Defining People Quotes & Sayings

Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody. — Kathleen Hanna

The collective benefits of higher education will not be asserted unless the public can be engaged in defining them. A student's future returns on his or her personal investment of time and money will seem more critical than the public benefits to be derived from ensuring that all students become people of character as well as of competence. An institution's prowess in potentially lucrative lines of scientific research will seem more essential to its mission than its participation in the development of an aesthetically engaged and broadly humane society. Unless there is public discussion that can help support the balancing of public and private priorities, colleges and universities will dance only to the private ambitions that ensure continuing high levels of enrollment and high ratings in the various surveys of satisfaction that give institutions a boost in national rankings. — Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet. — Salman Rushdie

I think the difference between being miserable and finding happiness is just a matter of perspective. If you live your life defining yourself by what other people think of you, it's a form of self-torture. — Sarah Silverman

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it. — Malcolm Bradbury

Protecting people from their bad habits - in fact, defining which habits should be considered "bad" in the first place - is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly seized. Prostitution, gambling, liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography, usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have regulated, outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often ineffective) laws. When — Charles Duhigg

One of art's defining characteristics is its relevance to people's shared experiences and also to the reveries and internal dialogues of their interior lives. — Patrick McNaughton

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street. — Brandon Stanton

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all. — Gene Wolfe

Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die. — Hanne Blank

The art of managing and leading comes down to a simple thing. Determining and facing reality about people, situations, products, and then acting decisively and quickly on that reality. Think how many times we have procrastinated, hoped it would get better. Most of the mistakes you've made have been through not being willing to face into it, straight in the mirror that reality you find, then taking action on it. That's all managing is, defining and acting. Not hoping, not waiting fro the next plan. Not rethinking it. Getting on with it. Doing it. Defining and doing it. — Jack Welch

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. — Meghan Daum

Somebody asked me a question. It was a defining question: 'What type of legacy do you want to leave?' We ask that question a lot later in life, but we need to start asking it to young people. — Marc Kielburger

Extremism certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word terrorism in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream - as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny. — Timothy Snyder

has provided me with a platform to share my passion with millions in a way I neither expected nor could have imagined in my career. I hope that it's given the millions of people that I've touched the optimism and the desire to achieve their goals through hard work, perseverance, and positive attitude. Although I'm recognized with this tremendous honor of being in the Basketball Hall of Fame, I don't look at this moment as a defining end to my relationship with the game of basketball. It's simply a continuation of something that I started a long time ago. One day you might look up and see me playing the game at 50. (laughs) Oh, don't laugh. Never say never. Because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion. Thank you very much. Looking forward to it. — Nathan Aaseng

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play. — Roy Ayers

People have defining moments, i suppose, especially when they're children. — Markus Zusak

It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters - only what people do tells us more about what they're like, — Stephen King

The world is so obsessed with defining sexuality for everyone and attaching labels to it. Any time any person openly leaves the sexual norm, their sexuality becomes, more often than not, the absolute defining characteristic of that person. It becomes the first thing people think about and often the first thing they mention. Every other part of that person all but disappears. — Dan Pearce

It's hard to say. Whenever you play with a group of people for a long time it influences the way that you play with others. They were all very defining in their own way and all affected the band in one way or another. I don't think they are so obvious in the music. The fact is that The Lawrence Arms is the culmination of a long search of trying to find people who play well as a unit. — Chris McCaughan

I grew up in a world where the majority of people were black, so that wasn't the defining quality of anyone. When you're describing someone, you don't start out with 'he's black, he's white.' — Lupita Nyong'o

Properly Defining a Project's Initiation:

Projects start going bad at inception --- the customer's inception...

The problem is that these are initiatives rather than projects. Managers often fail to include the implementation professionals in these early meetings....stays close to the intended baseline...
people are enamored with technology...accept the limited information provided by sales material as definitive and ignore the hidden complexities in the implementation. As a result, during the inception of a project, customers use buzzwords and concepts they believe they understand and make assumptions about the idea's implementation. — Todd C. Williams

I don't think the emotional quality is the defining quality of the music but it's definitely something that people have picked up on a lot — Win Butler

We need to encourage each other to do what we want and not let it totally define us. You know? The things that people think define them aren't valid either. You could see a girl who's completely covered head-to-toe and who looks like the sweetest little thing in the world, and she could be the most horrendous human being on the planet inside. — Ariana Grande

Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people. — Ibrahim Babangida

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender. — Andrew Solomon

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something. — Jay McInerney

I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And as a result there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? You're kind of nobody or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think that whole business defining yourself by anger is very problematic. And then the fact that we all kind of bend over backwards not to induce that anger becomes very often also a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don't like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, but to say "I don't like that much" and then get on with the next business. — Salman Rushdie

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people. — Ben Carson

People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it's a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property. — Michael Nesmith

How dull it is to have people defining you. — Octavia E. Butler

I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It's intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can't stop going back to it, and it's pretty much the defining experience of a human being. — Sebastian Faulks

What's the third metric beyond money and power? I think it's a combination of wellbeing and wisdom. Because the problem also with defining success just in terms of money and power means that people feel that they have to work around the clock, burn out, and the result is people making terrible decisions. — Arianna Huffington

There seemed to be something in him that made him different from most of the people he encountered in the office or in the train or in the park or at the houses of others. He could not succeed in defining what this difference was, and he simultaneously despised and congratulated himself for having it. He would sincerely have liked to be rid of it, but at the same time was pretty sure it was the best thing about him. — Robert Aickman

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining. — Chuck Klosterman

There's so many things that people do on a daily basis that they do as a way of defining who they are. But really, what defines who you are is when circumstances push you to the edge. — Aisha Hinds

Boundaries were necessary for a successful relationship. Most relationships aborted in the boundary-defining stage. Not because people demanded what they needed. But because they didn't, then got resentful about it — Karen Marie Moning

First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. — Sheena Iyengar

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature. — Marcus Rediker

Nine times out of ten, failure is resorting to Plan B when Plan A gets too risky, too costly, or too difficult. That's why most people are living their Plan B. They didn't burn the ships. Plan A people don't have a Plan B...

There are moments in life when we need to burn the ships to our past. We do so by making a defining decision that will eliminate the possibility of sailing back to the old world we left behind. You burn the ships named Past Failure and Past Success. You burn the ship named Bad Habit. You burn the ship named Regret. You burn the ship named Guilt. You burn the ship named My Old Way of Life. — Mark Batterson

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. — Ann Patchett

Instead of setting goals, seek defining moments. Those are the real tests, because you have to be willing to fail in a pressure situation in front of other people. — Hugh Jackman

'Santa Monica' was a big song, and I always knew it would be radio friendly. But it's not a defining song for me, though for a lot of people it is. — Art Alexakis

Are people the best judges of their own happiness, or outsiders? In defining happiness, should we think of entire lives or of shorter periods such as moments, days, or years? And to what extent are virtue and happiness linked? — Sissela Bok

The defining line from Frank Herbert's Dune argues that the mystery of life "is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced." My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It's a fantasy for people who want to solve life's mysteries without having to do the work. — Chuck Klosterman

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization. — Charles Eisenstein

I have worked in the homes of many successful people and have seen firsthand that everyone fails in life, but failure can be a gift if you don't give up and are willing to learn, improve, and grow because of it. You see, failure often serves as a defining moment, a crossroads on the journey of your life. It gives you a test designed to measure your courage, perseverance, commitment, and a dedication. Are you a pretender who gives up after a little adversity or a contender who keeps getting up after getting knocked down? — Jon Gordon

Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life. — Ivan Turgenev

Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life. — David Korten

Mads has a terrifying subtlety and as the episodes go on, you start seeing the way a person can command other people by doing practically nothing and terrifying the sh*t out of you. He is the most astonishingly subtle performer with the most incredibly keen sense of what his face can do and how his words can form. He has a mission. Nothing is by chance. I truly believe as long as we have success in seasons that Mads will become the defining face of Hannibal Lecter. — David Slade

All political parties, organizations, and all people should abide by the constitution and laws without any exception. They must all act in accordance with the constitution and laws. I see that as a defining feature of modern political system development. — Wen Jiabao

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read. — David McCullough

One of the defining things about my career on camera is I like to play different characters. That gets difficult to do. People don't trust you to do something different. In animation, it's all about trust and how far can you go away from yourself. It's a really marvelous environment that's extremely creative. — Diedrich Bader

All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with whom he believed the asylum to be infested. His books, and his work on the words he found in them, were about to become the defining feature of his newly chosen life. — Simon Winchester

We are condemned to be free people, liberated people who must make life-defining decisions. Freedom requires choices and all choices entail value decisions. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Before the Wright brothers flew, flying was fantasy. Before the civil rights movement, people getting along together and the races being equal was a fantasy. Things change because we imagine a different world, a world that is not. And I think that imagination is one of the most important and defining aspects of human existence: our ability to imagine a world that is not. — Brandon Sanderson

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist - probably to be found working in universities - who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale. — C.A.R. Hoare

Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes. — Warren Ellis

Speaker John Boehner complained that Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military into combat in Libya without clearly defining the mission to the American people and Congress. See, apparently, you're only allowed to do that when invading Iraq. — Jay Leno

Marriage is also a social statement, preeminently describing and defining a person's relationship and place in society. Marital status, along with what we do for a living, is often one of the first pieces of information we give to others about ourselves. It's so important, in fact, that most married people wear a symbol of their marriage on their hand. — Evan Wolfson

More and more people are defining themselves not by what they are about, but by what they are against, what they are overcoming, the thing that is wrong with them. — Chuck Palahniuk

People are realizing that being gay is just as defining as the color of our skin and it's not a choice. I'm really encouraged. I think in my lifetime we will achieve equality. I'm honored to be a part of it. — Leslie Jordan

My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. — Jim Butcher

It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman - and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze - as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter - one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process - sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock - demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution. — Gloria Steinem

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

Everyone has their own insecurities, regardless of how you look or how people perceive you, but sometimes people give their insecurities too much power. Defining beauty is simply a matter of opinion. For me, real beauty has very little to do with the structure of someone's face or body. — Devon Aoki

From Obama's book, "The Audacity of Hope:" "I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex - nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount." — Barack Obama

Does the Bible ever say anywhere from Genesis to Revelation, 'My house shall be called a house of preaching'? Does it ever say, 'My house shall be called a house of music'? Of course not. The Bible does say, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations'. Preaching, music, the reading of the Word - these things are fine; I believe in and practice all of them. But they must never override prayer as the defining mark of God's dwelling. the honest truth is that I have seen God do more in people's lives during ten minutes of real prayer than in ten of my sermons. — Jim Cymbala

Whenever you have a proclamation of being chosen, it's always a self-defining process. It's always the people who are chosen who say they are chosen. They never say that about the other. If you're going to say, "I'm chosen," it loads you with a very heavy burden. — Anne Provoost

People who know me would say they get a kick out of the fact that I'm always playing nice people, not that I'm not a nice person, but it's not a defining element. — Elizabeth Reaser

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people. — Robert Benchley

Every indication is that the Sudanese government will be defining it as an Arab, Muslim country. But there are also a lot of Christians and a lot of people, like the Nuba, who are not Arab. And that is why it is going to be problematic that Sudan will be defined in this way. — Rebecca Hamilton

This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times. — Cheryl Strayed

A lot of people are focused on climate change as a defining challenge of our time. A lot of people think it is a non-problem, at least in the United States. — Cass Sunstein

Nostalgia washes over me with tons of memors and lifetime rolled on this land. Every oblivious memory from the childhood wraps open in the fragrance of these busy roads and familiar land, long signals, irritating traffic,honking cars,rushing people,excessive pollution defining Delhi at its best. — Parul Wadhwa

In fashion, general people will look to the piece itself. [Some designers] concentrate on, 'How can I make this seam look special?' or 'What am I going to do with that button so it looks interesting?' I am not interested in that. At the moment, I am more interested in the shape and the form. I have a big desire to make clothes without defining them. — Raf Simons

When you travel by road in the west you travel with a cohort of dust which streams up from your tyres and rolls away in a disintegrating funnel, defining the currents of air your vehicle sets in motion ... And the heat is unthinkable, no matter how widely the windows are open, and the sweat streams off your body and into your socks, and if there are a number of people in the car their body stenches mingle disagreeably — Kenneth Cook

The defining problem of contemporary television is trust: Can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society? — Jeremy Paxman

The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they've gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and "race" are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown. — Bill Nye

I think TARP was the most defining vote since I've been in Congress. It was wrong. You don't nationalize private - it was wrong. It desensitized people to what $700 billion was, which opened the door for a $900 million stimulus, for Obamacare, for all these things. It was wrong. It broke my heart. — Louie Gohmert

It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you. — Rob Sheffield

The word 'success' - who's defining it? It's about whether or not it makes me feel good. Four billion people don't have to see or hear it. If I've enjoyed the process of creation and I'm at peace, then what happens next is just entertainment. If mass appeal were actually something, Marilyn Monroe wouldn't be dead. — Grace Slick

Different people have different ways of defining, living and maintaining relationships. Your way is not the only right way, it is merely your way. As far as right way is concerned, there isn't any. It is all about different opinions and perceptions. — Arti Honrao

And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse. — Erika Johansen

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds. — Jonathan Ive

Still on speaking terms with the Toilet Paper People, they consented to a box full of Legos that overnight manifested itself into a recording studio. I quickly remembered the power of my hands, my imagination, my will, and my conscience. These were tools I would never let myself get bored with. I would find myself in Blue Ocean Strategy and in other defining ways. — Cherry Tigris

In his latest book Marc Ellis asks the defining question for Jewish life today: 'Can injustice, represented by Jewish domination of Jerusalem, be at the heart of the covenant?' Ellis's answer is that the covenant of Israel with God has been shattered by the creation of a state at the expense of Palestinian life in the land. It can only be renewed by a new ethic and practice of justice that reconcile these two people, who have become irrevocably linked together in the land, either for good or for ill. — Rosemary Radford Ruether

You don't need to worry about defining the roles in a way that you will live with for the rest of your life - just consider the week and write down the areas you see yourself spending time in during the next seven days. Here are two examples of the way people might see their various roles. 1. Individual 1. Personal Development 2. Spouse/Parent 2. Spouse 3. Manager New Products 3. Parent 4. Manager Research 4. Real Estate Salesperson 5. Manager Staff Dev. 5. Community Service 6. Manager Administration 6. Symphony Board Member 7. Chairman United Way SELECTING GOALS. The next step is to think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days. These would be recorded as goals. — Stephen R. Covey

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it. — Jon Ronson

In marketing terms, a commodity is an undifferentiated product that is just like its competitors. It isn't usually very innovative, and offers a similar set of features and price point compared to competitive products. In other words, its defining characteristic is its "sameness" compared to other similar products. When a product becomes a commodity, the price that it commands in the marketplace tends to erode. People aren't willing to pay extra for your product. They consider it and those of your competitors to be interchangeable, so no one company has an edge in sales. — Chuck Frey

What you do that makes you happy and that makes your family, the people that love you, their opinion counts more than anybody out there that is putting a category on you or defining you according to the old phantasmal. — Angelique Kidjo

It's a weird feeling when people are defining you, and you haven't even defined yourself. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Japan would live and die by the race card - defining (and demonizing) America as "white" and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior "yellow" people. — Victor Davis Hanson

Defining by a general law the expenditures on the ... school ... is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. — Karl Marx

Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. — Eckhart Tolle

Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations. — David Weinberger

Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways. — Edward Norton

What I know for sure: Often we don't even realize who we're meant to be because we're so busy trying to live out someone else's ideas. But other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny. — Oprah Winfrey

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. — George Lakoff