Fiefdoms Quotes & Sayings

The IMF was a more formal and less fun place to work than Treasury. The meetings were endless, with crushing bureaucracy, an intrusive and fractious executive board, an appalling amount of paper, and a lot of factional conflict among various fiefdoms. — Timothy F. Geithner

There are no musically untalented people. — Igor Levit

I'm not an outgoing person. Compared to an average person, I am quite skeptical and pessimistic. This is different from being nervous. — Kim Jee-woon

There was already a famous Sternberg in psychology and it was obvious there would not be another. — Robert Sternberg

Assimilating college sports into the university would prevent them from being run as autonomies or fiefdoms. And you don't need an NCAA bylaw or an act of Congress to do it - just an active, empowered faculty and some administrators with backbone. — Sally Jenkins

You can stretch to your fullest in this land, Emma, and not touch any edges. There's no dream too big for the wilderness. I'd hate to see it tamed and carved up into little fiefdoms. — Alice Valdal

One day you turn and "social studies" has become "Chilean fiefdoms of the fourteenth century" and that's how you know you're in college. — Sloane Crosley

Traditionally siloed technical teams interact through complex ticketing systems and ritualistic request procedures, which may require director-level intervention. A team taking a more DevOps approach talks about the product throughout its lifecycle, discussing requirements, features, schedules, resources, and whatever else might come up. The focus is on the product, not building fiefdoms and amassing political power. — Mandi Walls

The electroencephalogram represents a continuous curve with continuous oscillations in which ... one can distinguish larger first order waves with an average duration of 90 milliseconds and smaller second order waves of an average duration of 35 milliseconds. — Hans Berger

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else. — Glenn Greenwald

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything. — Meryl Streep

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor? — Kurt Vonnegut

London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where. — China Mieville

You have to realize: OK, I don't know how to solve a political problem, I don't know how to solve the pollution problem ... all I know is in my own life, I need to figure out some sense of purpose, I need to figure out how to be happy ... and I'm willing. — Jewel