Contravene Quotes & Sayings

To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity. — Desmond Tutu

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds. — David Mamet

In contemporary parlance, the term Salafi has come to acquire many different connotations. It has been used to refer to some groups who consider it obligatory to take up arms against all those - non-Muslims and Muslims - who are deemed to challenge or contravene the dictates of the Islamic foundational texts, the Qur'an and the normative example of the Prophet Muhammad (the sunna). At the other end of spectrum, it refers to a politically quietist trend, typified by the Saudi religious establishment, that rejects all beliefs and practices seen as compromising the oneness of God (tawhid) while leaving politics largely to the rulling elite. But the term Salafi is also used for, and by, those who reject the authority of the medieval schools of law and insist on an unmediated access to the foundational texts as the source of all norms. — Muhammad Qasim Zaman

Middle class people, I think they realize that Romney is not for them because of his narrowness, but they want to make sure that Barack Obama is focused on them with things that will make a difference. They know he tried, but they also know that it didn't do as well as they would have liked. — Chuck Schumer

We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life. — Theodore Dreiser

Obama's immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don't think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself. — Victor Davis Hanson

Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them. — Albert Bandura

Round still, but that's fine.
Feeling good outside and in.
Maybe I'm not thin,
but skinny isn't perfect.
The perfect size is happy. — Nikki Grimes

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not ... The sensibilities of no two men are the same. Some would refuse to sell property without carefully explaining all about its merits and defects, and putting themselves in the purchasers' place and inquiring if he himself would buy under the circumstances. But such men never would be prosperous merchants. — Clarence Darrow

One seeks to contravene one's perceptions - why? So that one can wander utterly lost, without signposts or guide? — Philip K. Dick

But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one. — Primo Levi

Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed - naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians. — Helmuth James Graf Von Moltke

Primary Duty of Lesser Magistrates is Threefold: First, they are to oppose and resist any laws or edicts from the higher authority that contravene the law or Word of God. Second, they are to protect the person, liberty, and property of those who reside within their jurisdiction from any unjust or immoral actions by the higher authority. Third, they are not to implement any laws or decrees made by the higher authority that violate the Constitution, and if necessary, resist them. — Matthew J. Trewhella

Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable. — Elizabeth Edwards

When we are uncaring, when we lack compassion, when we are unforgiving, we will always pay the price for it. It is not, however, we alone who suffer. Our whole community suffers, and ultimately our whole world suffers. We are made to exist in a delicate network of interdependence. We are sisters and brothers, whether we like it or not. To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity. And those who shred the web of interconnectedness cannot escape the consequences of their actions. In — Desmond Tutu

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You say that as if pretending were a sin. We all do that kind of pretending to survive ... Some pretending is necessary and even good. We can tolerate all the pretending we need to do if we have some islands of honesty in our lives. Places where we don't lie to others. Most of all, places where we don't lie to ourselves. — Francisco X Stork

And in declaring true every theory that does not contravene the evidence of the senses, Epicurus does not blink the fact that the philosopher may arrive at more than one explanation for a given phenomenon - in some cases, even at explanations that are mutually exclusive or contradictory. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites. This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don't even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you'll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people. — Russell Brand

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war. — Tim O'Brien

If you find someone who agrees with you 80 percent of the time that is your friend not your enemy. — John Ensign

I am not a label snob and have learned that the thrill of shopping can be just as great, if not more so, when you find a bargain. — Sophie Kinsella

As for the Republicans
how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage' ... ) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

No treaty or international agreement can contravene the Constitution. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine. — Benjamin F. Wade

In our advanced technological age, most people deny the possibility of miracles ... Miracles don't happen, we are told, because they contravene the laws of nature and worse, they sound religious! Yet we live and move in a sea of miracle. — James Brown

Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. — Charlotte Bronte

Remember that the prime consideration of science is the protection and betterment of human life. I would never contravene that. — Alan Dean Foster

Thou wretched pillar of syphilitic pheasant-fuck! — Christopher Moore

You know to me, being a good actor, the most important quality is you've got to love to play, and to just be open to anything. — Peter Berg

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [ ... ] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that - this was the idea they had grown up with - they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante