Not Single Or Taken Quotes & Sayings

You can use the [Barack] Obama administration as a recent example. For seven years they've been unopposed. The Republican Party's not trying to stop 'em on a single thing. Much of Obama's agenda has been a success. He has been able to attack various traditions, institutions, and taken over the health care system in this country. They've taken over the student loan, they've taken over the education system, and everybody in it is miserable and unhappy. — Rush Limbaugh

We have taken a strategic decision to gather education activities under a single roof. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan

I heard the opening bar of 'Help' as I headed down Polk Street. Every single time I've heard that tune I've taken it as some message from God, a warning of things to come, a perfect description of my mashed-potato character — Oscar Zeta Acosta

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. — D. A. Carson

Looking back, perhaps the single biggest problem was fear. Fear of failure, fear of other people, but mostly fear of myself. It has taken sixty years to discover who I really am. It's never too late to find yourself however lost you may be. — Lynda Bellingham

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus" - the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient - today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination - the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801. — Richard Preston

What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable & tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & falacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend. — George Washington

So your luck still holds with women, too." Ryne's laugh had an edge. Perhaps he fancied her himself. "The Light knows, they can't find you handsome; you get uglier every year. Maybe I ought to try some of that coy modesty, let women lead me by the nose." Lan opened his mouth, then took a drink instead of speaking. He should not have to explain, but it was too late for explanation with Ryne in any case. His father had taken him to Arafel the year Lan turned ten. The man wore a single blade on his hip instead of two on his back, yet he was Arafellin to his toenails. He actually started conversations with women who had not spoken to him first. Lan, raised by Bukama and his friends in Shienar, had been surrounded by a small community who held to Malkieri ways. If Lira did share his bed tonight, as seemed certain, she would discover there was nothing shy or retiring about him once they were abed, yet the woman chose when to enter that bed and when to leave. — Robert Jordan

Of course I didn't think I'd heard him correctly. Why would he have told me something so important now, so casually, in the middle of a street fair?
Before I could stop myself, I blurted out the first thing I thought.
"Just one?"
The look he gave me was shattering.
Given everything I knew about him, though, I'd expected him to have killed a man.
It was the fact that his having taken a single life had resulted in his banishment to the Underworld for all eternity that I found so astonishing.
"I had no idea," he said, with a dry smile, "that you were so bloodthirsty, Pierce. Should we try to find you one of those pirate costumes? — Meg Cabot

By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting - a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had
had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist - even, perhaps, a murderer - could not take away from her. — Mary Balogh

What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure. — Ray Kurzweil

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality. — Felipe Alfau

Any single path truly taken leads to all the others. What matters is choosing a starting place - where to stand and begin spinning outward. Even then, you will find that outward and inward become the same direction. The center of the wheel is everywhere. — Robin Morgan

Remember Arikos the key to humanity is simple. Live your life with purpose. They humans need goals to strive for. All of Trieg's have been taken from him by his enemies so we need to replace them with new ones that matter to him. Without goals humanity is lost and a single man can't function. Acheron had been wrong about one thing. without goals everyone was lost. Even the gods. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

( ... ) the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too. — Robert Penn Warren

The DID patient is a single person who experiences himself or herself as having separate alternate identities that have relative psychological autonomy from one another. At various times, these subjective identities may take executive control of the person's body and behavior and/or influence his or her experience and behavior from "within." Taken together, all of the alternate identities make up the identity or personality of the human being with DID.

- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p7 — James A. Chu

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right? — Jesse Andrews

If you think of every single continent there is, on every continent, there is something, a natural resource that every continent has, or sources, that they can really survive with that, or they can trade with that. But a lot of the developed nations have taken those things from those places and have claimed it and, therefore, they're dependent on those other nations. — Stevie Wonder

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. — Karl Marx

I mean, that was the code, wasn't it? Single girls and taken guys weren't allowed to be friends. The leash always got in the way. — Carrie Butler

It's exciting to look back at the work that I've done and not have a single regret about a job I've taken. I feel really proud of every film I've been a part of. Big or small role, I feel like it was the right choices. — Ari Graynor

People, at their core, are inherently bad. Do you know this? Do you know that if someone drops their wallet, and you return it to them, you are rare? Some would say, stupid. Some would say that person's wallet was a gift from god to you and you should have taken it and the money in it. It's yours now. It's not anything to do with survival. It's self-entitlement, lack of morality. People do this without remorse or guilt. Every single day. People kill, hurt, maim, rape, without remorse or guilt. Every day. — Karina Halle

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written. — Sherwood Anderson

By massed practice we mean the single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you're trying to burn into memory, the "practice-practice-practice" of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time. — Peter C. Brown

Industrial agriculture, built according to the single standard of productivity, has dealt with nature, including human nature, in the manner of a monologist or an orator. It has not asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has told nature what it wanted, and in various clever ways has taken what it wanted. And since it proposed no limit on its wants, exhaustion has been its inevitable and foreseeable result. This, clearly, is a dictatorial or totalitarian form of behavior, and it is as totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature. Its connections to the world and to humans and the other creatures become more and more abstract, as its economy, its authority, and its power become more and more centralized. — Wendell Berry

Their willingness to help others is arguably the single most important trait that defines them as Newfoundlanders. Today, it is an identity they cling to, in part, because it is something that cannot be taken away from them. — Jim DeFede

One afternoon I lay on my bed, inert with mental fatigue, enumerating my many frustrations with the country & with the task I had set myself. It had taken me months of work to get this far, & every step of the way I felt I was pushing against some mighty, unspoken resistance. Time & time again I had felt that hardly a fact or a single item of information had been volunteered; every day I made half a dozen telephone calls; I trekked out to interview anyone who would talk to me, then found myself returning to the same place to ask for more information--questions I had omitted to ask, chase details they did not think, or perhaps wish, to supply. This was as true of people who had no reason to dissemble as of those who did. — Aminatta Forna

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It's called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion. — Yuval Noah Harari

Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death. — T. S. Eliot

The best man, then, must legislate, and laws must be passed, but these laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in all other cases retaining their authority. But when the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments an relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual. — Aristotle.

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success. In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth. You can develop those ideas, execute on them, and choose yourself for success. — James Altucher

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil. — Ayn Rand

To the extent that genomes can be thought of as compressed encodings of biological structures, they are spectacularly efficient. All the trillions of cells in the human body-not just the tens of billions in the brain-are guided in one way or another by the information contained in 30,000 or so genes. The best high-quality set of pictures of the body- the National Institutes of Health Visible Human Project, a series of high-resolution digital photos of slices taken from volunteer Joseph Paul Jernigan (deceased)-takes up about 60 gigabytes, enough (if left uncompressed) to fill about 100 CD-ROMs-and still not enough detail to capture individual cells. The genome, in contrast, contains only about 3 billion nucleotides, the equivalent (at two bits per nucleotide) of less than two-thirds of a gigabyte, or a single CD-ROM. — Gary F. Marcus

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees. — Trish Deseine

Running has taken me on adventures great and small, at home and around the world. It has provided me with hope and perseverance on days when I had none-and even, once every great while, warmed me with that fleeting ray of sunshine known as glory. Running has taught me that I can do anything, just so long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes that notion is metaphorical and sometimes not. In this way, I have been inspired to attempt things I would have never dreamed possible. And it all started with a single step. — Martin Dugard

Our lives are made of these moments. Simple words and actions, taken together, weave a single day, and our days become our life. Every gesture is a seed, and the seed determines the harvest. — Wayne Muller

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally. — Bill Gates

It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store? — Milton Friedman

Thank heavens when the first single Bye Bye came off this album work started to pick up, then I'm Alright has taken us across the world. Radio has been very good, it has chosen to be kind to us. — Jo Dee Messina

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130. — Ian Fleming

Every big castle was once started with a single block; despise no small beginnings. A little step taken every day builds up the hope of greater accomplishments. Do something every day! — Israelmore Ayivor

The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It's called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion. The — Yuval Noah Harari

We had a single find of BSE in this country. And we believe that what we're doing is appropriate action taken in an abundance of caution under the circumstances. And I believe it's the right thing to do. — Ann Veneman

How women dressed every single day back in those days is seen as kind of incredible - it must have taken so much time. But there's something so romantic about that because it's so different to how we dress. That aesthetic is so appealing, it's not what we're used to nowadays. — Lily Collins

Whether you have been sent to see the principle of your school for throwing wet paper towels at the ceiling to see if they stick or taken to the dentist to plead with him to hollow out one of your teeth so you can smuggle a single page of your latest book past the guards at the airport, it is never a pleasant feeling to stand outside the door of an office ... — Lemony Snicket

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world's population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil! — Jarett Kobek

No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty. — Albrecht Durer

The Chinese have certain advantages. The fact that it's a single party government. But I do believe in the long run the fact that India is a functioning democracy committed to the rule of law. Our system is slow to move but I'm confident that once decisions are taken they are going to be far more durable. — Manmohan Singh

The toll from the two attacks: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan's potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership - stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor's office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage. — Anand Gopal

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen

I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs in my life and I never will, over the course of my career I have taken hundreds of drugs tests and every single one has been negative. — Mohamed Farah

Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn't have to make conversation. — Kate Christensen

All of a sudden it seemed as if I could smell the brain, and not in a oh-how-gross way, but as if someone had taken the lid off a pot of gumbo to let the aroma fill the room. And I knew it was the brain that smelled so utterly enticing - knew it with every single cell of my being.
What the hell was wrong with me? — Diana Rowland

I had been told by a number of people that if you get half of what you want on your first album, you're doing really well. Pretty much every single thing they had was something that I liked. There were maybe one or two songs I didn't like, and they were taken off the album quickly. — Clay Aiken

I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point - namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation. I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. — Carl Jung

For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company's 'I'd Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You' line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises. — Dexter Palmer

She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I've uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you're constantly running out to J. C. Penney's to buy bathmats. — Lorrie Moore

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day. — Rajneesh

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home. — LeBron James

It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones, and the saying is true if taken to mean no more than that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones at variance and cross-purposes with each other. — Abraham Lincoln