Dispute Quotes & Sayings

The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea. — William O. Douglas

Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute
With Him the points of liberty who made
Thee what thou art and formed the pow'rs of Heav'n
Such as He pleased and circumscribed their being? — John Milton

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher. — Moses Mendelssohn

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry. — Ben Marcus

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. — Dinesh D'Souza

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise. — John Fowles

Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance." "Religion in that case," Jamie ventured. "Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn't really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters - many of them Scots - replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again. — Alexander McCall Smith

The right procedure: You begin at the wrong end if you first dispute about your election. Prove your conversion, and then never doubt your election. If you cannot yet prove it, set upon a present and thorough turning. Whatever purposes be, which are secret, I am sure His promises are plain. How desperately do rebels argue! "If I am elected I shall be saved, do what I will. If not, I shall be damned, do what I can." Perverse sinner, will you begin where you should end? — Joseph Alleine

Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further — Carl Sagan

It's not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It's that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist. — Steven Pinker

If enemy offers you two options,
surprise him with your third one,
end the feud with the fourth one. — Toba Beta

It's a simple question of supply and demand. But all of us are grossly overpaid. I think it's a ridiculous dispute. — Jim Courier

Always make it a goal to keep your conversations cordial. Sometimes that will not be possible. If a principled, charitable expression of your ideas makes someone mad, there's little you can do about it. Jesus' teaching made some people furious. Just make sure it's your ideas that offend and not you, that your beliefs cause the dispute and not your behavior. — Greg Koukl

It is obvious that putting the Arab-Israeli dispute on a resolution track would be an important element of overcoming the confidence problem in the region. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan

I like better for one to say some foolish thing upon important matters than to be silent. That becomes the subject of discussion and dispute, and the truth is discovered. — Denis Diderot

We were strong. We stayed bright as lightning,
we sang loud as thunder, we moved ever forward.
We are not our failures. We are love. — La Dispute

Large scale collective bargaining ... is merely a seductive name for bilateral monopoly, and means either adjudication of conflicts in terms of power, or deadlock and stoppage, usually injuring outside people more than the immediate parties to the dispute. — Frank Knight

The debate's over. The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona. — Al Gore

I conclude by applying to political economy what Chateaubriand says of history: "There are," he says, two consequences in history; an immediate one, which is instantly recognized, and one in the distance, which is not at first perceived. These consequences often contradict each other; the former are the results of our own limited wisdom, the latter, those of that wisdom which endures. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises up behind men. Deny, if you will, the supreme counsel; disown its action; dispute about words; designate, by the term, force of circumstances, or reason, what the vulgar call Providence; but look to the end of an accomplished fact, and you will see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected from it, if it was not established at first upon morality and justice.3 — Frederic Bastiat

When two wise men are blaming one another,
then time has come for you to be the third one. — Toba Beta

Liberals dispute that Reagan won the Cold War on the basis of their capacity to put mocking quotation marks around the word, won. That's pretty much the full argument: Restate a factual proposition with sneering quote marks. — Ann Coulter

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention. — Barry Unsworth

I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men. — Martin Luther

Command that your marshal be careful to be present over the household, and especially in the hall, to keep the household, within doors and without, respectable, without dispute or noise, or bad words. — Robert Grosseteste

You could spend hours following the trail of a single dispute, through smoking battlefields of interlinked comments threads and screen shots and blogs where the message "this post has been deleted by its author" stands like a tombstone over the grave of the one witness who can tell you what really happened. I know, because I've wandered extensively over this blasted heath in the past couple of weeks. — Laura Miller

Except in a very few matches, usually with world-class performers, there is a point in every match (and in some cases it's right at the beginning) when the loser decides he's going to lose. And after that, everything he does will be aimed at providing an explanation of why he will have lost. He may throw himself at the ball (so he will be able to say he's done his best against a superior opponent). He may dispute calls (so he will be able to say he's been robbed). He may swear at himself and throw his racket (so he can say it was apparent all along he wasn't in top form). His energies go not into winning but into producing an explanation, an excuse, a justification for losing. — C. Terry Warner

Arguing with somebody is never pleasant, but sometimes it is useful and necessary to do so. — Lemony Snicket

It is often argued that the people who will be affected by a major decision should be involved in it. Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal in southern Africa, once resolved a dispute between two brothers about a land inheritance they were to share. Kruger's decision: let one brother divide the land, and let the other brother have first choice. — Louis E. Boone

Be that as it may, Leibnitz was never able to explain the principles of his calculus clearly, and this shows that there was something in it that was beyond him, something that was as it were imposed upon him without his being conscious of it; had he taken this into account, he most certainly would not have engaged in any dispute over 'priority' with Newton. Besides, these sorts of disputes are always completely vain, for ideas, insofar as they are true, are not the property of anyone, despite what modern 'individualism' might have to say; it is only error that can properly be attributed to human individuals. — Rene Guenon

If there is a dispute between the mind and the heart the mind should win. — Matshona Dhliwayo

If 3,000 people perished in the World Trade Center attacks and the Jewish population is 10 percent, you show me records of 300 Jewish people dying in the World Trade Center ... We're daring anyone to dispute its truth. They got their people out. — Malik Zulu Shabazz

No domestic dispute between Franny and David had inspired the removal of their wedding rings. She would take hers off at work when she was giving scalp massages. Once she thought she had lost the ring, but she found it in the treatment room on a candleholder David had made for her during a personal failure of a pottery class he had taken the year he lost his job. After she found her ring, she started leaving it at home. — Amelia Gray

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

There is no dispute that judges need a pay raise. — Robert Duncan

I said to the German Ambassador that, as long as there was only a dispute between Austria and Serbia alone, I did not feel entitled to intervene; but that, directly it was a matter between Austria and Russia, it became a question of the peace of Europe, which concerned us all. — Edward Grey

These people have elevated audacity to symphonic and operatic levels. The Florida Supreme Court relied on new law to resolve the election dispute down there. — Vincent Bugliosi

Political philosophy reaches for the best regime, a regime so good that it can hardly exist. Political science advances a theory - in fact, a number of theories - that promises to bring agreement and put an end to partisan dispute. — Harvey Mansfield

To dispute with a drunkard is to debate with an empty house. — Publilius Syrus

These sermons of Jesus Christ are meant for your will and your conscience, not for your head. If you dispute these verses from the Sermon on the Mount with your head, you will dull the appeal to your heart. — Oswald Chambers

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It — Thomas Paine

I should explain - in view of my last letter, you may find it slightly surprising - that Daphne and I are now bosom friends. That is to say, she seems to think we are; and I do not feel that I know her well enough to dispute it. — Sarah Caudwell

Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we're back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math's procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities. — David Foster Wallace

It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first? — Pierre Bayle

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm. — Isaac Rosenfeld

If nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men; nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another. — James Mill

The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity. — Max Hastings

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes. — Christopher Hitchens

Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity. — Michel De Montaigne

There is no dispute managed without passion, and yet there is scarce a dispute worth a passion. — Thomas Sherlock

Throughout our youth, whenever we had a dispute, Li Wei and I would apologize to each other by exchanging gifts. Mine would be in the form of drawings, crudely done with whatever natural supplies I could find. His would always be carvings. There was only one time the exchange didn't happen, the day I told him I was accepting the apprentice position and would never be able to marry him. — Richelle Mead

There is hardly a case in which the dispute was not caused by a woman. — Juvenal

A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He — Clifford D. Simak

There is a dispute about the existence of God. Both sides try to hide that they killed Him - even before He came into being. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Attacking someone without warning for something they did weeks before? Check. Ready to turn a simple breed dispute into something far uglier with the razor blade she kept on her at all times? Check. Using blood as a weapon of rudeness? Check. Threatening death? Check. Attacking a helpful stranger or friend? Check. Kissing a helpful stranger or friend without warning or permission? Check.
Yeah, it only took Gwen six weeks to become her mother. — Shelly Laurenston

Could we forbear dispute, and practise love, We should agree as angels do above. — Edmund Waller

I had many wonderful experiences, received beautiful letters, and my Christian books received substantive and thoughtful reviews. But there was always argument, dispute, questions as to what I "really" believed, lectures from here and there on "the real truth," etc. — Anne Rice

That the Rhineland should be occupied by an international force until the dispute with Hitler can be resolved, the — Charles Kaiser

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties. — Benjamin Franklin

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave ... In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen ... I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law. — H.L. Mencken

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat. — Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Virtually the entire inflow was therefore Asiatic, and all but three or four thousand of that inflow originated from the Indian subcontinent ... It is by 'black Power' that the headlines are caught, and under the shape of the negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him the possession of his native land. — Enoch Powell

The American president increasingly used his influence to create conflicts, intensify existing conflicts, and, above all, to keep conflicts from being resolved peacefully. For years this man looked for a dispute anywhere in the world, but preferably in Europe, that he could use to create political entanglements with American economic obligations to one of the contending sides, which would then steadily involve America in the conflict and thus divert attention from his own confused domestic economic policies. — Adolf Hitler

With one decision, Judge Sotomayor changed the entire dispute. Her ruling rescued the 1995 baseball season and forced the parties to resume real negotiations. — David Cone

Start a conflict is to release a flood; stop the dispute before it breaks out. — Anonymous

To constitute a dispute there must be two parties. To understand it well, both parties and all the circumstances must be fully heard; and to accommodate the differences, temper and mutual forbearance are requisite. — George Washington

One day on the plains he had an angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their revolvers. But the driver was the quicker artist, and had his weapon cocked first. So Slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a matter, and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the quarrel settled by a fist-fight. The unsuspected driver agreed, and threw down his pistol-whereupon Slade laughed at his simplicity, and shot him dead! — Mark Twain

McDougall does not dispute the thesis as to
the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups
(p. 41). He says that the minds of lower intelligence
bring down those of a higher order to their own
level. The latter are obstructed in their activity,
because in general an intensification of emotion
creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual
work, and further because the individuals are intimidated
by the group and their mental activity is
not free, and because there is a lowering in each
individual of his sense of responsibility for his own
performances. — Sigmund Freud

Dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith. — Boyd K. Packer

Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they've lost is the argument that we are a society. — Thomas Frank

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. — John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

It is idle to dispute with old men. Their opinions, like their cranial sutures, are ossified. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Men of many words sometimes argue for the sake of talking; men of ready tongues frequently dispute for the sake of victory; men in public life often debate for the sake of opposing the ruling party, or from any other motive than the love of truth. — George Crabbe

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. — Anthony Burgess

What is without dispute ... is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them - to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else. — Jasper Fforde

There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They're innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I'm not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven't been, so far, good to their customers. — Scott Turow

And indeed, there are innumerable cases of important discoveries being made because the failed experiment revealed a new set of possibilities that you hadn't even realized were there. This is sometimes mistaken for serendipity, a notion that, since it's come up, I would like to take a moment to dispute. — Stuart Firestein

They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience. — Giordano Bruno

A man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It is a miserable thing when the conversation can only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that. — Samuel Johnson

Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence. — Martin E.P. Seligman

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's. — G.K. Chesterton

Arriving at the scene of a suicide or domestic dispute made him feel a little less alien, as though seeing others in the throes of suffering dissipated his own distress. — Ania Ahlborn

Hang on, I know what might be going on here. Maybe everyone involved in this dispute is awful. — David Mitchell

It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.46 — Jonathan Haidt

I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory. — Osip Mandelstam

In all my years of being with Pittsburgh, I never encountered a player taking a contract dispute into the season and letting that dispute affect the way he played. — Joe Greene

Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? — Sigmund Freud

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman. — Wilkie Collins

We should evaluate judges and judicial nominees based on the general process for applying the law to any legal disputes, not on the specific result in a particular case or dispute. — Orrin Hatch

Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage
in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion. — Sigmund Freud

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

Young gentlemen, who are to display their knowledge to the world, should have every motive of emulation, should be formed into regular classes, should read and dispute together, should have all the honors, and, if one may say so, the pomp of learning set before them, to call up their ardor. It is their business, and they should apply to it as such. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

If there were two princes in Christendom who had good will and courage, it would be very easy to reconcile the religious difficulties; there is only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and all the rest is a dispute over trifles. — Elizabeth I

I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect. — Hermann Hesse

I grew up in what my mom will always dispute as 'the hood.' She just doesn't like the name. But it had its similarities to any neighborhood like that. The all-black neighbors and the all-black problems and the all-black happiness. And I really loved it. — Jerrod Carmichael

The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on. — Sergio De La Pava

Once there lived in the ancient city of Afkar two learned men who hated and belittled each other's learning. For one of them denied the existence of the gods and the other was a believer.
One day the two met in the market-place, and amidst their followers they began to dispute and to argue about the existence or the non-existence of the gods. And after hours of contention they parted.
That evening the unbeliever went to the temple and prostrated himself before the altar and prayed the gods to forgive his wayward past.
And the same hour the other learned man, he who had upheld the gods, burned his sacred books. For he had become an unbeliever. — Kahlil Gibran

There's some stuff you just leave alone. You don't fix every problem that comes across your radar. You don't try to straighten out every dispute that comes before you. Don't chase down every rumor. If people are gossiping about you, let them talk, because the people who are talking negatively about you don't matter. — T.D. Jakes

One fact is beyond dispute: Homogenization prevents the consumer from realizing just how little fat is contained in modern processed milk, even "full fat" milk. Before homogenization, milk purchasers looked for milk that had lots of cream - that was the sign that the milk came from healthy cows, cows on pasture. Old-fashioned milk contained from 4 to 8 percent butterfat, which translated into lots of cream on the top. Modern milk is standardize at 3.5 percent, no more. Butterfat brings bigger profits to the dairy industry as butter or as an ingredient in ice cream than as a component of liquid milk. The consumer has been cheated, but with homogenization, he can't tell. — Ron Schmid