Objecting Quotes & Sayings

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any. — Bernard Bailyn

Honesty has become the second best policy with your spouse ... discretions apply elsewhere — Amit Abraham

American Heritage Dictionary: "The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. . . . In general, the Usage Panel accepts the split infinitive." Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary: "Even though there has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive, the subject has become a fixture of folk belief about grammar. . . . Modern commentators . . . usually say it's all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you need to." Encarta World English Dictionary: "There is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives. — Steven Pinker

The Luidaeg sighed and put her arms around me, pulling me close. "Come here," she said. "I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It's a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are." I thought about objecting, but dismissed the idea and nestled against her, enjoying the feeling of security given by knowing someone bigger and stronger than I was would stop anything from hurting me. That's all childhood is, after all: strong arms to hold back the dark, a story to keep the shadows dancing, and a candle to mark the long journey into day. A song to keep the flights of angels at bay. How many miles to Babylon? Sorry. I don't care. — Seanan McGuire

I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the Senate is not a bathhouse. Objecting to sex discrimination being the reason for rejection of Emmy Noether's application to join the faculty at the University of Gottingen. — David Hilbert

Most people considered him quite dull and negligible, but he possessed the supreme virtue in William's eyes of not objecting to William. — Anonymous

Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective. — J. Philippe Rushton

Never do what you can't undo. — Donna Tartt

Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs. — Tama J. Kieves

Miss Tarabotti was not certain if he was objecting to the kick or the scream, so she issued both again - with interest. He seemed to be having a difficult time negotiating Alexia's multiple layers of skirts and ruffles, which formed a particularly efficacious barrier in the tight confines of the hackney. — Gail Carriger

Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested. — Octavia E. Butler

One exhibition to which Tom Norman became particularly attached was his family of midgets. It consisted of two midgets, billed as man and wife and always brought into town in a specially constructed miniature coach drawn by ponies. In each town on the tour he made a point of closing the show down for a few days so as to allow the lady midget to 'give birth to her baby'. A new-born infant would then be hired to stand in for the hypothetical offspring, and even larger queues always gathered after such a 'happy event' to see the new arrival. The only problem was the difficulty he had in restraining the 'mother' from swearing volubly, smoking a pipe and drinking gin in front of the customers. The exhibition finally came to grief when the 'mother' ran away one night, objecting to being displayed as a woman any longer, both midgets being men. — Peter Ford

It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.
The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure. — Ernst Junger

If the desert allows the trees to proliferate, the desert shall disappear! Therefore the desert has no choice but to be the enemy of the trees! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm sorry. I'm used to people objecting to things because they think I can't do them or shouldn't do them. It didn't occur to me that you might have a real reason. — Patricia C. Wrede

The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock. — Chris Hedges

What [he] is apparently objecting to is that not everyone takes his beliefs seriously. Indeed, some don't seem to respect his beliefs at all, and actually poke fun at them. Well, I have news for [him]: that's the nature of a free society. Opinions don't necessarily merit respect; they must earn respect in the marketplace of ideas. — Jeffrey Shallit

To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut oneself off from ... The child may be joyous, the man must be sober and self-denying; the child may be free, the man is to be "responsible"; the child may be candid in his feelings, the man must be polite, restrained, mindful of the demands of convention; the child may be playful, the man must be industrious. I am not necessarily objecting to the manly virtues, but I am objecting that they should be so exclusively assigned to grownups, and that grownups should be so exclusively restricted to them. A man may have all the prescribed adult virtues and, if he lacks the childhood virtues, still be a dunce and a bore and a liar. — Wendell Berry

Her not objecting, does not justify him. It only shows her being deficient in something herself
sense or feeling. — Jane Austen

That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him - rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion. — George Eliot

I'm not attacking the idea that people live in conglomerations of houses in proximity to one another, sharing the same water mains and the same newspaper delivery boy and so forth. I'm not objecting to that. That could happen with or without homeownership. — Edmund Phelps

So he had them into the slaughter house, where was a butcher killing a sheep. And behold, the sheep was quiet and took her death patiently. Then said the Interpreter, You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints. Behold how quietly she takes her death! And without objecting she suffereth her skin to be pulled over her ears. Your King doth call you his sheep. — John Bunyan

What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object? — Yann Martel

You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old. — Alexandre Dumas

"Oh!" said my aunt, "I was not aware at first to whom I had the pleasure of objecting." — Charles Dickens

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate. — Walter Lippmann

In whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal. — Benjamin Franklin

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own. — Anthony Kennedy

All dreams continue in the beyond. — Tom Robbins

Criticizing and objecting to everything means an attempt to destruction. If you do not like something, try to make something better than it. Being destructive causes ruins, while being constructive brings about prosperity. — M. Fethullah Gulen

If the Commission is to enquire into the conditions "to be observed," it is to be presumed that they will give the result of their enquiries; or, in other words, that they will lay down, or at least suggest, "rules" and "conditions to be (hereafter) observed" in the construction of bridges, or, in other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement to-morrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of to-day. [Objecting to any interference by the State with the freedom of civil engineers in the conduct of their professional work.] — Isambard Kingdom Brunel

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands. — Wendell Berry

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803] — James Madison

It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other — Alice McDermott