Obviate Quotes & Sayings

My background is advertising: I moved to New York from London in 1998 to start up the U.S. office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. — Cindy Gallop

He got a booklet out of a folder. 'This is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's a standardized psychometric test we use to assess and analyze an individual's personality dynamic. It's got about six hundred true-or-false questions. You fill this out and then the computer will generate a report.' Well, I thought this was absolutely perfect! I was just delighted with the idea that psychodiagnostic algorithms would generate a posthumanist psychiatric profile for me for the autobiography. And both the Imaginary Intern and I felt this would really streamline the process, that it would save us a tremendous amount of work, and obviate the need for all that cloying introspection and redemptive candor that we both found so nauseating and counterrevolutionary. — Mark Leyner

As Carmen of the Guardia Civil remarked, the Guardia themselves provide enough crime to obviate the need for involving citizens. — S.H. Villa

If you spend enough time with someone, you can't hide anything. — Hilary Winston

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing. — Shirley Hazzard

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. — Samuel Johnson

Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation. — Patrick O'Brian

I don't have an image. Don't give me one. I want no image to have to uphold. — Bob Weinstein

My favorite actor who played villains - who could play anything, really - was Jimmy Cagney. — Malcolm McDowell

God wants us to know we are saved, for saved people are dangerous people, willing to face off with the world, unafraid of the consequences since they know that, whatever happens, they will have eternal life. — Max Lucado

A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract. — Joseph Lancaster

Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich. [ ... ]
"But we have also," continued the management consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship's peanut." [ ... ]
"So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and ... er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances. — Douglas Adams

It's true I've never been pregnant, but I know it's like to lose the possibility of a baby. So of course I sympathize with Elizabeth, Phil! Deeply! My heart breaks for her. I've cried and cried for her each time she's lost another baby.
It's just that sometimes I want to say to her, Darling, maybe you don't get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife. — Liane Moriarty

Even the small satisfaction of writing letters was denied us. It came to this: not only had the town ceased to be in touch with the rest of the world by normal means of communication, but also - according to a second notification - all correspondence was forbidden, to obviate the risk of letters' carrying infection outside the town. — Albert Camus

I think people who don't have conflict in their lives are just trying to please people and not really living life to the fullest. — Hope Solo

What untold hosts of voices there are which call upon one and summon him to reawakening. He remembers, and is himself once again, moving cleanly on his way. Some measure of simplicity again informs the steps he takes; he becomes content to be himself and finds fragrance in the air. He may eat his food in peace. He does not wish to obviate tomorrow's work. He is willing to consider: not to suppose a case, but to take the case that is. He becomes patient. Things invite him to adequate himself to their infinity. The passage of time is now not robbery or show; it is the meaning of the present ever completing itself. — Henry Bugbee

A tendancy to melancholy ... let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault. — Abraham Lincoln

There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it ... — Mark Helprin

You can work on an airplane but you can't fix anything here at the house?"
"Yeah, well, I'm an enigma," she said. "An annoying one. Just ask anyone in my family. — Jill Shalvis

The precept, "Know yourself," was not solely intended to obviate the pride of mankind; but likewise that we might understand our own worth. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing - by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature. — M.H. Abrams

He that runs may read. — William Cowper

Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step. — Richard Wright

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself ... — Henry Petroski

A jolt of rage now forced him into her face, their noses almost touching. At once she was the one pulling back.
"Is this yours and Fricker's little game, Geline? To what purpose? Why not keep to the truth? It's disgusting enough." His voice was ragged with fury. "Why make up lies when it's so unnecessary? I was a gambler, a prodigious drinker. I whored my way through most of London's lower echelons. I am profoundly fortunate not to be riddled with disease."
Her mouth crimped with distaste.
"Yes, indeed. Don't want to mention that, do we? There's a price to be paid for treating this vessel," he tapped his chest, "without respect. As to that, we've both been fortunate. — Cynthia Wicklund

I never had a desire to hurt anybody. — Joe Greene

I want the best of everything for everybody, and it will cost millions. — Joyce Cary

An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.) — Erwin Schrodinger