Cull Quotes & Sayings

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? — Cormac McCarthy

We each want nothing more than to live for the moment. Nature hardwired us perpetually to follow the call of the wild, cull all the highs in life, and rejoice in life by dancing, singing, jumping, building nests, creating beauty, and playing with our young. We each find ourselves happiest when we are engaging in conduct that makes us feel alive. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We have to use every tool at our disposal and that's why we're trialing a badger cull. We need healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle. Only if we work to eradicate the reservoir of TB in our badgers, will we have the strong and prosperous dairy industry the public wishes to see. — Owen Paterson

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Humanity has overcome the food chain, and having surpassed all other predators, has now turned to a strange form of cannibalism: humanity preys upon itself. We cull our own herd. We murder our own children. This is what we call "progress". — A.E. Samaan

Let us seek truth everywhere;
let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom
or its SEED. Having Found the seed,
let us scatter it to the winds of heaven.
Where ever it may blow, it will germinate.
There is no lack in this wide universe of souls
that will form the new ground. — Romain Rolland

I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population. — Prince Philip

Is it better that we manage population growth responsibly or should we to wait for nature to cull our numbers? — Phil Harding

Difficult as his task may be, so is writing an act that is perpetually longing in its attempt to cull the surreptitious meaning of life, which is always located experiences, beyond the obvious, possible, experience that is renewed with each new writing as if it were lived for the first time is the experience that drives today's human being to live a perpetual state of tension as he stands face to face with destruction, death, torture, and solitude. — Luay Hamza Abbas

This club's no place for you, tibby," he had told her with gruff fondness. "You has to stay away from a milling cove like me, and find some rum cull to marry."
"Papa," she had begged, stammering desperately, "d-don't send me back there. Pl-please, please let me stay with you."
"Little tangle-tongue, you belong with the Maybricks. And no use to hop the twig and run back here. I'll only send you off again. — Lisa Kleypas

The only way to cull the uncommon man from the common is with his clothes off. — Paula Wall

We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From all old flower fields of the soul; And, weary seeker of the best, We come back laden from out quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read. — John Greenleaf Whittier

I Have often thought if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words. — Joseph Addison

The chief advantage which these fictions have over real life is, that their authors are at liberty, though not to invent, yet to select objects, and to cull from the mass of mankind, those individuals upon which the attention ought most to be employed; as a diamond, though it cannot be made, may be polished by art, and placed in such a situation, as to display that luster which before was buried among common stones. — Samuel Johnson

Unless the prince knows how to cull an oak or carve from ash, I'm not interested. I don't like pampered boys. — Sarah Dalton

Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dullness that they blunt the sense and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later - that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences ... — Margaret Fuller

both offer immersion in their vision without rehashing the avant-garde fetish of terrorizing the audience or the mainstream one of chaperoning it. "We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks," Foreman has said. "But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity. — Maggie Nelson

The thought was this: to write the Sibeliuses' story from start to finish. To cull their story from the thousands or millions of conversations I had with them over the century that I knew them. To turn it into a book." -Elixir — Liz Moore

It was the ultimate celestial orgasm and I felt like a cup overflowing with plenty. The pulse of God moving through me brought such intense pleasure that I felt I might burst like the ripest berry in the sun. — Linda Cull

Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they're sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter? — Charles Frazier

And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons. — Cormac McCarthy

We measure time through a mental framework trussed with two major stakes: memory and expectation. Memory is that spottiness that takes place behind the eyes: memory takes place in the cloistered theater that houses diffused still pictures. We file mental pictures that encapsulate our prior life into mental shelves for a wayward librarian to cull through and forward select recollection to the recall center whenever summoned. Expectations arise from thoughtful consideration of our future prospects in life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest. — Charles Churchill

It will take a brave person to cull the benefits system and analyse who deserves and who doesn't. — Alan Sugar

Got anything we can cull the herd with?"
Nick stared at Zane for a few seconds. "I never realized how disturbing your accent is until you use cow analogies."
"Yeah okay, say 'car'. — Abigail Roux

She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing - ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth! — Mary Charlton

Almost everyone I've ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time. — Gregory David Roberts

John Bunyan, while he had a surpassing genius, would not condescend to cull his language from the garden of flowers; but he went into the hayfield and the meadow, and plucked up his language by the roots, and spoke out in the words that the people used in their cottages. — Charles Spurgeon

Ancient Greek had no verb meaning "to read" as such: the verb they used, anagignsk, means "to know again," "to recollect." It refers to a memory procedure. Similarly, the Latin verb used for "to read" is lego, which means literally "to collect" or "to cull, pluck," referring also to a memory procedure (the re-collection or gathering up of material). — Mary Carruthers

What may appear to be the wrong way by other people's standards may indeed be the perfectly inspired path by which you will arrive at clarity of mind and a more authentic expression of yourself. — Linda Cull

The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive. — Herbert Simon

All young people believed they were immortal, and he had personal experience of the methods they used to cull themselves - base-jumping, sky-diving, hard drugs, alcohol. Over the years he'd come to see solid sense in the ways so-called savage peoples formalised their rituals of manhood; without such regulation, young men seemed compelled to invent their own, even more lethal, rites of passage. — Alison Fell

Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and, therefore, less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. — Rick Santorum

Nearly one-quarter of all orcas captured for display during the late sixties and early seventies showed signs of bullet wounds. Royal Canadian fighter pilots used to bomb orcas during practice runs, and in 1960, private fishing lodges on Vancouver Island persuaded the Canadian government to install a machine gun at Campbell River to cull the orca population. — David Kirby