Disproportionate Quotes & Sayings

In my view what you can't argue for is a system that is neither decisive nor proportional and can be indecisive and disproportionate at the same time. — William Hague

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediaeval device for the punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for the cure of a sluggish liver. It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs Verloc's mother's voice sounded like a wail of pain. — Joseph Conrad

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? — Victor Hugo

Let no one ever shy away from the claim that Jews have power, that Jews have influence. We have learned the terrible lesson of history; that unless we have influence and power, disproportionate to our small numbers - immoral results will occur. We need power. And we must continue to use our power. Power which we earned, power which no one gave us on a silver platter, power which we worked hard for - use that power in the interests of justice. — Alan Dershowitz

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be. — D. A. Carson

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element. — Salman Rushdie

The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked: needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again. — Jon Evans

Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. "Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage," one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. "Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win."4.14 Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. — Charles Duhigg

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos. — Sam Harris

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture? — Ernest Van Den Haag

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit's excess resources in one area for another unit's excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What — W.Chan Kim

Disproportionate. — James Patterson

How you look has become ridiculously disproportionate to what you do. Critics are more harsh on female presenters. — Carol Vorderman

The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why in so many love stories there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future- or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love. — Alain De Botton

Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits. — Van Jones

Far too many Americans are illiterate in power - what it is, how it operates and why some people have it. As a result, those few who do understand power wield disproportionate influence over everyone else. "We need to make civics sexy again," says civics educator Eric Liu. "As sexy as it was during the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement. — Eric Liu

Reassurances are multiplying in the United States and Western Europe that "the general population" is safe. But "the general population" may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals. Everyone knows that blacks are getting AIDS in disproportionate numbers, as there is a disproportionate number of blacks in the armed forces and a vastly disproportionate number in prisons. — Susan Sontag

To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand. Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience: "Seeing is believing." In the realm of experience, positive stimuli reinforce behavior, whereas negative stimuli change attitudes and behavior. Simply — W.Chan Kim

God has designed us to depend on His Word to lead his people in ways that are utterly disproportionate to who we are. — David Platt

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A — Steven Pinker

Having a mood disorder is not synonymous with having artistic talent, but it is true that people in the so-called creative professions-writers, actors, artists, musicians-have a higher than normal incidence of such illnesses, and there are also a disproportionate number of alcoholics in these fields whose drinking may be an attempt to medicate the anxiety of depression. — Tracy Thompson

The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed. — Sara Harrison

For the disproportionate fear that the statistically and historically minimal group of women who were both angry and had hairy legs have inculcated both in their detractors and in their wannabe-successors, we should salute them as often as possible — Nina Power

Beauty is the first recognition of truth, great or small; Ugliness is the villain counter-posed to eradicate the internalization and eternalization of truth."

"Lonely individuals have the most fulfilling conversations upon the mutual recognition of pathos in one another's eyes."

"Rules are the first weapon of cowards, fascists, and dullards. The cunning and anarchists and steadfast use the rules only as a last resort. After reason, logic, bribery, creativity, pleas for decency, and empathy--rules are all that before one must quietly plan an disproportionate response (like automotive sabotage or murder made to look like an accident. — James W. Hritz

Those who take action have a disproportionate impact. The power of one is to move many. — Elizabeth May

Voluntary simplicity is at once joyous and altruistic. Joyous because it is not permanently plagued by the hunger for "more"; altruistic because it does not encourage the disproportionate concentration of resources in the hands of a few, resources which - were they to be spread evenly - would significantly improve the lives of those deprived of basic needs. — Matthieu Ricard

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact. — Anne Tyler

Military population that has a disproportionate number of young people with a history of sexual abuse. One theory for this holds that military service is an easy way for young people to get out of their home, and so the military will disproportionally draw recruits from troubled families. According to a 2014 study in the American Medical Association's JAMA Psychiatry, men with military service are now twice as likely to report sexual assault during their childhood as men who never served. This was not true during the draft. Sexual abuse is a well-known predictor of depression and other mental health issues, and the military suicide rate may in part be a result of that. Killing — Sebastian Junger

That summer I got to know four families in which half the children were gay. In case you're interested from a sociological point of view, they were always Catholic and there were always four kids, two of whom were gay. What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals - meaning there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world! — Tina Fey

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

oo many people are profoundly illiterate in power (TED Talk: Why ordinary people need to understand power). As a result, it's become ever easier for those who do understand how power operates in civic life to wield a disproportionate influence and fill the void created by the ignorance of the majority. — Eric Liu

Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous." — William Zinsser

I believe that Silicon Valley is truly a place of excellence and the impact of this tiny community on the world is completely disproportionate to its size. We are the undisputed leaders of technological change. But with our abundance of talent and resources, we also have the opportunity to be the pioneers of social change and, ultimately, this may be our greatest contribution. — Jeffrey Skoll

The entire issue is that women bear a disproportionate share of the hard work. Birthing, carrying, the whole thing - it's hard work. — Pete Sessions

There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. — Norman Mailer

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds. — Chris Cleave

Overcrowding, which is one symptom of the population instability, continues. It continues, not because the overcrowded people remain, but because they leave. Too many of those who overcome the economic necessity to overcrowd get out, instead of improving their lot within the neighborhood. They are quickly replaced by others who currently have little economic choice. The buildings, naturally, wear out with disproportionate swiftness under these conditions. — Jane Jacobs

A Killer Brand exists when an entity derives a disproportionate amount of success in its category because of a compelling and differentiated expectation that comes to be associated with its name. — Frank Lane

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ. — Tullian Tchividjian

In the legislature, the House of Representatives is chosen by less than half the people, and not at all in proportion to those who do choose. The Senate are still more disproportionate, and for long terms of irresponsibility. In the Executive, the Governor is entirely independent of the choice of the people, and of their control; his Council equally so, and at best but a fifth wheel to a wagon. In the Judiciary, the judges of the highest courts are dependent on none but themselves. — Thomas Jefferson

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result. — Sandra Day O'Connor

In the middle of 'Bleed Red' coming out, a huge disproportionate majority of people in radio came to us and asked if they could have 'Cost of Livin' as a single. There was even talk behind closed doors about pulling 'Bleed Red' because they had caught wind and heard 'Cost of Livin'.' We went with that. — Ronnie Dunn

Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature. — Joseph Butler

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. — Paul Fussell

It is unfair for our hospitals to bear a hugely disproportionate burden for mandated emergency health treatment for illegal aliens. — Jon Kyl

Lord, let me make a difference for You that is utterly disproportionate to who I am. — John Piper

I am fairly certain that my abortion position hurt me, because in a Democratic primary, where turnout is relatively low, liberal voters turn out in disproportionately large numbers and thus exercise a disproportionate influence on the outcome. — Robert Casey

It (land value taxation) guarantees that no one dispossess fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity. — William Vickrey

Where we're not wrong or where the cost of settling is so much that it is totally disproportionate to the harm or the error that we made, we're not going to settle. — Lee Scott

I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities. — Tina Fey

Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others. — Stephen Covey

However, candidates and elected officials pay disproportionate attention to the views of the politically engaged segment of the public, which is also the most ideologically polarized segment of the public. Therefore, polarization at the elite level is largely a reflection of polarization among the politically engaged segment of the American public. — Alan I. Abramowitz

But the subterranean currents that pushed so many young men to Syria from Lisleby, a Fredrikstad district of just 6,000, stand out as an example of a phenomenon none of those theories can explain: Why it is that certain towns, and even small areas within them, generate a disproportionate number of jihadists? — Anonymous

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character. — Anna Brownell Jameson

I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It's very healthy. — Sloane Crosley

The great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I think legislative assaults on motorcyclists are totally emotionally, disproportionate and totally unfair ... they're instigated and implemented by people who know nothing about motorcycling, but have a prejudice. It's easy to curb the freedoms of others when you see no immediate impact on your own. — Malcolm Forbes

If Judas Iscariot were alive, and a woman, and attending formal functions, wearing this dress would still represent a disproportionate punishment for his sins." "Her — Daniel O'Malley

I have been an 'Official' all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity. — William Allingham

Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves. — Gerry Spence

When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out that a disproportionate number of them were unattractive ... abused kids had head and face proportions that made them look less infantile and cute. — Nancy Etcoff

To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority. — William H. Seward

There is another way in which the general opinion, that women are inferior to men, is manifested ... I allude to the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and women. — Sarah Moore Grimke

We tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy - note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All calls for justice require that victims feel avenged, and revenge is never just if it's disproportionate. — Thane Rosenbaum

Here I first mounted a little Highland steed; and if there had been many spectators, should have been somewhat ashamed of my figure in the march. The horses of the Islands, as of other barren countries, are very low: they are indeed musculous and strong, beyond what their size gives reason for expecting; but a bulky man upon one of their backs makes a very disproportionate appearance. — Samuel Johnson

America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power ... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way. — Richard Barnet

I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don't know what to make of it. — Daniel Dae Kim

Not rarely, and this is especially true of wives and mothers, the motive behind assuming a disproportionate share of work and responsibility is completely unselfish. We want to protect, to spare those of whom we are fond. We forget that, regardless of the motive, the results of such action are almost always destructive and unproductive. — Hortense Odlum

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. — Lionel Shriver

Pakistan is riddled with problems that are rooted in the disproportionate power of the state. Aid has only boosted that power. — Iqbal Quadir

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take. — Barney Frank

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. — Daniel Kahneman

There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers. — Juan Enriquez

Society cannot but depend to a disproportionate degree on its capable few to develop and flourish. — Swami Kriyananda

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people
often in poverty
taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. — Leo Tolstoy

Why do we place such a disproportionate emphasis on sporting achievement? Why doesn't success in other fields receive similar attention ... Maybe it's because in a country that prides itself on being egalitarian, sport is intellectually and socio-economically an equal playing field. In fact, the more humble your background, the better, the underdog-turned champion is a narrative that resonates powerfully. We're far less interested in the stories of our best doctors, writers, lawyers, engineers, teachers or social workers. Their triumphs do not capture our collective imaginations. — Mia Freedman

I've had a disproportionate share of interaction with jerks. — Mona Sutphen

I suppose the Party machinery will carry everything before it, and, as heretofore, the Extremists on both sides, whether progressive or reactionary, will set the tune and collar the organization, and all we wretched, unorganized middle thinkers will either be destroyed between the contending forces, or compelled to serve in support of one disproportionate cause or the other. — Winston S. Churchill

Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn't she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent. — A.S. Byatt

The fear we throw about danger is always as disproportionate as a paternal shirt on an infant. — Austin O'Malley

I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values. — William Shawcross

A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature a good bit, of course, but a bit only in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence. — Walter Bagehot

The extent of neural growth and learning during sensitive periods results in early experience having a disproportionate impact on the shaping of our brains. — Louis Cozolino

In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely. — Jose Latour

We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream - a steady wage. — J.D. Vance

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size. — John Irving

...the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention. — Aleister Crowley

It is the phenomenon somethings called "alienation from self." In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. — Joan Didion

One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town ... The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment. — Tom Stoppard

It is in the nature of love to be disproportionate with both rewards and retributions. — Manu Joseph

To move along the line of natural expectation consolidates the opponent's balance and thus increases his resisting power. In war, as in wrestling, the attempt to throw the opponent without loosening his foothold and upsetting his balance results in self-exhaustion, increasing in disproportionate ratio to the effective strain put upon him. Success by such a method only becomes possible through an immense margin of superior strength in some form-and, even so, tends to lose decisiveness. In most campaigns the dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance has been the vital prelude to a successful attempt at his overthrow. — B.H. Liddell Hart

He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us. — David Jones

That is, " Harry said, " because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in the future condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, will will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don't like it. We don't like fighting and dying. But ... when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it. — Mark Helprin

If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time. — Gary W. Keller

The South has more of a disproportionate amount of irony on T-shirts than any other region in the country. — David Cross

As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime. — Raymond Kelly

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. — Ann Druyan

Right now the producers of 'Modern Family' have no idea how many people watch our show each week on all platforms, and nobody seems to want to tell us. If a disproportionate number of any show's viewers watch in alternative ways, then, under the current system, that show may not appear to be as strong as it actually is. — Steven Levitan