Exacted Upon Quotes & Sayings

When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government. — Grover Cleveland

He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been - a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. — John Edward Williams

For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like "should" and "ought". The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered. — Richard Russo

The Dalmatian tribes and the Pannonians, at least of the region of the Save, for a short time obeyed the Roman governors; but they bore the new rule with an ever increasing grudge, above all on account of the taxes, to which they were unaccustomed, and which were relentlessly exacted. — Theodor Mommsen

Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ. — Emma Goldman

Respect is tendered with pleasure only where it is not exacted. — Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. — Friedrich Hayek

The public schools are supported entirely, in most communities, by public funds-funds exacted not only from parents, nor alone from those who hold particular religious views, nor indeed from those who subscribe to any creed at all. — William J. Brennan

[In the Royal Society, there] has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars. — Thomas Sprat

Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form. — Mark Frost

All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear. — Abraham Verghese

Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. — Pierce Brown

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. — William James

So this was it, she thought. So many times she'd wondered. True sacrifice was the surrender of one sacred thing in favor of keeping another. No matter how prudent or cautious one was, in the end something precious was lost. Whether the claim was in the name of family or duty or honor or truth, it exacted a terrible price. To her dismay, she did not feel the pride or pleasure that Bledig had claimed when he spoke of the sacrifices he had made for her and their children. For Alwen, sacrifice brought grief and guilt, and an unbearable sense of uncertainty. — Roberta Trahan

I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. — Ford Madox Ford

When I see the hatred exacted at Mr. Obama - you know, he lowered your taxes, killed your number one bad guy and got your guys out of Iraq - I don't understand why he seems to inflame people so much. You know, unless, unless there's a race problem. — Henry Rollins

God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her 30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss, Bertha Schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin. — Andrea Dworkin

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. — Mark Twain

There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in - work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play ... The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner which they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning - a completely fatuous, ego-centric notion! - was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all. — Henry Miller

In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly. — Margaret Atwood

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for he vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land. — Oscar Wilde

The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life - that was what life demanded of you - surrender. For reward it gave you love, this swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties. — A.E. Coppard

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death - he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. . . . He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience - from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. . . . He was born in poverty and . . . suffered infinite pain - all for us - and thought it well worth his while.4 Isaiah — Timothy J. Keller

Truth is the hardest substance in the world to pin down. But the one certainty is the awesome penalty exacted sooner or later from a society whose reporters stop trying. — Flora Lewis

Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled ... — Christopher Hitchens

He is human - they are a lesser species. Over the decades, the dark side has exacted too great a toll on his body. He is a hollow shell of what he once was. — Drew Karpyshyn

I said I thought female labour of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man. — Fanny Kemble

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow. — G. M. Trevelyan

Be kindly and just in your dealings with your men. Never play favorites. Make them feel that justice tempered with mercy may always be counted on. This does not mean a slackening of discipline. Obedience to orders and regulations must always be insisted upon, and good conduct on the part of the men exacted. Especially should this be done with reference to civilian inhabitants of foreign countries in which Marines are serving. — John A. Lejeune

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship. — A. Philip Randolph

The Prophet answered: "How could I but be a thankful servant?"1 He did not demand of his Companions the worship, fasting, and meditations that he exacted of himself. — Tariq Ramadan

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price. She simply accepted the rights of her royal position and performed no duties in exchange. She wanted to combine two things which are, in actual human experience, incompatible; she wanted to reign and at the same time to enjoy. — Stefan Zweig

Sometimes sex is the price that is exacted from her for warmth and attention. And if these sometimes wonderful moments of closeness must coexist with terrifying, confusing moments of abuse, she learns to see the two as parts of the same experience. She grows to think she wanted the incest itself. Because they've become enmeshed, she doesn't know that it was love she wanted, not sex. — E. Sue Blume