Negated Quotes & Sayings

Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or
most crucially of all, for a teenage girl
simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right
right, down into their clever, brilliant bones
but lonely. — Caitlin Moran

Some were Charter Mages, and there would not be time to argue rights and wrongs, so any aggressive magic he used would be countered or negated by these others, as was the nature of Charter Magic. — Garth Nix

I love the idea that an abuse can be negated. And that the things most often disabused are notions. — David Levithan

After referees negated a line change that led to Tampa Bay"s winning goal in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: After all these years in the league, am I that stupid that I would put four forwards and one defenseman in a 3-3 tie, in the third period? I think everybody that knows me here knows I"m not that stupid. I might be halfway stupid, but not that stupid. — Pat Burns

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization ... — Greg Bear

And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed? — Lauren Oliver

Let's take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? — Sara Ahmed

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Nothing negated beauty faster than boredom. — Susan Dennard

The images enhanced, then negated each other. Nothing was fixed. Nothing is any one thing really, and isn't that the beauty of it all? — Whitney Otto

The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established. — Martin Heidegger

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell. — William Styron

The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it. — Julio Cortazar

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation. — Yukio Mishima

During the time that my recording career seemed to be in a slump a music called disco came on the scene and literally took over radio stations as well as having radio stations created to play it which sort of negated my music as well as that of some of my peers. — Dionne Warwick

When you thank something negative for happening, or thank a negative thought for being there, you've just negated the negative and turned it into positive energy! — Donna Labermeier

There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre. — Alexander Cockburn

It still took years for me to let go of learned pattern's of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love but always within an unfufilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting. Care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, out right cruelty. — Bell Hooks

If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself. — Maurice Blanchot

I also had the distinct impression that, when he'd leaned into my space, he'd tried to smell me, and he'd managed to do it without coming across as a creepy creeper. Admittedly, if he were less epically good-looking, he might have come across as a creepy creeper. But, as he had the body of a gladiator and the face of a movie star, I felt flustered, flattered, and turned on. The fact that I felt flattered made me feel like an idiot. I hated this about myself. I hated that, even though I knew better, good looks negated odd behavior. His odd behavior being that he was attempting to use all five of his senses to experience me while trapping us in an elevator; I didn't doubt that, if I'd given him any indication that I was in favor of his advances, he would have tried to taste me as well. I shivered at the thought, a wave of warmth spreading from my chest to the pit of my stomach, stinging and sudden, like a hot flash. — L. H. Cosway

I see signs of it wherever
racial, gender, sexual, and class identity politics are no longer totalizing but transcended-not negated-in creative exchange with other — Victor Anderson

But there was something about Nola that negated my bullshit ability. — Devon Monk

The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment ... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?
... I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. — Michel Foucault

right at this moment, I cannot imagine it being any worse
right here, I have been turned into nothing
right now, I am negated — David Levithan

... capable of maintaining and advocating a stance which negated all that he had gleaned from his earlier clarifications. — Ernesto Spinelli

One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That's when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking. — David Bowie

Our culture, so proud of its mind-over-matter philosophy, cuts us off from our bodily experience and from the earth itself. In this severance, our sexuality is negated, our senses assaulted, our environment abused, and our power manipulated. Our ground is our form, and without it we lose our individuality. — Anodea Judith

Omnipotence is a status that is fragile at best. By its very own standard meaning of unlimited power, unlimited authority, unlimited presence, and unlimited meaning; it still follows within its own realm of self-defeat, being overwhelmingly defeated, unlimited defeat, being crippled, being negated, being surpassed, being unable to do, and etc. And of course, one can twist metalogic, add in paradoxes, add in metapotence, but it's usually as a means to maintain the belief of something so high, that it cannot be reached. Unfortunately, it's been reached, and it has been defeated by finite conditions. — Lionel Suggs

In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated. — Phillip E. Johnson

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices. — Hannah Arendt

Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency. — Jonathan Turley

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out. — Doris Lessing

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong. — Lucy Grealy

See?" my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. "We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?"
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. — Lauren Oliver

You see, natural beauty creates such excitement that the existence of the weight is negated. And once it is negated, the heavier it is to bear. — Natsuo Kirino

There are no backwaters where things can breed - our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture. — William Gibson

Vision is a difficult, precarious, and fugitive extrapolation from a very few and ambiguous moments in our earthly experience, while our idea of the negated natural goods is vivid and persistent, loaded with the memories of a lifetime, built into our nerves and muscles and therefore into our imaginations. — C.S. Lewis

The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians — Ray Bradbury

If we had to accept the idea of an independent creator, the explanations given in [several Buddhist texts] which completely refutes the existence per se of all phenomena, would be negated. — Dalai Lama

I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence. — Douglas Adams

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker