Disavow Quotes & Sayings

You can scream you're Indian, you can disavow your religion, you can even be the next incarnation of Krishna for all your Hindu countrymen will care. Their HRM will pull down your pants and check your foreskin and slaughter you just the same. — Manil Suri

Regrets are particularly poignant for the old, those of us who have used up most of the chances we'll ever get and are left to make peace with our failed choices. Most things distance themselves with space and time to eventually slide off the edge of our consciousness, but not regrets. You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return. And the longer you deny them, the more they punish you when they can no longer be held at bay. — Lionel Fisher

The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This denouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single core of the bourgeoisie. — Leon Trotsky

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just - the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth - and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The artist's memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember-it's your brilliant stock-in-trade: remembering, and making something out of it. Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you're reinventing; that's a rule, perhaps the only one: being cognizant of your source material. — Hilton Als

Nature is indeed a specious ward, nay, there is a great deal in it if it is properly understood and applied, but I cannot bear to hear people using it to justify what common sense must disavow. Is not Nature modifed by art in many things? Was it not designed to be so? And is it not happy for human society that it is so? Would you like to see your husband let his beard grow, until he would be obliged to put the end of it in his pocket, because this beard is the gift of Nature? — Mary Wortley Montagu

Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come. — Roxane Gay

Some might call it manipulation, but I like to consider it simply using what God gave me. And the word manipulation is so ugly. It's what people say to disavow their own choices. If they end up never regretting their decision, does that mean that no one has manipulated them? — M.E. Thomas

In youth,' he said, speaking as if from a great distance, 'we believe, and the death of belief forces us to disavow all belief. But that disavowal, time softens, and if we do not believe, we hope. Belief is easier to kill, somehow, and its death easier to bear. — Michelle Sagara West

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit. — Milton Resnick

We're moving into sudden history now, baby. That life men lead and women disavow, that sure and certain sense that nothing is wrong, that life does not beat or pause, that the universe expands relentlessly. You can feel the source of all the world's light in your beating heart, in the map of your blood, in the vast range and pace of your brain. That's the light, baby. You don't need any other. Just that light beating forever inside you. — Scott Bradfield

Communists disavow the existence of God and religion. They hate it, because it's a competitor. — Rush Limbaugh

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from. — Jill Lepore

O my people, I disavow all that you associate [with God]. I orient my face with an exclusive orientation towards Him, who created the heavens and the earth and I am not one of the associators. — Abdelkader El Djezairi

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must
not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make ... let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds ... it will oftenest be seen that
he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous. — Blaise Pascal

Your thoughts of Christ, be very careful that they are conceived and directed according to the rule of the word, lest you deceive your own souls, and give up the conduct of your affections unto vain imaginations. . . . [But] we are not to forego our duty [to contemplate Christ] because other men have been mistaken in theirs, nor part with practical, fundamental principles of religion because they have been abused by superstition. . . . Yet I must say that I had rather be among them who, in the actings of their love and affection unto Christ, do fall into some irregularities and excesses in the manner of expressing it . . . than among those who, professing themselves to be Christians, do almost disavow their having any thoughts of or affection unto the person of Christ.297 — Timothy Keller

His boast of irreligion stayed on his tongue,for what reasons he couldn't say,any more than he could say why words long unuttered floated unbidden into his mind:La ilaha illa Allah,Muhammad rasulullah.The Kalima,the Word of Purity,the declaration of faith.It almost made him laugh:at the moment he planned to disavow his Muslim identity,his subconscious had unearthed its kernel. — Amy Waldman

It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts. — Timothy Noah

For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice. — Judith Spencer

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives - the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us - that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting. — Terry Tempest Williams

Is there a wrong way to say "I don't know"? Yes. When we declare ignorance, it should be a) honest and b) in the spirit of opening ourselves up to hearing, to learning, to receiving. When we say "I don't know" under these conditions, the words can forge connection, healing, growth. But when we resist or disavow knowledge, when we profess ignorance as a way of donning armor and evading accountability, then we make a mockery of those words, and we rupture connections not only with others but within ourselves, within our souls. — Leah Hager Cohen

Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow — Jeff VanderMeer

Most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc. — Richard Dawkins

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason. — Blaise Pascal

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
— Richard Mitchell

People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. — Roxane Gay

Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park. — Trevor Noah

Faith does not cease being active as it undertakes the process of rigorous thinking. One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver — Thomas C. Oden

I sent the first half of the dissertation to Rudolf Bultmann [major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity] as a courtesy with an invitation to respond to any points in my analysis and critique if he wished. I was speechless when I received a long letter from Bultmann, who had diligently examined the details of my arguments. His letter became a featured part of the publication in 1964 by Westminster Press of Radical Obedience: The Ethics of Rudolf Bultmann: With a Response by Rudolf Bultmann.
That book, more than any other , launched my career as a serious theologian. But it also led to my reputation as a situation ethicist, ironically just about the time I was beginning to disavow situation ethics. — Thomas C. Oden

Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life. — Karen Swallow Prior

The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything - all the pain I felt, the betrayal - I couldn't help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. — Bret Easton Ellis

When [Vladimir] Putin goes out and tells everybody - and you talk about a relationship, but he says Donald Trump is going to win and Donald Trump is a genius, and then I have people saying you should disavow. I said, I'm going to disavow that? — Donald Trump

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them. — Diane Johnson

The time had come- indeed it was past due- when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim, and kill. — Martin Luther King Jr.

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising
didn't make it to the airport, ...
and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. The cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem, I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. — Philip Roth

Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity. — Leo Tolstoy

For a man to get married and stay married, he must detach from and disavow the three things that bind him to reality: sex, travel, and near-death experiences. — Brian D'Ambrosio

When ... I've thought of madness, it seems most easily explained to me as poetry in action. A life of symbol rather than reality. On paper one can understand Gulliver, or Kafka, or Dante. But let a man go about behaving as if he were a giant or a midget, or caught in a cosmic plot directed at himself, or in heaven or hell, and we feel horror - we want to disavow him to proclaim him as far removed as possible from ourselves. — Helen Eustis

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. — Sigmund Freud