Quotes & Sayings About Making Statements

Lies of omission do not exist. The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have. If I do not volunteer information you deem critical to your fate, it possibly means that I am a scoundrel, but it does not mean that I am a liar. And it certainly means you did not ask the right questions.
One can make either true statements or false statements about reality. All of the statements I make are true. — Scratch

If I talk about coal, people will start equating my statements with a political angle. This is not a platform for politics, I'm not making any allegations on anyone. — Narendra Modi

It's just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense. — Elaine Morgan

After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See's, we've made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don't show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions. — Charlie Munger

Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements
and this is untrue. — Richard Rhodes

But you can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, "Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board." It's as though we're sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks - masters of the universe - and suddenly say, "Oops, somebody discovered something!"
No. We're always at the drawing board. If you're not at the drawing board, you're not making discoveries. You're not a scientist; you're something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

He had an AM radio playing a conservative talk show. The host was making some very interesting statements about the president. I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but from what the man said, I had to believe that sometime in the recent past the laws regarding sedition must have changed. — Jeff Lindsay

Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on. — Terry Eagleton

There was a period that black film had no chance of making it in Hollywood. So, people just made the made the statements that they wanted to make. Whether it was a science fiction film or whatever, b/c they were just making movie for themselves. Then there was a period where people were creating projects as their Hollywood audition 'pieces'. I feel that today we are moving back to the era where we all have our own voices. — Reginald Hudlin

I have lots of CDs that came out at one time or another, and according to the statements I've gotten, no one's buying them.I figured there's no need making a new CD. There are plenty of mine out there, and none of them are selling. — Mose Allison

TGIF," I said aloud even though it was only Thursday. But I was alone in my apartment as far as I knew. I deliberately avoid making whimsical incorrect statements in public. You would be surprised at how many people get irritated if you say "TGIF" on the wrong day. By "people" I mean "English professors." To most English professors it would be inconceivable to say, "Thank God it's Friday" on a Thursday. I don't know if that's because they are strict adherents to the rules of language or if they are mentally ill. — Gary Reilly

Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures. — Joel Meyerowitz

Everyone has taste, yet it is more of a taboo subject than sex or money. The reason for this is simple: claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal and financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisers, whereas by making statements about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny. Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes. Thus, while anybody will tell you as much (and perhaps more than) you want to know about their triumphs in bed and at the bank, it is taste that gets people's nerves tingling. — Stephen Bayley

Making sweeping statements such as 'no sweets ever again' has never worked before, and it's not going to work now. You'll get quickly overwhelmed and punt on any positive momentum you created. — Jude Bijou

You have more independent eyes scrutinizing the decision-making and financial statements of companies. — Steve Odland

You always hear all these statements like "Freedom isn't free." You hear the President talking about all these people making sacrifices. But you never really know until you carry one of them in a casket. When you feel their bodyweight. When you feel them. That's when you know. That's when you understand. — Jim Sheeler

I think abstraction is a very rich area. And it is upsetting that people seem to have some fear of it. I'm constantly making these statements about how you should just look at it and react to it on your own; just relax and let go. — Brice Marden

When I look at the chaotic and volatile debate right now, both in Germany and around the world, my impression and concern is that the daily barrage of proposals and political statements is making markets and consumers even more nervous. Still, Brussels is pressing for a joint European approach. — Peer Steinbruck

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that. — Mike Patton

The burden of selfhood," she sighed. "Life-long anguish. Straining to support an elaborate artifice every waking moment. Trying to maintain our bullshit personas. Haircuts, clothes. Making our big fucking statements to an indifferent world. We drink, we smoke, we squander fortunes on DVDs, anything to escape ourselves for a few blessed minutes. — Adam Baker

The place of electronic music, culturally and socially, is today completely different - it is now everywhere, and it has been totally accepted. Consequently, there is now a younger generation that is more focused on making great electronic music, good parties, and having fun, where there is not any more so much need for cultural and ideological statements in electronic music itself. — Thomas Bangalter

Once I start to do a film, it has inferences. If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you're saying something about that guy. A guy walks down the street and somebody's about to be run over and he shoves him out of his way and gets hit by the car himself, you're saying that guy's a hero. You can't avoid making certain statements. — Sydney Pollack

I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog. — Jeff Koons

But I hope that in the lives of Ender Wiggin, Novinha, Miro, Ela, Human, Jane, the hive queen, and so many others in this book, you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that counts more than bestseller lists, royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in. — Orson Scott Card

I invent, find, and borrow ways of making painterly statements, which reflect my person to the extent that I am able to reach into that core of my being. It's a kind of self-analysis that requires a balance between the rational and the intuited. — Thornton Willis

Never let a red line become the cage from which there is no escape. Constricting yourself in statements without any actions coming forth in the future in not engaging in compromise or negotiation will hang you on a tightrope by your own tongue. More talk, less squawk may just be the key to grace in unlocking a sense of mutual respect. Thumping a chest and making a threat from many a mile away from a situation is good for an ability to show off how well one can speak in broad tones. Yet, to sit down across from someone and speak to them as an equal, would go a lot further in balancing the plateau of respect shown. Maybe the red line will fly away and the need to always cling to it shall diminish with ears that truly listen to one another - A.H. Scott 3/3/14 — A.H. Scott

The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops. — George Saunders

There is no sense in making statements that will not continue to be true after they are made. — Frank Knight

I was really intrigued by them, became fascinated by them because they were asking questions that couldn't be answered almost, or were making statements that you couldn't quite understand. Like, 'I'm investigating things that begin with the letter M.' That took me through a whole stratosphere of possibilities, and doing a little research and discovered that the M is mercury. — Johnny Depp

Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children. I heard they were making statements that they were proud of losing fewer armed men than civilians. It's hard to see how they could be proud of such a situation. — Jan Egeland

I felt that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing because I was supplying a product to people that wanted it and it was accepted. I mean nobody really was making any negative statements about marijuana. — George Jung

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. — Marilyn French

I concern myself with Venezuela. However, some rightwing movements are transforming me into a pawn in the domestic politics of their countries, by making statements that are groundless. — Hugo Chavez

I almost feel like we do live in a world like 'Caprica.' The fact that it's so close to home is why it appeals to me so much. You're making statements about what's going on right now. You take Facebook and Wii and add it together, and that's what the virtual world in 'Caprica' is. — Magda Apanowicz

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly. — Eric Drooker

We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term.39 As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one's original negative self-perception they were trying to change. — Lindsey A. Holcomb

I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements. — Richard Dawkins

Unchecked expressions of anger often lead to our making negative statements that communicate to our children that we think they are unlovable. — Nancy Samalin

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. — Jackson Pollock

It's much easier to talk about following Jesus when you are making general statements rather than specific commitments. — Kyle Idleman

Most Western managers believe that long-term success flows from a state of stability, harmony, predictability, discipline, and consensus-a state that I refer to as stable equilibrium. This belief leads them to demand general prescriptions that they can immediately convert into successful action. The most popular prescriptions are to formulate a vision of an organization's future state, to prepare long-term plans to realize that vision, to set strategic milestones and monitor achievements against those plans, to write mission statements and persuade people to share the same culture, to encourage widespread participation and consensus in decision making, and to install control systems that allow top executives to set the organization's direction and stay in command. — Ralph D. Stacey

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic. — Fay Weldon

How did the hearing go?" she asked.
"We won, sort of," Kaldar said. "We die at dawn."
"The court gave the Sheeriles twenty-four hours," William corrected.
"Yes, but 'we die at dawn the day after tomorrow' doesn't sound nearly
as dramatic."
"Does it have to be dramatic all the time?" Catherine murmured.
"Of course. Everyone has a talent. Yours is crocheting and mine is
making melodramatic statements. — Ilona Andrews

The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others - usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself. — Louis MacNeice

Carl Jung never said: "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was:
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99. — C. G. Jung

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown. — Tom Stoppard

Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as
more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was
hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who
loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try
to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the
sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the
happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing
heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have
more ripely considered the thing. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply. — Sally Potter

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art. — John Hughes

I think the country could be spared a lot of agony and the government could worry about inflation and a lot of other problems if [Nixon would] go on and resign. [There is] no question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI and the CIA is an impeachable offense. — William J. Clinton

First principle: there's no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment - external or internal - and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody - so far as we can tell - agrees enough to get by, so that when I say 'Hand me the coffee' you know what to hand me. And that's reality. Second principle; people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn't fit the set of statements everybody's agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts...or they just blank it out. — Suzette Haden Elgin

I'm all for setting goals and making plans for the lives we want to become a reality. I love vision statements and life maps, but I have also discovered the power of a woman who does just one thing. — Nicki Koziarz

The German-French friendship is indispensable for Europe. And I will never let myself be carried away to making statements that would change it. — Francois Hollande

I think you've got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It's a very, very slippery slope. — Mark Cuban

Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes. — J.L. Austin

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined
perhaps even regulated
traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed a the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient
dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. — Edward W. Said

We're not making any official statements, especially when James Holden's in the room. No offense, but your track record for blurting information at inopportune moments is the stuff of legend. — James S.A. Corey

The present indicative asserts something which is occuring while the speaker is making the statement. — Spiros Zodhiates

Kids dealing with these really adult-problems. I'm making big, generalized statements but our culture doesn't acknowledge these things. Sex does lead to pregnancy! Kids don't always have an outlet or someone they can talk to about it. — Sarah Steele

I really don't think about making fashion statements. Just like any other woman or girl, I like to dress up. I think I'm fortunate enough to be dressed by some of India's best designers and to have the opportunity to wear their wonderful creations. But I have never made a conscious effort to try and be a fashion icon or something. — Sania Mirza

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word "scientism" should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I'll define as "the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority." Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's "fine-tuning" are evidence for God. — Jerry A. Coyne

In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans. — Isabella L. Bird

1. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better make sure kids can't get guns.
2. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better find out what's making these kids want to kill, fix that, and then they won't want to use guns to kill teachers and classmates.
See what I did there? Which statement makes more sense? Don't bring up politics. Don't refer to statistical data. Don't nervously look at your cell phone. Just read the two statements and be honest with yourself. We can do better. We're smarter than this. WAKE UP. — Aaron B. Powell

The various forms of education or 'normalization' imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality — Gilles Deleuze

I think, living in America, we're so bombarded with God all the time that in certain ways I'm making statements against that bombardment, you know? I think it's crazy. I mean, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything. But I still think about it. And I still write about it. — James Frey

I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be. — Chris Cornell

Power is making a statement about who you are. — Christina Aguilera

On every project, there are always areas that everyone wants to shy away from due to either the political environment or a desire for conflict avoidance. As an architect, you are responsible for asking the tough questions and raising the issues so that they can be dealt with. As you address issues, avoid making statements; instead, craft what you are seeking as a series of questions. This approach allows you to avoid presuming information to be factual and allows for a discussion to begin. Take time to qualify the questions with the context of why you are asking them. It can help defuse some of the political tensions — Anonymous

That's politics, power: it's all verbal, a continuous blizzard of words. But it's not just speaking, it's making statements. It's action; it's doing something without doing anything. — Harry Mulisch

For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead. — Douglas Murray

Baseball players practice, runners practice, so how can you practice being funny? You get up onstage. You train as an improviser, playing make-believe, using the vernacular of improvisation, saying 'yes and' to other people's ideas, making statements. — Ali Farahnakian