Invasive Quotes & Sayings

They were in a trench sliding through a forest of corn. Machine stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words - "invasive species" - rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it. — Joe Hill

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay ... cats were all about using people — Jonathan Franzen

The Hollywood culture is so invasive, and I definitely wanted to be near it eventually. — Carmen Ejogo

My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story. — Edmund White

The problem is that after two centuries of conflict about just who was wanted in the Australian nation the term 'Australia' both includes and excludes. There are still people for whom 'Australian' means predominatly Anglo-Celtic white people whose parents were born here before 'New Australians' came as migrants after the Second World War. A common alternative to 'white people' (who from an Aboriginal perspective might be more genially called 'whitefellas') is 'Europeans'. This makes an incongruous appeal to history. Politically the colonisers were British, but they includes people of many nationalities. It's an odd usage, as when you see a sign in a national park telling you 'Europeans' brought the invasive weeds and pests. They brought the sign and the concept of a park too, and 'they', in a complex sense, are 'us'. — Nicholas Jose

General Hayden knows full well the powerful and invasive nature of metadata. — Rand Paul

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug. — Terence McKenna

[H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian. — Glenn Greenwald

Novel technologies for delivering .. vaccines can certainly find a market if they are more effective, less costly, less invasive or more convenient to use than the alternatives. — Robert J. Eaton

Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders. — Richard Preston

Punker, what's compassion for a world this far gone? The streets don't give a fuck. It's a bummer, your care slides down its target like beads of rain on rock. There's no aquifer for any shit like this. Where does compassion go and can it be returned? You're Donn in this world, with the staff and the purple band. The artificer. Walking the bandoned suites of hell and your eyeballs thinking, what can be saved? Not their gear but its aspects. You started kung fu way later than the rest, and before that you saw compassion in a history spiel. Now it keeps washing up on your shore. Giving a shit might be made of parts, it might be made solo. It might be an invasive species or not. Punks evolved from dinos too. Not even cross time and distance. But the spikes on their heads are the same. — Noah Wareness

We're involved in a very large study that's federally funded and being done with Kaiser Permanente, and saliva is a very non-invasive way to get cells from the body. — Elizabeth Blackburn

It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence. — Terry Pratchett

Initially, after David's diagnosis, I would cringe when I read
books or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer had
been a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured be
viewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapy
and radiation: a gift?
Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand and
say, "If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, then
it was all worth it." And I'd reluctantly agree that cancer had been a
gift in our lives. We'd both seen the other alternative: patients and
survivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of us
wanted to become that. — Mary Potter Kenyon

Aquatic invasive species are destroying the environment, damaging fisheries, and costing American taxpayers billions of dollars annually. — John M. McHugh

Even someone as lowly as an assistant U.S. attorney has to undergo a background check, and you're asked a series of very invasive questions, and you're expected to tell the truth and they're under penalty of perjury. And you're asked those questions so you can't be blackmailed or extorted. — Trey Gowdy

One instance of this failure is the case of smoke, as well as air pollution generally. In so far as the outpouring of smoke by factories pollutes the air and damages the persons and property of others, it is an invasive act. It is equivalent to an act of vandalism and in a truly free society would have been punished after court action brought by the victims. Air pollution, then, is not an example of a defect in a system of absolute property rights, but of failure on the part of the government to preserve property rights. Note that the remedy, in a free society, is not the creation of an administrative State bureau to prescribe regulations for smoke control. The remedy is judicial action to punish and proscribe pollution damage to the person and property of others.48 In — Murray N. Rothbard

The intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. — William James

As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized - let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don't necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation - a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor's office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist - in front of an audience. — Knute Berger

Measuring someone is borderline invasive. You have to touch them and record their physical presence in the world. It's a pretty specific way to understand someone. — Susan Juby

The God content of the past no longer sustains the contemporary spirit. We sense that our only hope is to journey past those definitions of a God who is external, supernatural, and invasive, which previously defined our belief. We must discover whether or not the death of the God we worshiped yesterday is the same thing as the death of God. — John Shelby Spong

I try not to be too invasive into my personal life. When I was younger, I used to tweet a lot, everything I was doing and feeling. I can't do that anymore, because it's just giving people too much room to judge. — Kendall Jenner

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data. — Douglas Rushkoff

Anderson takes a shuddering breath, forcing away the memories. She is the opposite of the invasive plagues he fights every day. A hothouse flower, dropped into a world too harsh for her delicate heritage. It seems unlikely that she will survive for long. Not in this climate. Not with these people. Perhaps it was that vulnerability that moved him, her pretended strength when she had nothing at all. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates. — Emma Goldman

I do get clocked. But it's not invasive to the point where it's upsetting. It doesn't encroach. — Clive Owen

Do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven't already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can't eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions. — John Green

Psychotherapy consists of deciphering the code and bringing the flag, or symptoms, down in the process. By contrast, medications only suppress symptoms. They are like crutches or Band-Aids. By themselves, they are never a cure. As such, they should be used only as adjuncts to the real healing, aids used to buy time and protect the healing process. Since medications entail risks and dangers, they should be used only when truly necessary. The least invasive medication should always be chosen, and even then, medication should be used judiciously. — Joseph Glenmullen

The most powerful medicine on the face of the Earth is not drug medications, dietary supplements, or invasive therapies; rather, it is a healthy lifestyle. — Getty Israel

The nude thing, I don't know. It's sillier somehow. It's more like physical comedy. But kissing someone, it feels invasive to have everybody watching me. — Ilana Glazer

Informed consent is required for every invasive medical procedure, from getting your ears pierced to having an abortion. — Bob McDonnell

You have the power to treat your own pain, and you can do it without surgery, drugs, or other invasive interventions. — Jed Diamond

A supposedly daring insight came up, disguised as a question: Dr. Cole, aren't humans the most invasive species of all? She'd fielded that one many times before, during public lectures and even in her days as a teaching assistant [...] 'I'm not unsympathetic to that line of thinking,' she answered, 'but even if it's true, we're also the only species in any position to do anything about it. — Joe Pitkin

In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana's bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They'd go home eaten. Much to everyone's disappointment, Congress didn't follow through on the plan, and today America lives a cursed life - a beef life, with nary a free-range hippo within the borders of our country. — Sarah Gailey

Boys' aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a medical problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are "out of control" or "sick," rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys' invasive or aggressive behavior "because it means they really like you," an approach that prepares both boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless. — Lundy Bancroft

We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers. The New Yorkers have been coming here for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc. The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. — Dave Barry

Envy grew like a cancer, deep and invasive. — J. Lynn

Our oceans are facing innumerable threats - from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species - yet we haven't had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

He was the kind of guy who dragged you out of the lake, shoved you down on the ground, growling and groping you, telling you all the dirty things he wanted to do to you ... and then he did them. No-holds-barred, invasive, mind-numbing, disturbingly awesome things. — Madeline Sheehan

It's the shock of the world if you allow yourself to disconnect from the world and forget it's out there, how noisy it is, how busy it is, how invasive it is. — Terry Gilliam

I haven't had a lot of 'Games Of Thrones' groupies. The fans seem to be really nice. They don't seem that invasive. — Alfie Allen

This minimally invasive approach to hysteropexy involves laparoscopic plication of the round ligaments to the rectus sheath. A case series by O'Brien and Ibrahim (1994) of nine postmenopausal women with "moderate or marked" uterovaginal prolapse who underwent laparoscopic ventrosuspension provide discouraging results with 89% of women experiencing complete recurrence within 3 months, all of whom required additional surgery. Other authors have reported success with this procedure (Lin et al., 2005), although most literature focuses on uterosacral ligament plication and sacrohysteropexy, which are thought to provide more durable and anatomic repairs. — Mark D. Walters

You will need to verify your identity with a sacrifice."
"Didn't you ever hear of retina scans? Maybe fingerprints? Something less invasive? — J.T. Bock

We are constantly driven to believe that women should look a set age or be a certain body size, which is fuelling an obsession with ever more dramatic and invasive steps. — Marie Helvin

Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions? — Sarah Stillman

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow. — Geraldine Brooks

War is being waged all across the country against the invasive plant and animal species - some 50,000 of them - now spreading across the U.S. — Nancy Gibbs

Fuck. Fuck! He made sense. It was Asshole Invasive Sense (yes, meriting capital letters), but it was still sense. — Kristen Ashley

The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society. — Richard Grossman

Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren't we all? — Teju Cole

If Senator Rubio were doing his job and in Congress more, he might know that the program [phone records of a potential terrorist cause] continues. It's been ongoing for the last six months. So the Paris tragedy, this tragedy happened while we were still doing bulk collection, all bulk collection. Also in France, they have a program a thousand-fold more invasive, collecting all of the data of all of the French. — Rand Paul

Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators. — Richard Preston

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer. — Mary Oliver

Shall we upon the footing of our land
Send fair-play orders, and make compromise,
Insinuation, parley, and base truce,
To arms invasive? — William Shakespeare

The frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth ... No one would ask a man such a personally invasive question as "Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?" But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited. — Jean Marzollo

One reason we would use plant medicine: to be able to take care of the body as a whole. Another reason is that it is accessible, approachable, and requires few invasive methods. — Karen Rose

Sometimes there are paparazzi that take photos and you don't know they're there. So you're laughing, kicking up your heels and doing silly things. You don't even realize it. And then there's other times where they're two feet away from your face and it's invasive and it feels threatening, so you don't want to be smiling. — Dianna Agron

This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will ... — Benjamin Tucker

Brett: Husband! Father of my child! Dance partner, emergency grilled-cheese maker. The kind of fellow who knows how to pick the wine. The kind of fellow who looks great in a tux. Also a zombie-tux. The guy with the generous laugh and the glorious whistle. The guy who has the answer. The man who makes my child laugh till he falls down. The man who makes me laugh till I fall down. The guy who lets me ask all sorts of invasive, inappropriate, and intrusive questions about being a guy. The man who read and reread and reread and then reread, and not only gave advice, but gave me a bourbon app. You're it, baby. Thanks for marrying me. Two words, always. — Gillian Flynn

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with "good" bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go "bad", and those with "bad" bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have "good" bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle. — Golda Poretsky

I'd never go on a reality show - it's too invasive. — Paloma Faith

The Ocean Health Index is like the thermometer of the ocean. It will allow us to take the temperature to know what is going on at the global level, trying to integrate different impacts, including overfishing, invasive species, coastal development, and climate change. — Enric Sala

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen. — J.P. Delaney

My bottom belly was gone! I'd contemplated having that thing sucked out many times, but if you've ever had a face-lift and a brow lift and felt the pain of that, it makes you pause before doing anything else too invasive. — Adena Halpern

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I'm afraid that that person is you. — Austin Grossman

The pop culture has become more frenetic. There are more forces at work that are far more invasive. However, I think it would be perfectly doable to defend ones loved ones from some of the harsher aspects of public life. You're not going to be a 100% successful. But you can see when it's on purpose. It's so blatantly easy to avoid at times and you can tell when it was unavoidable. — Mel Gibson

When Islam swept out of the Arabian Peninsula, it became an invasive species to both the pagan and Christian areas it conquered. With it came the sexual practices of a very patriarchal, polygamist culture. While the religions it displaced were not particularly sex positive, Islamic sexual practices, on the whole, were uniformly sex negative. — Darrel Ray

I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate. — Andy Harper

By adopting programs to distribute substantial amounts of income, a nation guarantees that its government will become more powerful and invasive in other ways. — Robert Higgs

Her keyboard. "There," she said eventually. "Bringing up real-time scan." The display changed to a zoomed-in view of the Animus penetration around the object, as several of the tendrils of the black fluid crept toward it. Creed's eyes widened as just a moment later he saw the Animus shrink away from the object. It was impossible to say whether it had been driven back or had recoiled voluntarily, but the reason was at least clear why this tiny part of Malpense's brain had remained free of Animus. Unfortunately, it left them no closer to understanding what the object was. That would require an invasive, — Mark Walden

Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ' invasion, but a minimum of pain. — Benjamin Tucker

Invasive plants were like all evil things; the only way to ensure that they wouldn't return was to face them head-on, battle it out, and win. Anything else was only a temporary fix. I sighed, thinking of my own life. I was letting the weeds grow all over me. They were threatening my happiness and, in some ways, my life. So why couldn't I face them? — Sarah Jio

It's that invasive and puerile curiosity to feed a tabloid culture. I don't subscribe to it. — John Byrne

And no one wants to be noticed because of something like that; it's like being an invasive species that no one pays any attention to until you've strangled and ruined all the beautiful native plants. The — Jasmine Warga

Love, she reflected bitterly, wasn't something you bargained with or negotiated with ... it lived by its own rules. Love appeared when you didn't want it and refused to go. It was like an invasive species that entered your garden without warning, and proceeded to grow wildly out of control, resistant to every method employed to kill it.
Basically, love was pigweed. — Lisa Kleypas

It is interesting that the rhetoric and some state initiatives of multiculturalism in the West are accompanied by the gathering strength of right wing politics....Everywhere in the West 'immigration,' a euphemistic expression for racist labor and citizenship policies, has become a major election platform....The media and some members of the Canadian intelligentsia speak in terms of the end of 'Canadian culture,' displaying signs of feeling threatened by these 'others,' who are portrayed as an invasive force. In the meantime, Western capital roves in a world without borders, with trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA ensuring their legal predations, while labour from third world countries is both locked in their national spaces and locked out from Western countries, marked by a discourse of illegality and alienness. — Himani Bannerji

Aspects that we consider normal today could very well be repugnant in the future - eating animals, for one thing, or abundant choice, or invasive surgery. I was simply trying to demonstrate that what is acceptable today may not be acceptable forever, and vice-versa. — Jasper Fforde

Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer's. — J. Thomas LaMont

Whether by pill or invasive surgery, abortion is never good for women. — Janet Parshall

Her entire life has been devoted to healing the deepest, most invasive unseeable scar that one can ever have. — Tori Amos

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world. — Patti Smith