Desirability Quotes & Sayings

And as regards industrial enterprises there is little difference, from the psychological point of view, between those conducted by the state and those conducted by large private corporations. In either case there is a government which in fact, if not in intention, is remote from those whom it controls. It is only the members of the government, whether of a state or of a large corporation, who can retain the sense of individual initiative, and there is inevitably a tendency for governments to regard those who work for them more or less as they regard their machines, that is to say merely as necessary means. The desirability of smooth co-operation constantly tends to increase the size of units, and therefore to diminish the number of those who still possess the power of initiative. — Bertrand Russell

Talent equaled desirability. Talent trumped good looks or a halfway decent personality. Talent was a personality. — Meg Howrey

Sexuality, desirability has nothing to do with body type. It has to do with how you feel from within. I was at my fattest best in 'The Dirty Picture,' and I was called the most desirable. So there you go. I am quite well-endowed, so I have no complaints. — Vidya Balan

There's a great difficulty in making
choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice
seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any *one* of the others it would not be found inferior. All equally attractive but none finally inviting. — John Barth

Pull power is essential to reach our goals. You need to see a future with such clarity and desirability that you will go through all the uncomfortable things life throws at you to attain it. A — Michael Hyatt

I shall expect your reply within a month. Surely that is time enough to ... weigh your other offers.'
She stared at him. Well. She'd underestimated Lord Prescott. Or perhaps, more accurately, she hadn't fully estimated him ...
'Thank you, Lord Prescott. It's helpful to know that your desire for me will expire by a particular date.'
'Much like the desirability of any woman. You of all people should be fully aware that a woman's bloom doesn't last forever. Nor does her ability to bear children.'
...
'Thank you for reminding me. It slipped my mind, temporarily.'
He nodded, smiling a little, acknowledging her little barb. 'Good day, Miss de Ballesteros. I am not a man without feeling, and I think I shall depart now, to recover from the decidedly ambivalent receipt of my proposal.'
She smiled a little at that.
'Good day, Lord Prescott. Perhaps I should retire, too, to preserve my bloom. — Julie Anne Long

Women's greater social desirability and beauty power afford opportunities for creating both measurable and invisible income. While the opportunities are available to almost all women and some men, they are available in abundance to the genetic celebrity ... a woman so beautiful that men do more than look and talk
they follow her. — Warren Farrell

I think a certain kind of sexism is so matter-of-fact, and has been for so long, that young women feel less valuable or second-tier if their gender and attractiveness or sexual desirability are not being commented on in the workplace. — Cris Mazza

I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society
call it communism, if you will
in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced. — Michael Burawoy

As the tall dark and handsome male star, Carey Grant always stands for male beauty and desirability, whether in a 30s screwball, a 40s film noir, or a 50s romantic comedy. He consequently turns around the orthodox gender between the one who looks and so desires, and the one who is looked at, and so is being desired. — Steven A. Cohen

Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake. — Thomas Merton

To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak. — Immanuel Wallerstein

Culture and society determined sexual desirability as what makes us important so long that it's part of our sensibility from birth.Little girls know. From around 2 or 3, the pretty ones already know how and why they get attention. And how quickly they learn to play it. Use it. And how quickly the rest of us figure out we don't have it. — Cris Mazza

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society. — Tom Stoppard

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier. — G.K. Chesterton

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. — Eric Hoffer

Socialism tends to destroy wealth. Socialism does this by draining
its vitality away. It does this by destroying the desirability of wealth
as a wholesome value. Socialism kills the chance that any community
can survive by browbeating the concept of vested ownership, on
which community survival is always dependent in the end. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions. — Max Horkheimer

It does sound too easy, doesn't it? But if a man keeps saying, "I want you," a naive girl is drawn in by the ego-trip of her own desirability. The man need not be particularly attractive in
himself. It's the girl's vulnerability which traps her. A student from a co-ed school would laugh it off unless she was truly attracted, — Emma Darcy

I think it is a combination of looks, aura, success, the energies that one gives out, the person you are and the person you feel like that makes you 'desirable.' When the outside world sees you as a man who is responsible for himself and his family, as a man who is fit and sensitive, it kind of ups your desirability. — Arjun Rampal

What's amazing to me is how many of the issues facing women in the ancient world still linger today. Take Odysseus' wife, Penelope, a brilliant, resourceful woman who ends up in a terrible situation: in her husband's absence, she is being held hostage in her own home by men who claim to be courting her. She tries to make them leave, but because she's a woman they refuse, blaming their bad behavior on her desirability. — Madeline Miller

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. — Anne Carson

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. — Toni Morrison

I never realised that the downside of getting to know a woman before I screw her is the possibility that I might not want to screw her after I know her. That a personality could have such a devastating effect on desirability. It's depressing. My whole worldview is blown to bits. — Emma Chase

An anarchist society is by definition a Free Society, but a Free Society is not necessarily Anarchist. It might fall short in several respects. Some failings might seriously limit its desirability. For instance, a Revolution carried out by men in a male-dominated society, might perpetuate sex discrimination, which would limit freedom and undermine the Revolution by leaving it possible for aggressive attitudes to be fostered. The liberal illusion that repressive forces must be tolerated which will ultimately wipe out all freedom
lest the right to dissent be imperilled
could well destroy the revolution. — Albert Meltzer

In the case of an artistic practice that performs female narcissism..., the threat lies in its making superfluous the arbiters of artistic value. Already presuming her desirability, [she] obviates the modern critical system; loving herself, she needs no confirmation of her artistic 'value — Amelia Jones

Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are. — Alana Massey

The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn't see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers. — John Lanchester

Utopia's value lies not in its relation to present practice but in its relation to a possible future. Its "practical" use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet. — Krishan Kumar

Truth - An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. — Ambrose Bierce

You can't rely on how you look to sustain you, what sustains us, what is fundamentally beautiful is compassion; for yourself and for those around you. — Lupita Nyong'o

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. — Susan Sontag

The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency. — Robert C. Solomon

Bottom dogs have to be persuaded of the desirability of inequality. — William Donaldson

Our family car was the antithesis of designs and desirability. It was like driving Hitler's moustache. — Samantha Bee

Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance. — Anatole France

And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head. — Vita Sackville-West

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion. — Friedrich Hayek

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. — Sinclair Lewis

Popularity is a mathematical formula based on desirability criteria. High schools are a classic anthropological case study, and getting people to respond in the way you want is psychology. All science. It's just not the type of science that you're used to. — Eileen Cook

The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people's heads. — Kurt Vonnegut

Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem. — Caroline Knapp

While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm's length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it's the fact that we misanthropes don't discriminate - the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow. — Adrian Barnes

TRUTH, n.: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time. — Ambrose Bierce

I would be lying if I said I'm not flattered being voted as the 'Time's' Most Desirable Man of 2012. Frankly, I have no idea how the desirability quotient is arrived at. If it is just drop dead good looks, then I have to thank God and my parents for it. — Arjun Rampal

... and left decimated. Not for myself, but for all the single women out there trying to date. I wanted to run to the top of the Empire State Building and make an announcement to all of them to let them know they are worth so much more than this. That they don't need to wrangle some warm body to sit next to them just so they aren't alone on holidays. That they should never let a magazine or dating site or matchmaker monster tell them they're in a lower bracket of desirability because of their age or weight or face or sense of humor. — Amy Schumer

EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. — Richard Stallman

Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane). — Zygmunt Bauman

Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner. — John Berger

If there is one thing in which I hold complete confidence, it is the conviction of my own desirability. — Anne Elisabeth Stengl

A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability. — Helen Fisher

I have made believe so long that now I am quite sincere in my conviction that we can see pretty much whatever we look for; which should prove the desirability of searching for amusement and profit rather than for boredom and disillusion. — Gelett Burgess

An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculation by reference to the fact that there are times when there is nobody in opposition to the bears in the foreign-exchange market so that they alone are able to determine the rate of exchange. That, of course, is not correct. Yet it must be noticed that speculation has a peculiar effect in the case of a currency whose progressive depreciation is to be expected while it is impossible to foresee when the depreciation will stop, if at all. While, in general, speculation reduces the gap between the highest and lowest prices without altering the average price-level, here, where the movement will presumably continue in the same direction, this naturally can not be the case. The effect of speculation here is to permit the fluctuation, which would otherwise proceed more uniformly, to proceed by fits and starts with the interposition of pauses. — Ludwig Von Mises

Before venturing on so large an undertaking as is involved in the task I had set myself I consulted a number of distinguished scholars as to the desirability of such a series. — James Loeb

We knew that in general the quality of treatment we received in the training class varied inversely with the desirability of the job held by the speaker. In this there was a lesson: To get the best job, you had to weather the most abuse. — Michael Lewis

Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it. — Neil Postman

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[ ... ]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. ... I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers. — Philippa Perry

You need to see a future with such clarity and desirability that you will go through all the uncomfortable things like throws at you to attain it. — Michael Hyatt

I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders. But what about the injunctions of the Koran and Hadis? The leaders cannot over-ride them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope your learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty. — Lala Lajpat Rai

Science" as a prejudice. - It follows from the laws of order of rankle that scholars, insofar as they belong to the spiritual middle class, can never catch sight of the really great problems and question marks; moreover, their courage and their eyes simply do not reach that far - and above all, their needs which led them to become scholars in the first place, their inmost assumptions and desires that things might be such and such, their fears and hopes all come to rest and are satisfied too soon. Take, for example, that pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer. What makes him "enthuse" in his way and then leads him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability - that eventual reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" about which he raves - almost nauseates the likes of us; a human race that adopted such Spencerian perspectives as its ultimate perspectives would seem to us worthy of contempt, of annihilation! — Friedrich Nietzsche

We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others. — Caroline Knapp