Best Meddling Quotes & Sayings

I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart. — Sam Walton

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue. — Guy Deutscher

Stand there, damn'd meddling villain, and be silent;
For if thou utt'rest but a single word,
A cough or hem, to cross me in my speech,
I'll send thy cursed spirit from the earth,
To bellow with the damn'd! — Joanna Baillie

Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln's firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes's letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them. — Louis Menand

They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. — Herman Melville

And I get it, okay? I mean, look at him. I'd bang that drum, too. All I'm saying is, if you don't want your overprotective sister meddling in your business, find someone else to massage your lady bits."

"I'm partial to massaging my own lady bits, actually. I have no problem getting my own kinks out."

"Yes, well, more power to you then. But I, for one, am getting carpal tunnel syndrome with all the self-massaging I've been doing as of late. — Mia Sosa

Then there was Buddha meddling in, telling all of the Hindu, Hebrew, Christian and Islamic gods and demons that they were nothing more than unenlightened fear induced figments of nirvana-starved mortals. — Andrew James Pritchard

Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society's prohibition on women's magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips! — Zen Cho

Meddling with another man's folly is always thankless work. — Rudyard Kipling

It was not his nature to believe that he should engage in any kind of meddling or become actively involved in politics. His vocation lay in the fulfillment of a poetic mission, and he wanted to carry that mission out to the last detail, conscientiously and freely. In this sense he cursed "the disturbance of war," not because he overvalued his cultural role and saw his special poetic work endangered but because to him, in the final analysis, war meant the victory of barbarism, with the result that any kind of cultural work -- and therefore his, too -- could become involved in a bloody power struggle and be destroyed. — Carola Giedion-Welcker

White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. — Iris Murdoch

If love is left untainted by our promiscuous meddling, and if it is left to be all that God designed it to be, God will use it to turn pain to our profit in His pursuit of our perfection. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else. — Plato

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination. — Thrity Umrigar

Crack-brained meddling by the authorities [can] aggravate an existing crisis. — Karl Marx

Meddling is what we do. It's what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That's the way of it. — Alastair Reynolds

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results. — Will Self

The best thing about Las Vegas is that no one pretends to be responsible for your behavior like they do in the rest of the country. There's no meddling self-righteous liberals or right-wing Christian demagogues telling you that you can't do something fun with your own time and money. If you can afford it, it's yours. — Drew Carey

Advocates of Strict Father morality show such a resentment of illegitimate authority, not just toward meddling parents but toward any moral authority seen to be illegitimately meddling in their lives. The federal government is a common target. We regularly hear arguments that the federal government doesn't know what's best for people, that people know what's best for themselves, and that the government is not acting in the interests of ordinary people. Therefore, federal authority should be shifted to local governments or eliminated altogether. It — George Lakoff

It was no ill simile by which Plato set forth the unreasonableness of a philosopher's meddling with government. 'If a man,' says he, 'were to see a great company run out every day into the rain and take delight in being wet - if he knew that it would be to no purpose for him to go and persuade them to return to their houses in order to avoid the storm, and that all that could be expected by his going to speak to them would be that he himself should be as wet as they, it would be best for him to keep within doors, and, since he had not influence enough to correct other people's folly, to take care to preserve himself.' "Though, — Thomas More

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it. — Theodore Roosevelt

Have we reached the point where my intervention will not get me shouted at for being a meddling tomcat who doesn't respect the boundaries of others?" Tybalt stepped out of the shadows behind the Candela, tightening his hand around her throat. "I ask to be polite, you realize. There's no way I'm walking away. — Seanan McGuire

We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice. — Plato

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy. — George Washington

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace. — Thomas Frank

...the leader must 1) avoid getting swamped in detail; 2) not be petty; 3) not be pompous; 4) know how to select people to fit the task; 5) trust others to do a job without the leader's meddling; 6) be capable of clear decisions; 7) inspire confidence. — J. Oswald Sanders

Fine wits destroy themselves with their own plots, in meddling with great affairs of state. — John Selden

Refuting the false promises requires philosophic understanding of economic interventionism, central banking, and the deeply flawed foreign policy of meddling in the affairs of other nations. — Ron Paul

Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves onevery occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us. — George Canning

I've always admired President Chavez for standing up to imperialism and the meddling of the American government in South America. — Cindy Sheehan

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life. — Anais Nin

No wonder everyone is keen to put their feet up and let Fate look after them. It's rather like your granddad. Or a very hands-on organised person, sort of your own personal PA.
Only in my experience Fate is no such thing, and the same goes for his little brother, Destiny. Quite frankly they've made a real mess of things where I'm concerned. So from now on they can bugger off and stop meddling. I'm taking charge of my own life, and when it comes to love, Fate can mind its own bloody business. — Alexandra Potter

But if it is love, real love, then I want them to find each other. Because I believe that love is an overwhelming, all-consuming force, and when it's genuine you can't really ignore it. No matter how long it takes. It knocks down your door by force. It keeps you awake at night. It plagues your thoughts and burn your soul. If it is love, they won't need me at all. By telling my daughter that the man of her dreams loves her too, would I not be getting in the way? Meddling with fate? — Jessica Thompson

I make my way to the cave and notice a silhouette at the lip of the cavern. Kiaran. "Let me guess," I say, drawing nearer, "your sister told you where to find me."

His smile isn't visible in the darkness, but I can hear it when he speaks. "On the contrary," he says. "She told me I looked like I needed fresh air. It wasn't until I saw you that I realized she decided to engage in her second-favorite hobby."

"Subterfuge?"

"I was going to say meddling, but you're not wrong. — Elizabeth May

But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State. Most true. Seeing — Plato

Mature citizens have to sink or swim by themselves. Citizens are on their own and have to prove their responsibility and self-reliance. They have become the leaders in their own family units (or local communities). They have to, and are competent to, make their own decisions. They have to protect themselves and their families (or communities). They know what is good for them better than their government, which is distant from them. A good government does not meddle or interfere in their lives. Any governmental meddling or interfering is strongly resented. Here — George Lakoff

Saturdays are set for antique shops. Williamsburg in Brooklyn has some good ones. I get in there and start meddling around with dusty boxes and rickety, worn-in stuff. I like it when I find something with someone else's name on it. — Valerie June

Politics is the enemy of a sound economic entity, he mused. New laws, harsher tax rates, meddling . . . and now this. — Philip K. Dick