Buttress Quotes & Sayings

Moreover, an archetype exists in the nation's consciousness that connects student loan debt with irresponsibility. This is a result of well-publicized accounts of loan defaults in decades past in which students took out loans with no intention of ever paying them back and simply filed for bankruptcy after graduation. This perception was sufficiently strong that in the 1970s, Congress was convinced to remove bankruptcy protections from student loans. However, according to a March 2007 paper by John A. E. Pottow of the University of Michigan, this perception had a fatal flaw: "The fatal problem is that there are no empirical data to buttress the myth that students defraud creditors any more than other debtors."1 In fact, it was shown that when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, there was a less than 1 percent bankruptcy rate among student debtors.2 Nevertheless, this misconception has been so often repeated that it is now indelibly etched in the public's mind. — Alan Collinge

When I finish something, I try and read it as if I've never read it before. Mostly I'm looking to see what the themes are, what it's About. When I revise, I'm trying to buttress those themes, highlight the things that add to them, remove the things that detract from them, and also make it look like I knew what I was doing all along. — Neil Gaiman

Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed. — Lorrie Moore

Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church. — Florence King

We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all - the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity. — William H. Willimon

It is a truly radical experience for a clergyperson to admit that their beliefs, and the faith that they have long articulated, have lost their meaning. It is more than the dark night of the soul; it is the utter abandonment of a worldview that, after thorough study, reflection, and lived experience, fails to withstand critique both intellectually and emotionally. It is a revelation that uncomfortably exposes the internal architecture of self-delusion and the social and religious constructs that buttress these imaginative ideologies. It is a journey that all members of the Clergy Project have taken, myself included. — Catherine Dunphy

A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible. — Michael Parenti

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death. — Gore Vidal

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. — Jonathan Lethem

If the constitutional treaty is rejected it will be back to square one, just at a time when we want Europe to be a more effective force for good in the world, when we need to buttress ourselves against the pressures and insecurities of globalization. — Peter Mandelson

What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift. — Terry Brooks

Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a 'child-centered' rather than a 'teacher-directed' approach to classroom instruction. Freire's rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools' most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a 'guide on the side,' not a 'sage on the stage.' — Sol Stern

Cricket was a manly game. Manly masters spoke of the 'discipline of the hard ball'. Schools preferred manly games. Games were only manly if it was possible while playing them to be killed or drowned or at the very least badly maimed. Cricket could be splendidly dangerous. Tennis was not manly, and if a boy had asked permission to spend the afternoon playing croquet he would have been instantly punished for his 'general attitude'. Athletics were admitted into the charmed lethal circle as a boy could, with a little ingenuity, get impaled during the pole-vault or be decapitated by a discus and did a manly death. Fives were thought to be rather tame until one boy ran his head into a stone buttress and got concussion and another fainted dead away from heat and fatigue. Then everybody cheered up about fives. — Arthur Marshall

After a quarter of a century of personal experience and professional observation, I have come to understand that peace of mind is the true goal of the considered life. I know now that the sum of all other possessions does not necessarily add up to peace of mind; on the other hand, I have seen this inner tranquility flourish without the material supports of property or even the buttress of physical health. Peace of mind can transform a cottage into a spacious manor hall; the want of it can make a regal residence an imprisoning shell. — Joshua L. Liebman

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And — Atul Gawande

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness. — Nancy Horan

There is nothing like a newborn baby to renew your spirit - and to buttress your resolve to make the world a better place. — Virginia Clinton Kelley

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin. — Christian Smith

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other. — Richard Flanagan

Mom and Dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while Junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry. — Marcus Sakey

Use plot to buttress a story. — Gayle Lynds

A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically. — John Shelby Spong

So which is it to be, Benedict or Wilberforce? I think it needs to be both. Realistically, in the short term, most of our energy will need to be expended on preserving confidence in our own communities. As we saw in the last chapter, there is much work to be done in transforming our own communities in ways that will buttress and nurture what we believe. But while sustaining and nurturing these beliefs must be our short-term priority, our hearts, together with our heads, must remain orientated to the welfare of the city where we have been exiled. Clearly, — Glynn Harrison

While I cannot be regarded as a pillar, I must be regarded as a buttress of the church, because I support it from outside. — William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith. — Tony Campolo

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome. — John Ruskin

Was life measured by the trouble you avoided, or by the obstacles you overcame? God had made her for trouble, equipped her for hardship. She'd do her share and then some. Most of all, she'd buttress the man who faced the dangers for all of them. He wouldn't do it alone. Not while she had blood pumping in her veins. — Regina Jennings