Not Meddling Quotes & Sayings

Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln's firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes's letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them. — Louis Menand

Oberon could not speak for the burning anger on is tongue. Instead, he drew back his mighty fist and would have knocked his captain clean off the wall, down on the jagged rocks below...
Only suddenly, standing between him and his prey was the gloriously golden image of his wife smiling sweetly up at him.
"Really, darling, such a display. And so public too!" she said, laughing like the ringing of a bell chorus. "What will all the little ones think?'
"Out of my way, Titania!" Oberon bellowed. "Puck has told me of your part in all this nonsense, and I'll be dealing with you next!"
But Titania had seen too many of her husband's tempers over the long centuries of their marriage to mind him much now. "Don't be ridiculous," she said lightly, tapping him on the nose with one long, elegant finger. 'Do you really want to stand in the way of true love? When you start meddling with people's hearts, things never go well, as everyone knows. — Camryn Lockhart

That's precisely what the governing body should NOT do - manage every detail of their lives. We are not their meddling grandmothers; we exist to keep them safe so they can make their own decisions, resolve their own problems, and live their own lives as their conscience dictates. We are NOT to become that conscience. — Trish Mercer

It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person. — Charles Dickens

We would not have our country's vigour exhausted or her moral force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel, great and small, which afflicts the world. — Henry Cabot Lodge

When men do not know their assignment on earth they kill themselves psychologically and emotionally, wallowing in different careers and meddling in dreams of others. They become restless and engage in unhealthy competition - living unfulfilled lives — Bernard Kelvin Clive

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me. — Jonathan Evison

Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns. — Plato

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle. — William Faulkner

Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. — Yuval Levin

Will you stop meddling in my love life?" I growled.
"I'm not meddling. I'm offering commentary. — Ilona Andrews

It was a bit late to repair the damage, but Harry swore to himself not to meddle in things that weren't his business from now on. He'd had it with sneaking around and spying. — J.K. Rowling

Meddling, smug, stupid little ... "
"She likes me! They always play hard to get when they like me!"
"No. You do not understand. I could not have done it because I can not read or write. — Darren Shan

...the leader must 1) avoid getting swamped in detail; 2) not be petty; 3) not be pompous; 4) know how to select people to fit the task; 5) trust others to do a job without the leader's meddling; 6) be capable of clear decisions; 7) inspire confidence. — J. Oswald Sanders

Speak not to me of the meddling Jaghut! — Ian C. Esslemont

Meddling is the evil, not indifference. — Marty Rubin

It was no ill simile by which Plato set forth the unreasonableness of a philosopher's meddling with government. 'If a man,' says he, 'were to see a great company run out every day into the rain and take delight in being wet - if he knew that it would be to no purpose for him to go and persuade them to return to their houses in order to avoid the storm, and that all that could be expected by his going to speak to them would be that he himself should be as wet as they, it would be best for him to keep within doors, and, since he had not influence enough to correct other people's folly, to take care to preserve himself.' "Though, — Thomas More

Not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysicks, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick. — Robert Hooke

Thank you," she whispered. "I promise I will not interfere in Court business again."
"Oh yes, you will."
Zouelle looked up to see her uncle regarding her with a sad little smile.
"You decided that you were ready to start meddling in the great game. I really hope you were right, Zouelle, because once you start playing it you can never leave. You are in the game now, my dear. There is no going back. — Frances Hardinge

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy. — George Washington

Don't cross me Scooby-Doo. I'm not an old man in a mask waiting to be thwarted by you meddling kids. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

They were the sort who berated a man for meddling and chased him away, then berated him again for not being there when he was needed. Not that they would admit he was needed, even then, not them. Raise a hand to help and you were interfering, do nothing and you were an un-trustworthy wastrel. — Robert Jordan

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. — Marcus Aurelius

The government should stop meddling in the business of the farmers, who would actually still be living ina desert if not for government meddling. — Jon Stewart

Oh, no," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. "Not that. That's meddling with things you don't understand."
"Well, we are wizards," said Ridcully. "We're supposed to meddle in things we don't understand. If we hung around waitin' till we understood things we'd never get anything done. — Terry Pratchett

One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an "island of freedom" where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five. What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit's senior management. — Eric Ries

You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do - merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. — Dorothy L. Sayers

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination. — Thrity Umrigar

I make my way to the cave and notice a silhouette at the lip of the cavern. Kiaran. "Let me guess," I say, drawing nearer, "your sister told you where to find me."

His smile isn't visible in the darkness, but I can hear it when he speaks. "On the contrary," he says. "She told me I looked like I needed fresh air. It wasn't until I saw you that I realized she decided to engage in her second-favorite hobby."

"Subterfuge?"

"I was going to say meddling, but you're not wrong. — Elizabeth May

It was not his nature to believe that he should engage in any kind of meddling or become actively involved in politics. His vocation lay in the fulfillment of a poetic mission, and he wanted to carry that mission out to the last detail, conscientiously and freely. In this sense he cursed "the disturbance of war," not because he overvalued his cultural role and saw his special poetic work endangered but because to him, in the final analysis, war meant the victory of barbarism, with the result that any kind of cultural work -- and therefore his, too -- could become involved in a bloody power struggle and be destroyed. — Carola Giedion-Welcker

The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you're a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your "kind", and neighbours who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation. — Max Gladstone

The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). — Robert Hooke

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear. — Thomas Babington Macaulay

Advocates of Strict Father morality show such a resentment of illegitimate authority, not just toward meddling parents but toward any moral authority seen to be illegitimately meddling in their lives. The federal government is a common target. We regularly hear arguments that the federal government doesn't know what's best for people, that people know what's best for themselves, and that the government is not acting in the interests of ordinary people. Therefore, federal authority should be shifted to local governments or eliminated altogether. It — George Lakoff

The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it. — Roger Angell

My primary pastoral work had to do with Scripture and prayer. I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman or child. That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural. Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer- helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer. This turned out to be slow work. From time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results. But after a while it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people's lives than helping them attend to God. More often than not I found myself getting in the way of what the Holy Spirit had been doing long before I arrived on the scene, so I would go back, feeling a bit chastised, to my proper work: Scripture and prayer; prayer and Scripture. — Eugene H. Peterson

Mature citizens have to sink or swim by themselves. Citizens are on their own and have to prove their responsibility and self-reliance. They have become the leaders in their own family units (or local communities). They have to, and are competent to, make their own decisions. They have to protect themselves and their families (or communities). They know what is good for them better than their government, which is distant from them. A good government does not meddle or interfere in their lives. Any governmental meddling or interfering is strongly resented. Here — George Lakoff

Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves onevery occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us. — George Canning

Government is not the creator but the creature of human society. The Government has no mission from God to make the community, on the contrary the community is determined by Providence, where it is happily determined for us by far other causes than the meddling of governments - by historical causes in the distant past, by vital ideas, propagated by great individual minds - especially by the church and its doctrines. The only communities which have had their characters manufactured for them by governments have had a villainously bad character. Noble races make their governments. Ignoble ones are made by them. The — Clyde N. Wilson

The world will not alter for all your meddling. — Moliere

But if it is love, real love, then I want them to find each other. Because I believe that love is an overwhelming, all-consuming force, and when it's genuine you can't really ignore it. No matter how long it takes. It knocks down your door by force. It keeps you awake at night. It plagues your thoughts and burn your soul. If it is love, they won't need me at all. By telling my daughter that the man of her dreams loves her too, would I not be getting in the way? Meddling with fate? — Jessica Thompson

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. — Anonymous

We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice. — Plato

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill. — Edmund Burke

Have we reached the point where my intervention will not get me shouted at for being a meddling tomcat who doesn't respect the boundaries of others?" Tybalt stepped out of the shadows behind the Candela, tightening his hand around her throat. "I ask to be polite, you realize. There's no way I'm walking away. — Seanan McGuire

We're not going to meddle in the internal life of other peoples and other governments, because we don't want them meddling in ours. — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador