Exorbitant Quotes & Sayings

The act of eating,which hath by several wise men been considered as extremely mean and derogatory from the philosophic dignity, must be in some measure performed by the greatest prince, hero, or philosopher upon earth; nay, sometimes Nature hath been so frolicsome as to exact of these dignified characters a much more exorbitant share of this office than she hath obliged those of the lowest orders to perform. — Henry Fielding

Its contempt for citizens ... is so routine, and so unlimited, that the agency has become a kind of Frankenstein, running wild and terrorizing Americans at will. The IRS hypocritically requires mistake-free returns when its own books are in shambles. It demands exorbitant sums of money without regard to the accuracy of its claims. It doesn't hesitate to use every possible maneuver to get what it wants, sometimes destroying businesses
and lives
in the process. — James Bovard

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway. — Anne Lamott

The price of greatness is exorbitant; only those rich in courage can afford it. — Matshona Dhliwayo

It was so unfair. Like the exorbitant cost of designer shoes. Or world hunger. — Jeaniene Frost

Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers. — Mary Katharine Ham

Should a man,
to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour,
scent
and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion,
respiration, muscular
and brain activity-and nothing
more? 'Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an
exorbitant price? Is it not a mockery? Should one pay? Seven years in the army and seven years in the camp,twice seven years twice that mythical or biblical term,then to be deprived of the ability to tell what is a man and what is a woman
is not a price extortionate? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Tell me this," Pudge would often ask me, as he sat and read about the exorbitant funeral of a rival. "If he was the guy with all the power, then how come he's riding in the lead car, stuffed inside a coffin? — Lorenzo Carcaterra

I used to think all that game playing was par for the course and even kind of exciting. It just felt logical to pursue a boy the same way I applied to college - by expending exorbitant time and energy showing what a great catch I am and what a perfect match we'd be, so that after a lengthy waiting period I might get accepted. But now the idea of reliving any version of that charade seems like hell. — Daria Snadowsky

Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak's feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances. — Thomas Hardy

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream. — Arthur Miller

It is certainly a vulgar error, that aversion in a woman may be conquered by perseverance. Indifference may, perhaps, sometimes yield to it; but the usual triumphs gained by perseverance in a lover are over caprice, prudence, affectation, and often an exorbitant degree of levity, which excites women not over-warm in their constitutions to indulge their vanity by prolonging the time of courtship, even when they are well enough pleased with the object, and resolve (if they ever resolve at all) to make him a very pitiful amends in the end. But a fixed dislike, as I am afraid this is, will rather gather strength than be conquered by time. — Henry Fielding

I was stunned to see that he looked stunned himself, which was an exorbitant display of emotion for Barrons. — Karen Marie Moning

Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law. — John Locke

The truth of the matter is that - by an exorbitant paradox - I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire. Each wound proceeds less from a doubt than from a betrayal: for only the one who loves can betray, only the one who believes himself loved can be jealous: that the other, episodically, should fail in his being, which is to love me - that is the origin of all my woes. A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want? — Roland Barthes

I had changed my francs into drachmas on the boat; it seemed like a tremendous wad that I had stuffed into my pocket and I felt that I could meet the bill no matter how exorbitant it might be. I knew we were going to be gypped and I looked forward to it with relish. The only thing that was solidly fixed in my mind about the Greeks was that you couldn't trust them; I would have been disappointed if our guide had turned out to be magnanimous and chivalrous. — Henry Miller

I'm sure everyone feels sorry for the individual who has fallen by the wayside or who can't keep up in our competitive society, but my own compassion goes beyond that to those millions of unsung men and women, who get up every morning, send the kids to school, go to work, try to keep up the payments on their house, pay exorbitant taxes to make possible compassion for the less fortunate, and as a result have to sacrifice many of their own desires and dreams and hopes. Government owes them something better than always finding a new way to make them share the fruit of their toils with others. — Ronald Reagan

It appears she has taken an exorbitant quantity of heroin.' 'Oh dear.' I pushed my plate aside. 'What condition did she have to take it for?' 'Boredom.' He stood up. 'She has so little to do with her time since she came out of prison.' I — M.R.C. Kasasian

Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture. — Dean Koontz

We start with our consumers and spend an exorbitant amount of time talking with them, trying to figure out what's driving them, finding out where they are and how they're changing things. — Cathy O'Brien

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. — Stephen Jay Gould

Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency! — Chinua Achebe

It is certain that success naturally confirms in us a favourable opinion of our own abilities. Scarce any man is willing to allot to accident, friendship, and a thousand causes, which concur in every event without human contrivance or interposition, the part which they may justly claim in his advancement. We rate ourselves by our fortune rather than our virtues, and exorbitant claims are quickly produced by imaginary merit. — Samuel Johnson

By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization. — Robert Kuttner

Epicurus is right, that happiness is up at auction all the time, and sold in lots to suit the purchaser whenever he bids high enough. And the price is not exorbitant: prudence to plan for the simple pleasures that can be had for the asking; resolution to cut off the pleasures that come too high; determination to amputate our reflections the instant they develop morbid symptoms, and to take an anti-toxine against fret and worry, the moment we feel the approach of their contagious atmosphere; concentration, to live in a self-chosen present from which profitless regret and unprofitable anxieties, projected from the past or borrowed from the future, are absolutely banished. — William De Witt Hyde

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts.
I'm kidding, of course. — William Deresiewicz

I'm continually amazed at how even extremely high performers' lives are often still controlled in some way by their family-of-origin or in-law relationships. I wish we had some cosmic algorithm that actually revealed how much lost performance comes from people having to continually negotiate the intrusion of family-of-origin conditioning and interference into their businesses, careers, marriages, parenting styles, life choices, and the like. It literally becomes crippling to even some of the most talented people out there. In these situations, even if the adult umbilical cord is providing food, it's charging exorbitant rent. — Henry Cloud

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant. — Erma Bombeck

Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, themost rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing. — Jane Austen

So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less. — Jonathan Swift

If God brings our pets back to life, it wouldn't surprise me. It would be just like Him. It would be totally in keeping with His generous character ... Exorbitant. Excessive. Extravagant in grace after grace. Of all the dazzling discoveries and ecstatic pleasures heaven will hold for us, the potential of seeing Scrappy would be pure whimsy-utterly, joyfully, surprisingly superfluous ... Heaven is going to be a place that will refract and reflect in as many ways as possible the goodness and joy of our great God, who delights in lavishing love on His children. — Joni Eareckson Tada

The petroDollar system breaking down, where oil is no longer paid for in Dollars internationally, essentially would be the death knell to the US Dollar as the reserve currency. It means the US can't borrow with 'exorbitant privilege' anymore, and it means the US Treasury market is set for an out-of-control interest rate spiral. — Addison Wiggin

The American goes to Paris, always has, and comes back and tells his neighbor, always does, how exorbitant and inhospitable it is, how rapacious and selfish and unaccommodating and unresponsive it is, how dirty and noisy it is-and the next summer his neighbor goes to Paris. — Milton Mayer

I found myself at the beginning of 'Mad Men,' because I wasn't a sample size, spending an exorbitant amount of money on a nice dress that I would never wear again because someone would say - 'Christina Hendricks wore this dress twice.' — Christina Hendricks

The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. — Douglas MacArthur

The price of maturity is exorbitant these days. Paying for wisdom with money is one thing, but when time becomes the currency, it's your life at stake. — Anthony Marais

I have lifestyle requirements. Photos, meetings, lunches, dinners, facial care, tooth care. It requires an exorbitant amount of money. — Gary Coleman

We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder. — Willa Cather

In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that explained why taxis could charge customers exorbitant prices for dismal service. The simple reason, according to the 176-page study: lack of competition in the market. The culprit: local governments. — Marvin Ammori

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created. — Bryan Stevenson

I find it ironic that now water is more expensive than music. On the one hand, record companies can't go crying when they've gouged consumers for decades, charging exorbitant prices for CDs that cost 29 cents to make. On the other hand, when music is free, musicians starve. — Tom Morello

But now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed. — Pauline Gedge

Wild Bill had his faults, grievous ones, perhaps ... He would get drunk, gamble, and indulge in the general licentiousness characteristic of the border in the early days, yet even when full of the vile libel of the name of whiskey which was dealt over the bars at exorbitant prices, he was gentle as a child, unless aroused to anger by intended insults ... He was loyal in his friendship, generous to a fault, and invariably espoused the cause of the weaker against the stronger one in a quarrel. — Jack Crawford

If you suppress the exorbitant love of pleasure and money, idle curiosity, iniquitous pursuits and wanton mirth, what a stillness would there be in the greatest cities. — Jean De La Bruyere

We are a generation of lovers who long to be loved. We spend exorbitant amounts of money to compel others to delight in us. We construct our ideal life on Facebook because we are unsatisfied with our real life, which is tainted with boredom, loneliness, insecurity, and a lack of friends and followers . We do not enjoy the person God created us to be or the life God has gifted us with. We think we are overweight, underweight, too pale, too dark, too plain, or just plain boring. Yet we crave to be delighted in by a significant other. So we pursue misguided avenues to make ourselves delightful, to satisfy our craving to be loved.
Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (pp. 118-119). — Preston Sprinkle