Quotes & Sayings About Dismissal

Life turns on small choices.
A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.
A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.
A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.
A word spoken with the best intentions.
Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.
David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero. — William Carmichael

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up. — P.G. Wodehouse

Let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a yes. — Sara Ahmed

Why do you think I am like this?" It didn't really sound like a question; there was no regret, or sorrow, or genuine tinge of curiosity. I didn't think he expected a complex answer in any case, as I'm pretty sure we both knew that a team of neuroscientists and psychologists could work on Mad Dog for a decade and still not have all of the answers. Instead, I removed a sheet of paper from my legal folder and wrote one quatrain from a poem by W.H. Auden: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. He received this carefully and spent a moment looking it over. For the tiniest fraction of a second his face relaxed and his eyes softened and he seemed to shrink into himself as he breathed in. Then it was over, and he turned away from me, a dismissal if I ever saw one. He crumpled up my note angrily and tossed it away onto the floor. It was the last time we ever spoke. — Jean Casella

Did you see what happened?"
"Hard to miss," he said dryly. "Your boat went kaplooie."
Tally blinked at his easy dismissal of two lives and a million-dollar boat. "Is that the technical term for it? — Cherry Adair

You know what my mother said to me when she came to say good-bye, as if to cheer me up, she says maybe District Twelve will finally have a winner. Then I realized she didn't mean me, she meant you!" bursts out Peeta.
"Oh, she meant you," I say with a wave of dismissal.
"She said, 'She's a survivor, that one.' She is," says Peeta.
That pulls me up short. Did his mother really say that about me? Did she rate me over her son? I see the pain in Peeta's eyes and know he isn't lying.
Suddenly I'm behind the bakery and I can feel the chill of the rain running down my back, the hollowness in my belly. I sound eleven years old when I speak. "But only because someone helped me. — Suzanne Collins

Because I am fully aware of what the word "fat" means - what it really means, when you say it, or think it. It's not just a simple, descriptive word like "brunette" or "34." It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection. — Caitlin Moran

Trust you to come at me with a story like that." The cool dismissal stabbed right into the heart of any sense that they endured this ordeal together, as one. Did the captain have no confidence in Demane's expertise, did all the faith flow only one way? It hurt in the belly and chest to be brushed off so. Demane couldn't have guessed his own expression. — Kai Ashante Wilson

Passion is what you would do if you got to choose. It's what you think about doing in the privacy of your own mind, without ear of dismissal or mockery. — Urijah Faber

You asked what you'd done to displease me and I told you: you're breathing. And in much too close a proximity to me. That displeases me. It's
time you depart my bed." Neferet sighed and flicked her fingers at him in dismissal. "Go. Now. — P.C. Cast

So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion - and dismissal of emotion - it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to. — Kurt Vonnegut

Mattie sticks out her tongue, and I take that as my dismissal. — Jill Hathaway

meant well. But I was looking for real help. Yet all I got was what seemed like an overspiritualized dismissal. Many of us have experienced similar push-back from well-intentioned Christians when seeking to learn about practical subjects. A friend of mine who has a lot going on but is doing it all very well was told by one of his pastors that he should take it easy and not do too much because it "causes worry." And sometimes when things get overwhelming, it is suggested that — Matt Perman

I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year. I hear scornful dismissal of concerns about global warming, an issue viewed seriously by the vast majority of scientists. I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it. — Philip Yancey

Favor exalts a man above his equals, but his dismissal from that favor places him below them. — Jean De La Bruyere

The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learning
of this news, he leaves her for a
nondisabled woman with a fuller
bustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen. — Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism. — Sherry Turkle

Thus all civilian officials and military officers in the United States government who either knew or should have known that the Reagan administration intended to assassinate Qaddafi and participated in the bombing operation are "war criminals" according to the U.S. government's own official definition of that term. The American people should not have permitted any aspect of their foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged "war criminals." They should have insisted upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, and prosecution of all U.S. government officials guilty of such war crimes. Nevertheless, U.S. public opinion had been so effectively brutalized by five years of Reaganism that over three-quarters of the American people rallied to the support of their demented leadership over the destruction, injuries, and death it had inflicted upon hundreds of innocent civilians in Tripoli and Benghazi. — Francis A. Boyle

After the dismissal of Hamrouche and until 1999, the state underwent a severe financial crisis and was on the verge of stopping all payments. Loans had to be negotiated with international financial institutions, particularly with the IMF, which required a structural adjustment program. State finances were saved by credits from the IMF and the European Union. Algerian negotiators, who played on the fear of the European states about the Islamist threat, said in effect, "It's either us, with all our defects, or an Islamist republic just one hour's flight from Europe." Alarmed to the point of panic, the West paid up without any conditions on how their credits were to be used. Policy thereafter fluctuated between rhetoric and laxity in letting deficits mount. — Ellen Lust

Some employees are protected by union or personal contracts that limit reasons for dismissal. — Bill Dedman

Thus, Macbeth's nihilism, which will come to bitter and futile fruition in the final act with his dismissal of life as "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing", is seen to have its roots in the play's opening act with his turning away from fides et ratio toward infidelity and irrationality. — William Shakespeare

Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It's almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on. Through the most ordinary things, books, for instance, or a postcard, or eyes or hands, life is transformed. Hands that for decades reached out to hurt us, to drag us down, to control us, or to wave us away in dismissal now reach for us differently. They become instruments of tenderness, buoyancy, exploration, hope. — Anne Lamott

Dismissal can be a secret form of arrogance, and I held this proudly against the Stones until the light shifted and I caught myself being utterly wrong. — Morrissey

Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it. — Murray Rothbard

My first bit of advice is to not personalize a job loss. The cause for the dismissal was a business calculation. This is difficult for many to grasp; it's difficult to accept that events just occur. Come to see this as an experience. Obviously not the most pleasant experience, but it is one that you'll overcome. — John-Talmage Mathis

The rich believe that they're different and that it is their right to pay a much lower tax rate. The response that you see from people on Wall Street, their dismissal and their almost contempt for the concerns about their culpability in the financial crisis, about the income inequality, shows that they are completely out of touch. — Robin Wells

I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists. — Sarah Rees Brennan

The dismissal of any of these people would send a useful signal to U.S. allies that the president has the nerve - and self-awareness - to make a change. — Bret Stephens

Conspiracy nut, leftist, madman. These are terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument. It would be healthier and more fun to hear what someone has to say. — Oliver Stone

Young girls and adolescents will not know that feminist thinkers acknowledge both the value of beauty and adornment if we continue to allow patriarchal sensibilities to inform the beauty industry in all spheres. Rigid feminist dismissal of female longings for beauty has undermined feminist politics. While this sensibility is more uncommon, it is often presented by mass media as the way feminists think. Until feminists go back to the beauty industry, go back to fashion, and create an ongoing, sustained revolution, we will not be free. We will not know how to love our bodies as ourselves. — Bell Hooks

Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years. — Adolf Hitler

Their backs were to me, and the vampire hadn't seen me yet I loosened the coiled chain so a good three feet of it swung free. Who to attack first? They were both small and vicious.
I remembered Mack's contemptuous dismissal and the fact that he never left me a tip. Mack first. — Charlaine Harris

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse, The author writes on Eisenhower's cold dismissal of his wartime lover. — Jean Edward Smith

I need you to be serious right now."
"Probably you shouldn't have drugged me, then."
She rolls her eyes and waves in dismissal. "It was chloroform. You'll be fine."
"And Rayna?"
She knows what I'm asking, and she nods. "She should be waking up right about now." Mom sits back in her chair. "That girl has the personality of a mako shark."
"Says the nut job who chloroformed her own daughter."
She sighs. "One day you'll understand why I did that. Today is obviously not that day."
"No, no, no," I say, palming the air with the universal "don't even" sign. "You don't get to play the responsible parent card. Let's not forget the little matter of the last eighteen-freaking-years, Nalia." There. I said it. This conversation is finally going to happen. — Anna Banks

In the case of the FBI, I revealed that William Sessions, the FBI director, had been engaging in abuses of all kinds, and I exposed that. And that led to his dismissal by President Clinton. — Ronald Kessler

And as for the Ellison Fellow's feelings towards Katherine Potter
to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before Katherine Potter, in fact, as he has reacted before all new, strange (attractive) women who happen, since a certain event, to have crossed his path. He does not know how to deal with them. He is filled with dismay, a giddy sense of arbitrariness, an apprehension that the universe holds nothing sacred; all of which is only to be stilled by the imperative of loyal resistance.
He is not immune to the prickle of passing lust. But he deals defensively with it. He reacts either with disdainful dismissal (Not your type, definitely not your type) or with a rampant if covert seizure of lecherousness (Christ, what tits! What legs! What an arse!), which serves the same forestalling function by reducing its object to meat and its subject (he is past fifty, after all) to a pother of shame. — Graham Swift

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist. — Thomas Kinkade

Collective hallucination is another of the dismissal-labels by which conventionalists shirk thinking. Here is another illustration of the lack of standards, in phenomenal existence, by which to judge anything. One man's story, if not to the liking of conventionalists, is not accepted, because it is not supported; and then testimony by more than one is not accepted, if undesirable, because that is collective hallucination. In this kind of jurisprudence, there is no hope for any kind of testimony against the beliefs in which conventional scientists agree. Among their amusing disregards is that of overlooking that, quite as truly may their own agreements be collective delusions. — Charles Fort

The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past. — Harold Rosenberg

My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal. — Jamaica Kincaid

I believe that the one thing that has come out of this
extraordinary
meeting this morning is an awareness that we have, perhaps, been careless about the critical relationship between human and pegasus, careless in our resignation that no better bond than what we are accustomed to can exist. The king agrees with you that his daughter and Lrrianay's son suggest a different way. But the king's view, and indeed hope, for that way is diametrically opposed to your own. Bring what the histories can tell us both, and the councils will decide whose concept of the way forward has more merit.
The king is prepared to consider the possibility that your outburst arose from a dedication to the well-being of our country too profound for restraint; but he is only barely prepared so to consider it. You may leave us. Now. — Robin McKinley

I was disappointed over my dismissal, given that it was at a crucial stage of the game and I had worked very hard to get to that point,. — Ricky Ponting

My interest in spiritual approaches to medical problems should not, however, be construed as a dismissal of science; rather it is a call for more integrated relations between science and humanities in order to transform medical cultures. — Ann Cvetkovich

Today, he showed the world why he is considered the best batsman around. Some of the shots he played were simply amazing. Earlier, opposing teams used to feel that Sachin's dismissal meant they could win the game. Today, I feel that the Indian players, too, feel this way. — Wasim Akram

You two still here?" Ash waved a hand in dismissal at Calvin. "Why don't you and your toy tiger go play pirates or something? Leave the drinking to the big boys. And Dex. — Charlie Cochet

There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism. — John Carroll

There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So, — Frans De Waal

Any woman who has devoted herself to raising children has experienced the hollow praise that only thinly conceals smug dismissal. In a culture that measures worth and achievement almost solely in terms of money, the intensive work of rearing responsible adults counts for little. One of the most intriguing questions in economic history is how this came to be; how mothers came to be excluded from the ranks of productive citizens. How did the demanding job of rearing a modern child come to be termed baby-sitting? When did caring for children become a 'labor of love,;' smothered under a blanket of sentimentality that hides its economic importance? — Ann Crittenden

Avery doesn't know what these people are talking about, and since he's driving, he can't go online to check. The sensation he has is a strange, difficult one. He knows these people aren't talking about him. But at the same time they are talking about him, in their blanket dismissal. And they're also talking about us. Because so many of them are our age or older, stuck in previous decades of thought. The gays of today, the gays of yesterday - we're all the same bother, all the same wrong. Not people, really. Just something to yell about. — David Levithan

When I look back on my life I come to one simple conclusion: there exists an intelligent, loving Presence in the Cosmos that will ultimately have its desire for relationship with us fulfilled; even our arrogant dismissal of its existence will not stop it in its tracks. The Enlightenment's god, the great idol of free will, lies smashed in pieces in its wake. The jealous Presence patiently draws us homeward like some gigantic electromagnetic beam. The Death Star in reverse. This divinity is, I believe, the 'Abba' of Jesus, a transcendence that will not be boxed in by religious misrepresentation... — Dylan Morrison

This feeling of helplessness in us has arisen from our deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs. — Mahatma Gandhi

You, my child, will marry well. More than once." ( ... ) The lady retrieved the cards and shuffled them back together into one stack in an attitude of dismissal.
Taking this as a sign her fortune was complete, Preshea stood. Looking particularly pleased with life, she passed over a few coins and gave Madame Spetuna a nice curtsy.
Mademoiselle Geraldine was fanning herself. "Oh, dear, oh, dear, Miss Buss. Let us hope it is widowhood and not" - she whispered the next word - "divorce that leads to your multiple marriages."
Preshea sat and sipped from a china cup. "I shouldn't worry, Headmistress. I am tolerably certain it will be widowhood. — Gail Carriger

Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience. — Richard Stites

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake; the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. — Victor Hugo

A man's reception depends upon his coat; his dismissal upon the wit he shows. — Pierre-Jean De Beranger

Euphemism in the workplace does not end with job descriptions. It reaches a pusillanimous peak at the other end of the work process - in dismissal. — Nigel Rees

A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners. — Mary Barnett Gilson

This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence. — Daniel Quinn

If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, decided to hijack the one I had created. — Dawn Kohler

The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right. — Flora Rheta Schreiber

Jakes nodded his dismissal. "Workable. Set up a meeting."
Mitchel stood. "Who would you like to send, sir?"
He smiled. "Ivy, I've neglected my duties as commander of The Baldain. I'll transport down to Earth and handle this matter myself. — Cheryl Sterling

The rationale seems to be that we keep people as victims by validating them, empathizing with them, and fighting alongside them for equality and the dignity they deserve. I don't think people are kept down by that. I believe what keeps people down is the constant dismissal of their pain, the degradation, the humiliation, the fear of injustice, and the continuous crushing of their will, their faith, and their hope. This type of oppression kills the self-esteem people need to empower themselves, and it's flat-out terrorism. — Kyrian Lyndon

It's not even rejection, it's dismissal. — Paula Hawkins

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism. — Greg L. Bahnsen

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength. — Peter Drucker

Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection - a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding sign, of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. — Vladimir Nabokov

I let Wally go yesterday," Mr. Forney said. "I just want you to know that." "You fired him?" "Of course. Fraternizing with hotel guests is cause for dismissal." "But - " "We have high standards for the hotel, Miss Spooner. That includes employees." "Yeah," I said. "I've seen your high standards up close, Mr. Forney. I think you like rolling in your stinky high standards. Especially when you can kick a couple of guests out of the hotel because they have the wrong last name." He — Judy Blundell

[Donald Trump] suggestions are not only offensive but, in certain cases, dangerous and sometimes even illegal, like his dismissal of the laws of the United States international law when it comes to torture. — Hillary Clinton