Quotes & Sayings About Blinkers

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human. — Isaiah Berlin

Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention
a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit? — C.S. Lewis

I need advice and opinion-honest opinion. I want to get better. Why go around with blinkers on? — Natasha Richardson

I don't like the shrug. It's an abdication of responsibility for making sure that art keeps doing the things that art should do. If you shrug, that keeps the wheels turning the way they're turning. It lets corporations turn you into selfish consumers. It lets them fit you for a new pair of blinkers. And that means that predictability keeps getting prized over experimentation and product keeps getting prized over art. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

You know when you're on a course that you know is the right one. You can't explain it, you can't define it, you don't know how you got there or what all the obstacles will be, you just know the end result will be amazing and it will be worth it.
That was the road I was on.
Full speed ahead, no blinkers or turn signals, just cruise control. — Shelly Crane

Lloyd George is a one-eyed fellow in blinkers. — Archibald Primrose

Check to make sure your brake lights and blinkers work.... — Michael J. DiPinto

Remember, you must never use your position to lord it over the heathen. Instead you must humble yourself and earn their respect though your own quiet faith and the power of the Holy Spirit. The missionary must seek nothing for himself, no seat of honor or hope of fame. Like the cabhorse in London, each of you must wear blinkers that blind you to every danger and to every snare and conceit. You must be content to suffer, to die, and to be forgotten. -Count Zinzendorf — Janet & Geoff Benge

The more we drank, the louder we became. The waitstaff didn't seem to mind, but that was probably because it was late and there was only a few others on the far side of the restaurant, and they were almost as drunk as we were. Except Shepley. He was too protective of his car to drink too much while driving, and he loved America more than his car. When she came along, he not only watched his intake, but he also followed every traffic law and used his blinkers.

Whipped. — Jamie McGuire

I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers. — Paul Klee

Nor bigots who but one way see, through blinkers of authority. — Matthew Green

Imagine driving a car that isn't working well. When you step on the gas the car sometimes lurches forward and sometimes doesn't respond. When you blow the horn it sounds blaring. The brakes sometimes slow the car, but not always. The blinkers work occasionally, the steering is erratic, and the speedometer is inaccurate.
You are engaged in a constant struggle to keep the car on the road, and it is difficult to concentrate on anything else. — Stanley Greenspan

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years. The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue, Chapman wrote. All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead. — Philip K. Chapman

The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt ... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else. — Rebecca Solnit

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. — Charles Dickens

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don't want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings. They don't want to admit that they might have minds and personalities because that would make it quite difficult for them to do what they do; so we find that within the lab communities there is a very strong resistance among the researchers to admitting that animals have minds, personalities and feelings. — Jane Goodall

Daisy!" He walked away from the tree, turning her so that she could not avoid looking at him, and used his most severe tone. "A well-behaved young lady does not attempt to dislocate her master's shoulder." She gave him a sorrowful look, and he was tempted to delude himself into thinking she understood, but just at that moment, the damned rodent scampered down the tree, and she tried to take off again. This time he was ready for her. Blinkers might be a good idea. * — Ella Quinn

I live in Selfridges because it has everything under one roof. Liberty's is great for the same reason - I'm so lazy, I hate walking from shop to shop. Powder in Crouch End always has great designer labels in, so when I walk past I have to put my blinkers on because every time I nip in I come out with too much stuff; it's dangerous. — Sheridan Smith

Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother's direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught her attention: her mother's tear-filled eyes were reflecting the on-off motion of the blinkers like a watery mirror. Kate stared transfixed at the flashing points of light that betrayed her mother's pain. The urge to tell her father how much she wanted him to be proud of her and how much he had hurt her, faded in the dark depths of her mother's eyes. — Sabrynne McLain

You are thinking about where your brain is at any time. It's very tricky but it's why women are very well suited to rule the world in the future, because of the multi-tasking they do and their ability to be moving in 15 directions at once. It's the women who behave like men, who focus in that singular way with the blinkers on, who have problems. You get a lot more done that way maybe, but you also lose the perception of who's behind you, what's going on, the 360 degrees of it, the whole picture of life that we do have as women. — Meryl Streep

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers. — Laurence Housman

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. — Rebecca Solnit

Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers. — J.L. Austin

The fractured self is not something that needs to be rectified fixed and made whole; by freeing thought of the blinkers of representation, the space of fracture, of multiplicity (as opposed to unity) becomes a powerful place and one from which the most radical ideas can emerge. — Ria Banerjee