Degree Quotes & Sayings

Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity. — Ambrose Bierce

I had a major in business, and I graduated with a business degree, but I was perhaps the worst student to graduate from that program. — William Shatner

I can discover nothing in any mere animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature has given senses to wind itself up, and guard, to a certain degree, against everything that might destroy or disorder it. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other, a professor of anthropology with a Ph.D. degree. — Ferid Murad

Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.
(Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.) — Andrew John Wiles

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. — D. A. Carson

But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it. — Ridley Scott

I was never a Certified Public Accountant ... I just had a degree in accounting. The reason I was never a Certified Public Accountant was because it would require passing a test, which I would not have been able to do. — Bob Newhart

Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life - or at least the part my work played in it - I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life. — Philip Levine

I try not to look like a university man here ... My fellow-guests think of a university degree as a disgraceful preliminary to the blood-sucking life of the bourgeoisie. A sign, moreover, that a man has to earn his own living. — Eilis Dillon

Opposition to the truth is inevitable, especially if it takes the form of a new idea, but the degree of resistance can be diminished- by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method of approach. Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth- for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth. — B.H. Liddell Hart

It's scary to make major changes, but we usually have enough courage to take the next right step. One small step and then another. That's what it takes to raise a child, to get a degree, to write a book, to do whatever it is your heart desires. — Regina Brett

All day long because it's what you've been trained to do. But if, in your heart, you believe that the pain you're feeling is real and if you believe it's connected to some underlying condition, it is unlikely that the pain or the spirit will leave. Demons are more sensitive to what you think than what you say. Your belief in the legitimacy of the symptoms plays into the agenda of the evil spirit and what you believe can allow it to remain there. What we believe about the afflicting spirit can either empower it or remove its power over us. The degree to which any spirit can influence us is determined by how much we believe what it says. — Praying Medic

I have studied Murad Saeed's case myself, He have not submitted any fake degree. Its a conspiracy against him. If he had any fears, if he was guilty he wouldn't have went to court. — Imran Khan

I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson. — William Monahan

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past. — George Crumb

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: it teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it to one degree or another.
(Harry Dresden's internal monologue in White Knight) — Jim Butcher

I have toured with Klemens Marktl, playing his original compositions and arrangements. He is a wonderful drummer, a writer possessing a high degree of creativity, and an assured band leader. — Joe Locke

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees. — Mark Gevisser

Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights. — Polybius

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, "the wrath of God," "the day of wrath," etc ... — Ambrose Bierce

We human beings are born in ego, live in ego, are brought up in ego and will die in ego. We need a certain degree 0f vision when we live in this world for achieving and attaining our goals in life. — Mata Amritanandamayi

To one degree or another, I have been happy most of my life, in part because the world has infinite charms if you wish to see them. - Addison Goodheart pg. 119 — Dean Koontz

I came out of my professional athlete career with a 450 credit score, no money in the bank to show for it, but I had an Ivy League degree. So I put that Dartmouth degree to good use and got a job on Wall Street. I hated it but used the time to make connections and become financially literate. — Brian J. White

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I think any film that asks its audience a degree of tolerance and acceptance of those less fortunate than themselves isn't a bad thing from whatever culture you're in or from whatever part of any political spectrum. — Hugh Bonneville

A free society depends upon a high degree of mutual trust. The public will not give that trust to officials who are not seen to be impartially dedicated to the general public interest, nor will they give trust to those high in government who violate the rule of law they ask citizens to obey at the expense of self-interest, or to those who present government as the place where one feathers his own nest, [or] exchanges favors with friends and former associates. — Archibald Cox

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil. — Ruby Wax

It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay). — Stewart Brand

Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have. — Jeffrey R. Anderson

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan. — Maxine Kumin

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The poor man is incapacitated from showing the virtue of generosity to anyone, though he may possess it in the highest degree; and gratitude that consists of disposition only is a dead thing, just as faith without works is dead. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

meaning indifferent to the distinction between things. It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As — Robert Macfarlane

The discovery of a completely unknown manuscript at a period in which historical science is carried to such a high degree appeared almost miraculous. We hastened, therefore, to obtain permission to print it, with the view of presenting ourselves someday with the pack of others at the doors of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, if we should not succeed - a very probable thing, by the by - in gaining admission to the Academie Francaise with our own proper pack. This permission, we feel bound to say, was graciously granted; which compels us here to give a public contradiction to the slanderers who pretend that we live under a government but moderately indulgent to men of letters. — Alexandre Dumas

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile. — Glen Duncan

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields — Bjarne Stroustrup

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value. — Allan G. Johnson

We live in a country where we're supposed to have freedom of the press and religious freedom, but I think to some degree, there's a sense of fear in America today, that if you say the wrong thing, what some people will consider what is wrong, if you step out of line, if you dissent, whether you be an entertainer, that somehow and some way this government or the forces to be will come down on you. — John Lewis

The degree of a nation's civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. — Charles Darwin

All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life. — Henry Giroux

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write — Pamela Glass Kelly

Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than any other kinds of affection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. — David Hume

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. — Sarah Manguso

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is. — David McCullough

We all like motorcycles to some degree. — Bob Dylan

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness. — Nigella Lawson

In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices. — Hector Berlioz

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. — Sherman Alexie

Acting is a lifelong love affair, and I am passionate and respect my craft to the utmost degree, which gives me the strength to move on from adversity in my work. — Sebastian Roche

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built. — Niklaus Wirth

All unemployment compensation should be tied to a job training requirement. Now the fact is, 99 weeks is an associate degree. — Newt Gingrich

There are grander and more sublime landscapes - to me. There are more compelling cultures. But what appeals to me about central Montana is that the combination of landscape and lifestyle is the most compelling I've seen on this earth. Small mountain ranges and open prairie, and different weather, different light, all within a 360-degree view. — Sam Abell

My Master of Arts degree means nothing at all to these monkeys and I have come to share their indifference. — Charles Portis

How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying. — Kim Gordon

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use. — Hugh Hammond Bennett

I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic. — Kevin Spacey

There are many paths to enlightenment. Some of us who have expanded to a degree of illumination have thereafter preached the dogmatic certainty of one particular path. But enlightenment doesn't care how you get there. And if you aren't going to be thinking about it in paradise, then don't worry about it now. — Thaddeus Golas

All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions. — Thomas Paine

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise. — Ayn Rand

The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree that they are not even considered victims. They are not even considered at all. They are nothing. They don't count; they don't matter; they're commodities like TV sets and cell phones. We have actually turned animals into inanimate objects - sandwiches and shoes. — Gary Yourofsky

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. — Terence McKenna

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. — Herman Melville

And I, a self-saboteur of the first degree, did it anyway. — M. Pierce

An educated person would know that holding a degree will not make you entitled to a better job nor a better salary than someone who has no degree. — J.B.

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence ... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem. — Robert Motherwell

The degree of complications and unhappiness in a person's life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is. and being grateful it isn't worse, while trying to make it better. — Robert Ringer

Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernobyl Diaries.' — Oren Peli

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a ... turkey ... in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

He would enter silently and wake Magdalyn roughly. He loved Magdalyn's scream. He would beat her savagely and acuse her of plotting against him.
If she begged and swore it wasn't true like most frightened women would, he'd throw her off the balcony. If she cursed him, he would bang her, matching her defiance with an equal degree of brutality, and she would live another day. Before he left, he would hold her tenderly in his arms and whisper that he was sorry, that he loved her. Decent women always wanted to see something good in him. He shivered in anticipation. — Brent Weeks

It takes a lot of strength to hold onto and care for the things we love, so why is it that god seems to have made humans unable to conjure up that degree of power and love? — Ai Yazawa

Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You're not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest. — Shannon L. Alder

I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you've lost your deposit. It's best if you don't say it. — John Hurt

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on. — Thomas Piketty

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. — Isaiah Berlin

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm ... But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity. — James Madison

The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners. — D. Elton Trueblood

I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest. — Charlotte Bronte

Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.
He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.
Extradition job with one caveat: kill the extraditee. — James Ellroy

The strength of any weakness within us is the degree to which it is feared. — Guy Finley

Money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind, and couldn't care less who brought you up or in what circumstances. — Felix Dennis

Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can't help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously. — Paul Allen

Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure. — Amanda Palmer

So I try not to do press and if you can keep the balance of keeping a certain degree of anonymity and do interesting work then you can hope for a degree of career longevity. — Charlie Hunnam

I'm fearless, to a degree. — Laura Bell Bundy

I am increasingly unimpressed by works of art that require a college degree to understand. I think that art should be for everyone. And people should be moved by it. — Patrick DeWitt

That day -- Monday, 25 February 1980 -- unfolded, in the context of British politics, much like any other day. Government, in those days, happened rather like a tree falling in a forest when there was no one there to witness it. For those among the Great British Public who wanted to believe that something was happening, the assumption was that something was indeed most probably happening, while for those who still needed to see it, or hear it, to believe it, there remained a high degree of doubt that anything was happening at all. — Graham McCann

There's a certain degree of speculation that goes into valuations. In so far as the market supports a valuation, everyone who gets a great one deserves it, but they should also be cautious because that speculation is temporary. I saw Yahoo go from $100 billion to $10 billion. It's not a long-term measure. — Brian Acton

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler. — Georges Bernanos

If you have fairy blood, even in the tiniest degree, you must live close to Fairy Land, and eat a little fairy food, or else you will always be hungry. — Robert Moss

Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. — Mitt Romney

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, - and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In — Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration. — Bob Black

Polybius foresaw Rome's decadence. "All things are subject to decay and change," he wrote. "When a state, after having passed with safety through many and great dangers, arrives at the highest degree of power, and possesses an entire and undisputed sovereignty, it is manifest that the long continuance of prosperity must give birth to costly and luxurious manners, and that the minds of men will be heated with ambitious contests, and become too eager and aspiring in the pursuit of dignities. And as those evils are continually increased, the desire of power and rule, and the imagined ignominy of remaining in a subject state, will first begin to work the ruin of the republic; arrogance and luxury will afterwards advance it; and in the end the change will be completed by the people; when the avarice of some is found to injure and oppress them, and the ambition of others swells their vanity, and poisons them with flattering hopes. — Anonymous

Being a homicide detective ca be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over the grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there's only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it's the office who is left with the investigation. — Stieg Larsson