Bastion Quotes & Sayings

Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom. — George W. Bush

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past. — Paul Theroux

My idea was to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility. Had Napoleon had that idea he would have conquered the bloody world. I wanted Liverpool to be untouchable. My idea was to build Liverpool up and up until eventually everyone would have to submit and give in. — Bill Shankly

Yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a laboring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Slander is the first bastion of incompetency. — Steven Wood Collins

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. — Carl Sagan

When fraternities are not allowed, Communism flourishes. Young men who are inexperienced but have faith are more useful than older, experienced men without faith. The fraternity system is a bastion of American strength. — Barry Goldwater

Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves. — David Levithan

Gay marriage is the last bastion of, to me ... as a legal, ceremonial, sentimental and religious side, it's one of the last steps. Retaining your job being one of the earlier steps, like, not getting kicked out of your job because you're gay. — Gus Van Sant

A castle of defense, a bastion of might
A fort where the wise teach the young to fight
An armory of weapons, sharp as hooks
Are wrapped in leather and shelved as books — Shannon Hale

The Internet is a bastion of negativity, and we get to sit there and voice our cute, little, important opinions. — Roger Craig Smith

It wouldn't be The Bastion if some conspiracy wasn't brewing in the dark recesses of the halls of power, — Rhiannon Frater

The brewing industry is a very, very male dominated industry. It's a male bastion. — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust. — Robert Byrd

We have to talk more. I need you to know what we need to talk about. In fact, don't decide what is and isn't important to share with me, it all is - from the mundane to the shocking. If something upsets you? Tell me. Make me a part of your life in such a deep way that I don't feel separate from it. I don't ever want to feel like you're keeping things from me again, even if it's unintentional. — Kat Bastion

Tradition was the last bastion of fools. — Steven Erikson

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds that
the dorms and classrooms can't
accommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.
When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns. — Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Hey," he said, leaning back in his chair and spreading his legs wide.
"I'm more than willing to change my last name and give up my citizenship for you. I'll even walk two steps behind you in public after we're married, like a proper prince consort. But the birth control thing is going to have to be up to you, because obviously nothing can contain what these bad boys are packing."
"Did you seriously just refer to your testicles as 'bad boys'?"
"I did. It's not as if you didn't have warning, Mia. As has been previously stated - by that bastion of fine reporting, InTouch, no less - I am the world's greatest lover."
"More like the world's greatest idiot. — Meg Cabot

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney

Sentimental titles are the last bastion of scoundrels, and can add significant barf to an already barfy work. — Robert Genn

She didn't hold on. It wasn't healthy. And she was a bastion of positive mental health and good feelings. And stuff. — Maisey Yates

I never intended to become a zombie huntress; I had only intended to protest prom, high school's last bastion of patriarchal society. — G.G. Silverman

As long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself. — Ray Kurzweil

Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation. — Andrew Linzey

My eyes flickered back and forth. Sweat beaded on my forehead and I felt the fluid suffuse my palms, a bastion of warm comfort in a moment of primal terror. — Wonderwall123

In a darkening world where the shadows of violence, political expediency, materialism and junk culture grow ever longer, sport as it is practised by its good pros remains a bastion of decency, a place where virtue is rewarded and cheating exposed. — Eamon Dunphy

If the Soviet Union and its allies were allowed to continue subverting democracy with terrorism and fomenting so-called "wars of national liberation" in Central America, it wouldn't stop there: It would spread into the continent of South America and north to Mexico. Then, as I was told that Lenin once said: "Once we have Latin America, we won't have to take the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit ... — Ronald Reagan

The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that. — C.S. Harris

It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day. — Michel Houellebecq

People respond better to kindness than cruelty. Why, it's even caught on in the workplace, that bastion of self-hatred and disrespect. — Cheri Huber

Mercer opens hi mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open his mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there's a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode.
Nothing happens.
"All right," Polly Cradle says, and then, pro forma, "Bastion, you're a very naughty boy."
"Yes," Mercer says acidly. "The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone's problems. — Nick Harkaway

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges. — Reinhold Niebuhr

People ask all the time, "What are you thinking?" It's my least favorite question in the world. The last bastion of solace is my mind. It's an invasion. — Charlie Sheen

In abortion they are trying to destroy the last bastion of the image of God. — R.C. Sproul Jr.

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I'd discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend. — Nancy Barr

Austin - it's a stimulating center. In this conversation, the very first two questions were talking about my kind of wanderlust and my adventures. Some people at my time in life travel forever. I don't know whether it's the British or the Australians - whoever it is, you can kind of stagger into some sort of far-off bastion in the middle of nowhere, and you'll find someone from Britain or someone from Australia or maybe an American. — Robert Plant

Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We'll build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration. That's the bastion of money. — Adolf Hitler

Luther also said that one of our biggest problems was our own "good" works. They obscure our need for a Savior. "At the cross," said Gerhard Forde, "God has stormed the last bastion of the self, the last presumption that you were really going to do something for him." Genuine freedom awaits all who stop trusting in their own work and start trusting in Christ's work. — Tullian Tchividjian

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. — Umberto Eco

The last bastion of competitiveness is local advertising sales. There's little being spent by local advertisers on the Internet. That's where local media have leverage. — Jerry Yang

Sad to say, this Islamophilia problem does not occur only at the low-ranking level of Director of the CIA. But at least you've always got the army, haven't you? Surely that is one remaining bastion of common sense that would never bend to such cravenness. — Douglas Murray

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. — Umberto Eco

He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins. — Jon Meacham

We want to gently remind people that we don't have forever. In my work, I hear parents complain all the time that their children grow up so fast. But they don't take the time to sit down and talk to each other. The last bastion of getting together is around the table. — Leo Buscaglia

University of California students can look forward to the same authoritarian management style Secretary Napolitano brought to the Department of Homeland Security, hardly a bastion of free speech and open government. — Doug LaMalfa

North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world. — Barbara Demick

The Supreme Court has always been the last bastion of the protection of our freedoms. — Barbara Jordan

It's the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance ... all the bastion of fools. — Steven Erikson

In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals ... The familybecame a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father) ... In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man. — Kenneth Keniston

Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network. — Jonah Goldberg

Though it was mid-July, the morning was brisk, the sky a gray cotton of clouds, and Puget Sound a steely, cold blue. Most of Seattle grumbled, worn with winterish weather, impatient for the elusive summer sun. With umbrellas tucked away in the trunks of cars, sunglasses lost and separated from their original purchasers, the Pacific Northwest was a bastion of misty air and pale, complaining residents. — Courtney Kirchoff

Make no mistake about it: Law school is not a bastion of intellectual discourse. — Tucker Max

Once Lotari reached his mate's side and gently kissed her hand, the crowd began cheering and whooping for them.
Bastion the dwarf appeared beside Stitch, a handkerchief extended. "Ye blubbering hoofer. Best keep that with you tonight, I doubt this'll be the first tears you'll be a shedding."
Stitch took the cloth and dabbed at his cheeks. "Glad to see you here, Bast."
"Never miss a hoofer gathering. There's always meat and grog. Who in their right mind turns a nose up to such a fare, eh? — Jackie Castle

Sport has been called the last bastion of male domination. Unfortunately, there are others - Congress, for instance. — Mariah Nelson

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason. — Frederick C. Beiser

Fixing things around the house was the last bastion of manliness. But now, even that is getting taken away. As women become more economically independent, they are starting to fix things around the house for themselves. — Hanna Rosin

Sometimes our emotions rule us. How we handle the consequences ... defines us. — Kat Bastion

I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth. — Leila Janah

For two centuries supporters of the Electoral College have built their arguments on a series of faulty premises. The Electoral College is a gross violation of the cherished value of political equality. At the same time, it does not protect the interests of small states or racial minorities, nor does it serve as a bastion of federalism. Instead the Electoral College distorts the presidential campaign so that candidates ignore most small states - and many large ones - and pay little attention to minorities. — George C. Edwards III

If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American. — Rich Lowry

Women, he would say, are not Muses. Muses are Muses. To confuse one with the other is to mistake the Devouring Void for the Seminal Light. Earthly Women and the Muses are ancient, sworn enemies. The battlefield is the Creative Male. On the one side is the encampment of Discordia, of Diana, of Venus located in his Heart and in his Groin. On the other is the Bastion of Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania, in his Brain and in his Mind. The Muses are tolerant and understanding of border raids, skirmishes, and harassing maneuvers. Throughout the history of the Male Light, there have been few painters, few writers, who have not had a She Who Must Be Accommodated. For some it was their mothers. For many their wives, their mistresses, their girlfriends. For many it was their daughters, a favourite waitress, a stripper, a whore. To the Muses, they are all one. Mother, whore, wife, daughter, stripper, waitress, mistress, girlfriend. — Dave Sim

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese. — Neal Ascherson

I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden variety button and of lower-priced long johns for the budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen to me, I would end up an old-maid like Miss Violence, pitied and derided. This at the bottom was my fear. I wanted to be elsewhere, but I saw no way to get there. Once in a while, I found myself hoping that I would be abducted by white slavers, even though I didn't believe in them. At least it would be a change... — Margaret Atwood

Even the alternative weekly newspapers, traditionally a bastion of progressive thought and analysis, have been bought by a monopoly franchise and made a predictable shift to the right in their coverage of local news. — Bernie Sanders

Principles and inelastic rules are the last bastion of the primitive. Principles are guides which substitute for knowledge; rules are drawn up to guide those who do not know.
Primitive man has stayed with us for aeons, sustained by the pessimistic belief that, since knowledge is impossible, substitutes must always be employed instead. — Idries Shah

Your friends are at the house.'
I sit up, straight. 'Who'?
'I don't know. Weird people. The Sullivan girl, whose father got the Gosford police to pick you up.'
'Siobhan?'
'And another one who's making cups of tea for everyone, and keeping the boy who's telling Luca fart jokes away from the girl who says he's "the last bastion of patriarchal poor taste".'
'Justine, Thomas and Tara.'
And the drug fiend, Jimmy, is keeping Mia calm and the Trombal boy's rung about ten times. I don't like his manner on the phone.'
'You won't like any guy's manner on the phone. — Melina Marchetta

The Devil has a great advantage against us inasmuch as he has a strong bastion and bulwark against us in our own flesh and blood. — Martin Luther

Anyone who thinks Ryanair flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things. — Michael O'Leary

It would be really great if someone would invent a new Internet with the specific purpose of not making money off of it, but making it what it originally was, a free marketplace of ideas, and there are still aspects of the Internet that are that. Wikipedia, essentially, is still the bastion of the original ideals of the Internet. — Todd Rundgren

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. — Seth Dickinson

The U.N. is an American-based bastion of foreign spies. Russia has more spies in the U.S. than there are members of the F.B.I. — Meldrim Thomson Jr.

There aren't enough words to describe what you do to me, for me. Every day, I wake thinking about how I can make you smile, cause your laugh. I know I love you because of the things I want to learn about you, endless ways I want to touch your body, your heart. There are so many adventures I want to take you on, experiences I want to have with you - just to live in the moment with you. — Kat Bastion

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism. — John Patrick Shanley

The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session. — Shulamith Firestone

In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches. — Carl Sagan

What was it with women and pushing men's buttons?
I get that a woman wants to look attractive. News flash: you already do. We see it. But apparently to women, owning their own beauty isn't enough. They arm all the weapons in their arsenal to gain the attention of every Y chromosome within a ten-mile radius. Why do they go to all the trouble? Validation.
Meanwhile, biology dictates survival of the fittest; battles ensue, wars are fought, and somewhere amid all the carnage, a victor emerges to claim his female. All because said female just wanted to go out and feel pretty that night. — Kat Bastion

My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind. — Kate Christensen

When the Carlton Club, A Conservative Party bastion in London, was badly damaged by bombs and Churchill remarked that he was surprised that no one had been killed, a Labor Party official replied, "The devil looks after his own. — Philip Seib