Decencies Quotes & Sayings

It's nothing he can see or lay hands on - sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward ... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies ... no, no bullet with fins, Ace ... not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day ... — Thomas Pynchon

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency. — Aldous Huxley

Happy will be those who take a lesson and warning from the mistakes and misfortunes of others and seek, nevertheless, to adopt the good they offer. Wisdom, wherever he finds it, it's a believer's goal, because he is more worthy of it than anyone else. — Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful of the country because we always seemed so far behind style-setting New York, I now thank God for the cultural lag. Ours, after all, is the good neighbourhood. A society well worth preserving. — Mordecai Richler

The only sounds here were lazy, ponderous, gentle sounds. A bee hung low in the warm afternoon haze, and he watched it unafraid, listened to the dull electric razor sound of its wings cutting the air. Birds sang sweet and unseen, and a hundred eyes watched him from the dark. — Michael Montoure

After a long day at work, I want someone to come home, turn on my video and think, 'Oh my God, how girls get ready? This is hilarious. I love this; I'm forgetting about all my problems.' — Lilly Singh

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar! — Catherynne M Valente

Emerging from chaos,
came Light,
filling need. — E'yen A. Gardner

Obviously, everybody's favorite form of web content is more story with principal actors. But the economics of the web do not yet support. — Matt Nix

I just want to feel like home. I just want Rosabelle. My other half. Where she was day, I was night. While I was earth, she was sky. -Dreams, Smiles, and Bloody Tears — Chamera Sampson

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization. — Agnes Repplier

We are not supposed to comprehend something like this, — David Levithan

Vital to quality of life is the ability to work together, learn from each other, and help each other grow. — Stephen Covey

Humphrey finds everybody charming I never can get him to abuse Casaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybody myself. — George Eliot

Being an actor you have a lot of expenses. — Esai Morales

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I value peace when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies. — Elia Kazan

Politics are not my concern ... They impressed me as a dog's life without a dog's decencies. — Rudyard Kipling

If only you could take that final step, you'd see farther than ll the rest. You'd be alone with nothing but blue sky above you. — George R R Martin

She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother's death when he accepts Lestat's offer. Frankenstein's creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer's rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination - but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. — Glen Duncan

Those graceful acts, those thousand decencies, that daily flow from all her words and actions, mixed with love and sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned union of mind, or in us both one soul. — John Milton

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal integrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanishes into thin air: your decencies and your church-goings and your regularities and your attachment to a correct school and party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine
what is all that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come? — Frederick William Robertson

Robert? You wake me up and you charge me for it? — Dan Brown

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. — George Monbiot

Our concern for human rights comes to the fore when there are gross violations of human decencies. Then other countries, including China, must recognize that this affects the American attitude towards their country. But towards what precise institutions will it evolve? I think we ought to leave something to history. — Henry A. Kissinger

Paris, true to its promise, had been a place of civilized indecencies, or uncivil decencies ... — Ana Castillo

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever. — Alexander Pope

In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity. — Norbert Wiener

If you must commit suicide ... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of. — George Henry Borrow

I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life. — Charles Lindbergh

One who preserves all the exterior decencies of ignorance. — Samuel Foote

As a moral and social institution, a weekly rest is invaluable. It is a quiet domestic reunion for the bustling sons of toil. It ensures the necessary vacation in those earthly and turbulent anxieties and affections, which would otherwise become inordinate and morbid. It brings around a season of periodical neatness and decency, when the soil of weekly labour is laid aside, and men meet each other amidst the decencies of the sanctuary, and renew their social affections. But above all, a Sabbath (one day of rest in seven) is necessary for man's moral and religious interests. — Robert Dabney

So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics - that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world - that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind. — Helen Keller

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. — Oscar Wilde

But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me. — Jonathan Safran Foer