Manoeuvre Quotes & Sayings

With every new manoeuvre, the light was growing dimmer
fading by numbers as well as strength
and the sound could no longer be heard, but only the pulse of it
seen going out in the darkness
losing its edges
caving in at its centre
webbing, now, as if a spider was spinning against the rain
until the last few strands of brightness fell
and were extinguished
silenced and removed from life and from all that lives forever.
And the bell tolled
but the ark, as ever, was adamant. Its shape had taken on a voice. And the voice said: no. — Timothy Findley

The more closely [the German army] converged on [Stalingrad], the narrower became their scope for tactical manoeuvre as a lever in loosening resistance. By contrast, the narrowing of the frontage made it easier for the defender to switch his local reserves to any threatened point on the defensive arc. — B.H. Liddell Hart

It was a strategic victory as bloodless for the defeated as for the victor-and the less men slain on the other side, the more potential adherents and recruits for Caesar. Despite the substitution of manoeuvre for direct assaults upon his enemy the campaign had cost him only six weeks of his time. — B.H. Liddell Hart

meant they had room to manoeuvre. But — Tom Barber

The religious lifestyle keeps you focused. It's helpful when trying to manoeuvre through the music scene. — Matisyahu

The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as 'spirituality', 'piety', 'morality', 'ethics' and 'asceticism'. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts - and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of 'religion' in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is 'culture'. — Peter Sloterdijk

I wanted this to be easy. I wanted to know for sure who I loved and why. I wanted to be in love without a hint of doubt.
But I realised that I could want as hard as I liked; the reality was already messier than I liked. I was in over my head ... and I had a panicked feeling that I wasn't going to be able to manoeuvre this without screwing up big time. — Liz Reinhardt

Lust? Who's talking about lust? You want to screw her, right? So that's your objective. All you need now is deployment of the appropriate tactics to manoeuvre her into an advantageous position and then secure your conquest. Then it's just a question of mopping up. — Simon Scarrow

The nation, and the working class, are only abstract generalizations, dogmatic concepts, nebulous
entities which can be apprehended only by a verbal manoeuvre. Both concepts are real only as verbal constructions. Their existence is rooted in language, in its internal world, but not in the external world of men. The only reality is the concretely real human being, our neighbour, whom God puts in our path and to whose actions we are directly exposed. — Gustav Janouch

The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition. — Idries Shah

Mass becomes immobile; it cannot manoeuvre and therefore cannot win victories, it can only crush by sheer weight. — Hans Von Seeckt

Every manoeuvre must be the development of a scheme; it must aim at a goal. — Ferdinand Foch

Because we inhibit the same material world and manoeuvre with languages tied to common definitions, we talk to others in the assumption that they largely share our images and conceptions. — Alain De Botton

This is how to de-fang an over-tempestuous customer!" Vicky told her sister. "This was what I was taught by Doris at the Health Centre! Once a man has been disarmed, he will go away quietly like a lamb! Or a dog, with his tail between his legs! He! He! He!" she burbled, unable to contain her mirth.
And this was how Venus outwitted Mars to save Psyche's virginity. Mars was defeated by a simple manoeuvre known in the massage parlour industry as a "Hand Job"![MMT] — Nicholas Chong

Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the "luxuriousness" of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye. — Elfriede Jelinek

Spud has two expressions: totally-scoobied-as-to-what-the-fuck's-going-on and the constantly-on-the-verge-of-tears look he is currently deploying. Assailed with self pity and self loathing, regarding his folly in sitting next to Begbie, he glances around. - Aye ... it's bad, like say, he concedes, wondering how he can manoeuvre into another seat. — Irvine Welsh

When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot. — Ken Livingstone

The Euro is a conquest of sovereignty. It gives us a margin of manoeuvre. Its a tool to help us master globalisation and help us resist irrational shifts in the market. — Dominique Strauss-Kahn

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own - they even, for God's sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, 'I want to raise some questions about so-and-so', and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. — David Lodge

Thursday morning. I usually let my Mum wake me up but today I have set my alarm for seven. Even from under my duvet, I can hear it bleating on the other side of my room. I hid it inside my plastic crate for faulty joysticks so that I would have to get out of bed, walk across the room, yank it out of the box by its lead and, only then, jab the snooze button. This was a tactical manoeuvre by my previous self. He can be very cruel. — Joe Dunthorne

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track. — Marc Guggenheim

While many lessons can be found in Frederick's campaigns, the main one would appear to be that his indirectness was too direct. To express this in another way, he regarded the indirect approach as a matter of pure manoeuvre with mobility, instead of a combination of manoeuvre with mobility and surprise. Thus, despite all his brilliance, his economy of force broke down. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Who? Mr. Dalton has his hand firmly on Grace's elbow, as though she can't manoeuvre herself through the blockade of tables and chairs.
She could fly right through you, thinks Jack. — Helen Humphreys

When people are content they are difficult to manoeuvre. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. — Russell Brand

Sometimes a single battle decides everything and sometimes, too, the slightest circumstance decides the issue of a battle. There is a moment in every battle at which the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority, as one drop of water causes overflow. — Napoleon Bonaparte

That evening Squealer explained privately to the other animals that Napoleon had never in reality been opposed to the windmill. On the contrary, it was he who had advocated it in the beginning, and the plan which Snowball had drawn on the floor of the incubator shed had actually been stolen from among Napoleon's papers. The windmill was, in fact, Napoleon's own creation. Why, then, asked somebody, had he spoken so strongly against it? Here Squealer looked very sly. That, he said, was Comrade Napoleon's cunning. He had seemed to oppose the windmill, simply as a manoeuvre to get rid of Snowball, who was a dangerous character and a bad influence. — George Orwell