Overstate Quotes & Sayings

Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do. — Bill Bryson

People tend to overstate my resilience, but, of course, I hope they're right. — David Brudnoy

One cannot overstate the potential for hysteria on a movie set. Everyone always acts as if making the movie is as important as eradicating malaria. — Delia Ephron

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory! — Ezra Jack Keats

Each of our lives is the sum of its parts. No ONE individual is the driving force. And no one person can stall its progression. If everyone plays their position, life evolves without drama, opportunities flourish and ultimately we ALL benefit. When you selfishly overstate your part you only weaken the whole. — Carlos Wallace

I cannot overstate the power of libraries in my life. — Elizabeth Gilbert

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress. — Ezra Klein

I don't want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes. — Elizabeth Warren

It is impossible to overstate the need for prayer in the fabric of family life. — James Dobson

But I can't overstate God's promise: "Unload all your worries onto him, since he is looking after you" (1 Pet. 5:7 JB). — Max Lucado

One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later. — Sebastian Haffner

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive. — Roger Kimball

Hometown Aerosmith fans are different from other Aerosmith fans, and that mainly has to do with Joe Perry. It's tough to overstate his strange grip on the local psyche. Tyler is a star who belongs to the whole world, but Perry, that dude belongs to Boston. — Rob Sheffield

We overstate the ills of life, and take Imagination ... down our earth to rake ... — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If you're not comfortable with public speaking - and nobody starts out comfortable; you have to learn how to be comfortable - practice. I cannot overstate the importance of practicing. Get some close friends or family members to help evaluate you, or somebody at work that you trust. — Hillary Clinton

The thing we don't want to do is overstate the benefits, but there is all kinds of proof that exercise, both physical and mental, increases brain activity. — Nolan Bushnell

Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts as the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite. — E.B. White

For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed. — Dan Barber

The words 'I'm sorry' are so powerful that it's almost difficult to overstate — Dennis Prager

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance. — Esther Dyson

I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. If they're anything like the fortunate people I know, they're prepared, they're always working at their craft, they're alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them. — Twyla Tharp

Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it. — Atul Gawande

It is impossible to overstate the imporance of problems in mathematics. It is by means of problems that mathematics develops and actually lifts itself by its own bootstraps ... Every new discovery in mathematics, results from an attempt to solve some problem. — Howard Whitley Eves

And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what
we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a — Kwame Anthony Appiah

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face. — Barack Obama

It's hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense. — John Darnielle

This fundraising is consuming us. It's impossible to overstate, I think, what it's doing to members and their ability to just focus on the job that they were elected to do. The collective concentration of the institution is being undermined every day by the need to fund-raise. — John Sarbanes

I feel there's no need to overstate. — Anson Mount

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate. — Anson Mount

It was very difficult.
We don't advertise this much, but those years that we went through were hell.
I don't want to overstate the situation, but everything was mortgaged to the hilt, cash was a real problem, and it did limit what we were able to do. — Gina Rinehart

I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it. — Hillary Clinton

We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate. — Seth Godin

I can't overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I'd thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people - I didn't judge! - but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.
And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn't need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only. — Lev Grossman

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity ... it's a safe enclosure. — Jonathan Lethem

I am interested in the size of your intention. It is better to overstate the important than to understate it. — Robert Henri

The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them. — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. — Jerry Saltz

I could never overstate the importance of a musician's need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good 'inner ear' - the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening - is the most important element in becoming a good musician. — Steve Vai

Thanks for existing, R.E.M. It's hard to overstate how much these guys changed everything, creating an entire rock audience in their own image. — Rob Sheffield

There is simply no way to overstate the water crisis of the planet today. — Maude Barlow

It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius. — Robert Green Ingersoll

There is no way to overstate the magnitude of the collective spiritual transformation that will occur when we shift from food of violent oppression to food of gentleness and compassion. — Will Tuttle

It is hard to overstate the economic importance of the U.S.A. to Scotland, and that makes it essential that we engage with companies and potential investors and get the message across that we are open for business. — Nicola Sturgeon

It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it. — George Bernard Shaw

All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance. — Francois Truffaut

It's nearly impossible to overstate how fully my father has devoted himself to Apollo Group and its mission since he created Apollo Group four decades ago. — Peter Sperling

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer. — J.K. Rowling

It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been ... one of the primary sources of progress. — John Stuart Mill

It's hard to overstate how utterly mad it is for a Fed chairman in the age of the global economy to claim that a weak currency only affects tourists. It's a little bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you're a woodpecker. — Matt Taibbi

What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes."
"You like to overstate."
"I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I'm finished forever. — Don DeLillo

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson. — William Monahan

Think of a single problem confronting the world today. Disease, poverty, global warming ... If the problem is going to be solved, it is science that is going to solve it. Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do. If anyone ever cures cancer, it will be a guy with a science degree. Or a woman with a science degree. — Bill Bryson

Put your feelings out there to the other person. Let time, the universe, and destiny run its course. Don't overstate your feelings to other person and don't force the square peg. — David Mezzapelle

I could not possibly overstate the need for an urgent response. — Tom Frieden

So, will his new gun laws - aimed primarily at law-abiding firearms owners - reduce the crime rate even further? Rock is hesitant to give a conclusive answer: "I think it will help. (But) I don't want to overstate it. I don't want to give any guarantees." — Allan Rock

Don't overstate Fox News. It's still much smaller than the least of the network niches. — Tom Brokaw

Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes22.' In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell's sway that in the 1980s, when geologists had to abandon just a part of his theory to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter. — Bill Bryson

The transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate, — Marc Andreessen

It should be needless to add that policy needs to be somewhat flexible and adaptive since war has a way of frustrating political intentions. It is a blunt instrument, and there are many reasons why cunning plans often go awry, not the least among which is the fact of an enemy with an independent will.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this maxim. Maxim 3 insists both that we never forget that war is about peace (see Maxim 2), and, more pointedly, that the making of peace is likely to be more difficult than the waging of war. It is a common, and somewhat understandable, error to assume that if one takes care of the fighting in an efficient manner, and the enemy is duly humbled, somehow the subsequent peace will all but take care of itself. Indeed, to go further, it is by no means unknown for professional soldiers to be less than fascinated by the political consequences of their military efforts. — Colin S. Gray

In short - to overstate the point only slightly - because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Having been a lobbyist myself you can't overstate how easy it is to get things done your way. It's a complicated policy and many lobbyists are trying to wreck amendments as we speak. — Bryony Worthington, Baroness Worthington

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants. — Bill Gates

It's important not to overstate the benefits of ideas. Quite frankly, I know it's kind of a romantic notion that you're just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what's key. — Sergey Brin