Mitigating Quotes & Sayings

Those mitigating circumstances could just as well be mentioned if the thinker thought it worth the trouble. From the standpoint of human relations it is worth vastly more than the trouble it takes. The little sympathy or appreciation, coming first, puts the thinkers in the same camp with the feeling types, and the feeling types' desire to stay in the same camp will keep them agreeing with the thinkers as far as possible. — Isabel Briggs Myers

Business cycles naturally entail peaks and troughs in employment, and socially responsible businesses should follow successful examples like Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Saudi Aramco, Africa Rainbow Minerals, and Google in working toward mitigating joblessness and enhancing people's abilities to earn a livelihood. — Klaus Schwab

In fact, man has been able to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating the obstructive forces that came from the higher region of his humanity. — Rabindranath Tagore

How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity? — Michel Foucault

Pro-active good governance aims beyond short-term requirement keeping in mind the long-term needs such as the use of clean technology and in preparedness and mitigating climate change fallout etc. — Narendra Modi

The origins of these [schooling] federal policies were tied to President Johnson's war on poverty. Supplemental funds were sent to school districts serving poor children to compensate for issues related to poverty. Since the enactment of NCLB, the focus on mitigating poverty has been replaced by a focus on accountability as measured by test scores. — Pedro Noguera

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred. — Frank Herbert

The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair. This is everywhere apparent, most clearly in despair at its maximum and minimum. The devil's despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse. Therefore, his despair is the most absolute defiance ... — Soren Kierkegaard

Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. — Mary Karr

How can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America's postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the most vulnerable among us? In — Yuval Levin

The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States. — John Maynard Keynes

I am afraid that it would be a mockery of justice if the death penalty is not imposed. And therefore I pleaded that there are maximum aggravating circumstances, which supersede the mitigating circumstances. And there is not a single mitigating circumstance which speaks in favor of the accused, and therefore all the accused deserve (the) death penalty. — Ujjwal Nikam

Quite ironically, the answer to ineffective philanthropy is more of it: the failure of philanthropy is its own success. The perceived necessity - even the indispensability - of a donor like the Gates Foundation grows in proportion to its own inability to achieve the unachievable: mitigating the very inequalities that its own presence might be inadvertently compounding. — Linsey McGoey

The handling of our forests as a continuous, renewable resource means permanent employment and stability to our country life. The forests are also needed for mitigating extreme climatic fluctuations, holding the soil on the slopes, retaining the moisture in the ground, and controlling the equable flow of water in our streams. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

One of the mitigating benefits of children is that they make a Lego habit more respectable. — Jonathan V. Last

But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck. — Scott Stossel

Even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it's still worth mitigating. — Nicholas Kristof

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer's benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office. — Ayn Rand

Drama, it would be as if you wrote some poetry. You'd run the risk of being embarrassed if people read it, because you're pouring your heart out and you're not mitigating it with any humor or anything. — Woody Allen

Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer. — Majora Carter

You must provide more benefits and fewer costs and risks than the other choices your manager has. Most people seeking a promotion pay more attention to promising benefits than they do to alleviating costs and mitigating risks, but all three are critical in any decision to promote from within. — Anonymous

While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

...[I]t doesn't take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it. To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence. From this perspective, wages aren't what they are because one party (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. Good people are those who get a gold star from their teacher in elementary school, a fat acceptance letter from a good college, and a good life when they graduate. All because they are the best. Those who don't pay attention in high school get to spend their days picking up discarded cans by the side of the road. Both outcomes are our own doing. — Thomas Frank

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. — Sam Harris

The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger. Keeping climate at 1990 levels, assuming it could be done, would leave more than 90 per cent of human mortality causes untouched. — Matt Ridley

Technology transforms people's lives. From mitigating poverty to simplifying processes, ending corruption to providing better services, Technology is omnipresent. It has become the single-most important instrument of human progress. — Narendra Modi

It's so much easier to count our disadvantages than tot up the mitigating circumstances that generally outweigh the despair. — Mariella Frostrup

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant. — Mark Twain

All human beings are inherently good, so when someone goes off the rails, there must be some mitigating factor - he was bullied, was a loner, had an abusive father, or a domineering mother, etc. — Ray Comfort

To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. When an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and money, but to squander them. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Ohhhhh Je-sus you're wet. Oh fuck, you're so wet, baby. Are you serious with this? It's all over your legs."
She blurted the words without thinking.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Before trying to do something mitigating, like closing her legs. Doing so proved hard, however, with him almost between them and his big hands refusing to move from her thighs.
And he looked so ... so incredulous too.
"Don't be sorry. Don't. You should know it's hot as fuck that you're like this. Seriously." He paused. Seemed to consider, before continuing. "You always like this? — Charlotte Stein

If progressives were interested in mitigating inequality, they would support the dynamism of free markets to allow the merit of ideas, products and services to win the day rather than stifle companies and pick winners in the name of imagined 'progress.' — David Harsanyi

There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. — Terry Pratchett

Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers. — Philippe Lejeune

Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That's when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away — John Beddington

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now? — Nick Hornby

Cognitive neuroscience, and social theorists from Weber to Bourdieu, have recognized that humans act, most of the time, habitually, not reflectively. Both at intrastate and inter-states levels, habits play critical roles in mitigating uncertainty, providing a sense of order, and entrench patterns of cooperation or enmity. — Nayef Al-Rodhan

We have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we've got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it — John Beddington

I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time. I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors. — Lisa Cholodenko

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes. — James Fenimore Cooper

The steam-engine in its manifold applications, the crime-decreasing gas-lamp, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, the law of storms and rules for the mariner's guidance in them, the power of rendering surgical operations painless, the measures for preserving public health, and for preventing or mitigating epidemics,-such are among the more important practical results of pure scientific research, with which mankind have been blessed and States enriched. — Richard Owen