outside ,from the objective conditions of human life?
This question divides all people into two large groups: believers and materialists. For believers all evil and good is in man. Hence denying violence because it's directed toward the outside, is a fight with an imaginary, nonexistent evil. Violence should be directed toward ourselves, inside, in the form of repentance or asceticism.
To assert that evil is outside, that a man is evil because the conditions in which he lives are bad, that changes in these conditions would bring changes in man,to insist that man is a result of outside circumstances, is from the religious point of view the most godless and the most inhuman idea which has ever appeared in the human mind. Such an opinion degrades man to a thing, to a helpless executor of outside, mechanical, unconscious forces. — Alija Izetbegovic

My experience is that people who call themselves "The Intellectuals" understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been convinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up and become interested in some practical work which would have brought them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have looked very different to them. Bad as conditions might have seemed at first, when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken a more hopeful view of the situation. — Booker T. Washington

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. — Charles Darwin

Hard times only feel bad. In truth, they serve us so very well. They make us tougher. They connect us to our dormant potential. Yes, they make us feel uncomfortable. Yes, they create confusion within our minds and provoke fear within our hearts. But the reality of the matter is that the conditions that challenge us the most are the very conditions that lead to our greatest growth. And to our most fulfilling achievements. — Robin S. Sharma

It is easier to say that AS best describes my differences. It makes people more comfortable to have a scientific-sounding term. But actually, I feel dishonest when I say I have AS because the negative effects of my differences on my life are so slight compared to other kids who have AS or other forms of autism and truly suffer. I always feel like I'm doing the people who have these conditions a disservice when I use the medical term, because then people say, Oh, that doesn't seem so bad. What's all the fuss about? — Francisco X Stork

It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind. — Richard Wright

Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government, and earthly despotism would be the absolute perfect earthly government if the conditions were the same; namely the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual; but as a perishable, perfect man must die and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible. — Mark Twain

There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated. — Dave Eggers

I love rainy and bad-weather days because this type of weather gives me a mental advantage, especially when I'm fishing in a tournament. When the weather is inclement, most fishermen start thinking of reasons why they can't catch bass. But, because I fish so often in bad weather, I'm thinking of all the reasons I can catch bass in bad weather conditions. — Gary A. Klein

When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions. — Antonio R. Damasio

Spend your time with those who love you unconditionally, not with those who only love you under certain conditions. — Suzy Kassem

I watched 60 Minutes ... and they showed this woman, she's in every kind of..thing like that. 'This woman', they say, 'she lost her first four children
died from malnutrition
and, now, she's afraid that her new six-month-old newborn twins will suffer the same fate' ... Who's going to step in and say ... 'kick her in the cunt 'til it doesn't work', 'that woman is a sociopath! that is a sick human being!' ... How much of a sociopath do you need to be? That is the slow ritual torture-murder of children, one after another! At what point does cause-and-effect not kick in? How many bulb-headed skeletons have to go stiff in your arms?! ... 'what? this one's not working ... oh, well let's try again', one after another. At what point do you not go 'I think this is bad'? ... How many kids are you going to fuckin' kill, lady? ... If you impregnate someone under those conditions, they should abort the parents! that's sick! — Doug Stanhope

Clues. Sometimes we get involved with things that have both advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes the bad points outweigh (or outwit) the good, and we choose to ignore the negatives. Our subconscious won't let us get away with that. Remember, the mind will lie, the body cannot! * * * Getting Better by Getting It Together As we've see, your state of health depends on many constantly changing conditions. When you experience an illness or accident, it is usually because an imbalance between your inner and outer worlds has triggered a body problem. So you must work backwards: begin by looking at the body problem for clues to the cause of the imbalance, then take the steps necessary to restore your inner alignment. — Rochelle Gordon

Yet our ability to exercise free will and transcend the most extraordinary obstacles does not make the conditions of our life irrelevant. Most of us struggle and often fail to meet the biggest challenges of our lives. Even the smaller challenges - breaking a bad habit or sticking to a diet - often prove too difficult, even for those of us who are relatively privileged and comfortable in our daily lives. In fact, what is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of prison against all odds. — Michelle Alexander

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way. — Timothy Ferriss

Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. . . Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes 'good people' off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. — Philip G. Zimbardo

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense. — Charlie Munger

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country. — Faye Wattleton

Trends come like a series of ocean waves, bringing the high tide when things are good and, as conditions recede, the low tide appears. These trends come unexpectedly, unpredictably, and they have to be weathered with temperance, poise, and patience- good or bad. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

According to Rushdoony, the conditions of the Irish transport were as bad or worse than what we know of slave ships, and the condition of Irish immigrants on arrival was "far worse than that of slaves: — Julie Ingersoll

Besides Germany, the only countries that don't have speed limits are places like Nepal, where road conditions are so bad that a limit would be beside the point. In other words, it's a little crazy that this is even a topic for debate in Germany. — Sigmar Gabriel

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

Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his 'Friends of Israel' to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishing economic boom. It seems that the prosperous conditions at home divert the attention from the disastrous war in Iraq.
Greenspan is not an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able to continue implementing the 'Wolfowitz doctrine' and PNAC philosophy, destroying the 'bad Arabs' in the name of 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'ethics', and even 'women's rights'. — Gilad Atzmon

Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

One of the most remarkable of man's characteristics is his capacity for becoming used to conditions of almost any kind, whether good or bad, both in the self and in the environment, and once he has become used to such conditions they seem to him both right and natural. This capacity is a boon when it enables him to adapt himself to conditions which are desirable, but it may prove a great danger when the conditions are undesirable. When his sensory appreciation is untrustworthy, it is possible for him to become so familiar with seriously harmful conditions of misuse of himself that these malconditions will feel right and comfortable. — F. Matthias Alexander

The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don't become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don't do something about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever. On — Yuval Noah Harari

Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever. — Benjamin Graham

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And they know it - how often, under what conditions ... — Thomas Pynchon