Overturning Quotes & Sayings

Justices look solemn in their formal black robes, but every so often they like to have a little fun by taking on a strange case, or overturning a presidential election, that sort of thing. — Christopher Buckley

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that. — Brent Scowcroft

This president [Obama] has done more for the LGBT community than any president in history. It's just an objective fact. And his legacy is secure in terms of the advancement of the rights of the LGBT community, from Don't Ask, Don't Tell to his support for overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, and of course marriage equality, work on HIV and AIDS, and other things. — Gavin Newsom

The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn't give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don't like it. The Federal Election Commission can't do anything about it. — Lois Lerner

The polluters had triumphed by overturning the campaign-finance laws. "There was a huge change after Citizens United," he contends. "When anyone could spend any amount of money without revealing who they were, by hiding behind amorphous-named organizations, the floodgates opened. The Supreme Court made a huge mistake. There is no accountability. Zero. — Jane Mayer

As a species, tragedy dwells within us all. We push it to the back of our thoughts, but it is never so far gone that it cannot return, crashing and writhing into our souls: a rogue wave overturning a boat on a calm day. Tragedy is never more than a breath away. We hide from its certainty and go about our lives as though time can be wasted. Somewhere deep inside ourselves we know that we tell ourselves lies. We know that someday everything we love will be gone. — Logan Kain

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. — John Maynard Keynes

No offense, Sam, but you're going off the road. Off the road! Sam! You're going off the road!"
"No, I'm not; shut up," Sam snapped as he guided the huge truck back onto the road, narrowly avoiding overturning in the ditch.
"This is how I'm going to die," Jack said. "Crammed in like this in a ditch."
"Oh, please," Sam said. "You're strong enough to tear your way out even if we did crash."
"Do me a favor and rescue me, too, — Michael Grant

Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits,or,more expressively, not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently,do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others ... He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair. — Max Stirner

When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening. — Samuel Beckett

She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit. The — Marie-Helene Bertino

Overturning patriarchy does not mean replacing men's dominance with women's dominance. That would merely maintain the patriarchal pattern of dominance. We need to transform the pattern itself. — Petra Kelly

How can such episodes of such savage cruelty happen? The heart of man is an abyss out of which sometimes emerge plots of unspeakable ferocity capable of overturning in an instant the tranquil and productive life of a people. — Pope John Paul II

Many authors also attacked the widespread corruption among lawyers. In general, justice was recognized as being so unjust that, as Montaigne complained, ordinary people avoided it rather than seeking it out. He cited a local incident in which a group of peasants found a man lying stabbed and bleeding on a path. He begged them to give him water and help him to his feet, but they ran off, not daring to touch him in case they were held responsible for the attack. Montaigne had the job of talking to them after they were tracked down. "What could I say to them?" he wrote. They were right to be afraid. In another case he mentions, a gang of killers confessed to a murder for which someone had already been tried and was about to be executed. Surely this ought to mean a stay of execution? No, decided the court: that would set a dangerous precedent for overturning judgments. — Sarah Bakewell

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. — Jacques Ellul

Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp. — Bill Mollison

God can even affect the mind of a heathen ruler, and this he can do in answer to prayer without in the least overturning his free agency or forcing his will. — E. M. Bounds

In an instant, he felt pain and dropped the bug. It had bitten him. Pulling his hand to his face, he saw a tiny, bloody cut, the skin torn. When he looked down, the insects were gone, scattering into the brush. He scoured the area for them, overturning limbs and driftwood and kicking the underbrush, but to no avail. They had disappeared. Duncan — John Koloen

I thought of myself as a revolutionary, committed to overturning the whole system of empire.1 BILL AYERS, PUBLIC ENEMY — Dinesh D'Souza

Or we could change the definition in another way. We could remove the part of the definition that refers to "supernatural powers." Then sorcery and witchcraft would include beliefs that unknown persons harm others using techniques that cannot be demonstrated to be real or that are not observable. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy played on people's fears in the 1950s by claiming that the government and Hollywood were filled with Communists dedicated to overturning all that Americans hold dear. In the 1980s and 1990s, various supremacists blamed certain political factions and minorities for social problems and what they believed to be the degeneration of their nation's values. Will there be other witch hunts in the twenty-first century? — James Peoples

Overturning police cars is a super-intense workout. It's probably the only sport I enjoy. — Ai Weiwei

Can you picture Ghandi or Buddha storming into the polling place of a local election, shouting, overturning tables, sending the participants fleeing? Now throw a small carnival into the mix, which they also need rout. Impossible. Whoever did this would have to be really committed to clear the building. Fierce and intentional.
This is a breathtaking quality - especially when compared to our present age where doubt masquerades as humility, passivity cloaks as rest, and emasculated indecision poses as laid-back enlightenment. — John Eldredge

I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Sometimes overturning brutal regimes takes time and costs lives. I wish it weren't so. I really, really do. — Hillary Clinton

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity. — Christian Nestell Bovee

The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice. — Blaise Pascal

The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government. — Daniel Webster

The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept. — John Battelle

Always when I play back my father's voice," Maria says, "it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply. — Joan Didion

Nothing is so capable of overturning a good intention as to show a distrust of it; to be suspected for an enemy, is often sufficient to make a person become one ... — Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities. — Ronald Carter

In a matter of seconds, the sky darkened and the first fat drops of rain splashed around us. We went from table to table to gather our guests, smiling to mask our nervousness as the wind blew harder. As I watched the empty chairs overturning and the linens on the grape arbor flapping like sails, I was seized with a sudden fear. The wind whipped the trees; the creak of branches presaged the first sharp flash of lightning, followed by a thunder crack that set my heart pounding. — Rosie Genova

There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man. — Bill Gaede

The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade . — Ellen Willis

A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle. — Kate Millett