Quotes & Sayings About Pedestals

We have to put people on pedestals; otherwise, there's no one to knock off pedestals. — Dean Devlin

Why would they lie to us?"
"Because deep down, we're all afraid of having peace. Because deep down we know we're all poisoned. We're more afraid of ourselves than we are of others. In that thinking, we deny ourselves the very power that we could have. In that thinking, we put liars on pedestals. Then, when the time is right they proclaim their lies as truth and revel in it as if they did something truly righteous and people will fall to their knees because we never learn if our mistakes are never admitted and cataloged. What better way to destroy a person than to make them realize that everything they ever believed was wrong? — Celia Mcmahon

From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her. — Max Beerbohm

The favorites of fortune or of fame topple from their pedestals before our eyes without diverting us from ambition. — Luc De Clapiers

High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners. — Anne Fadiman

I don't think actors need to go on pedestals. I don't buy it. — Richard C. Armitage

While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic. They leave nothing to be desired generally in regard to gallantry and chivalry, but they actually do not seem sometimes to have outgrown that old contemporary of chivalry
the idea that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses, ... but they must not furrow their brows with thought or attempt to help men tug at the great questions of the world. — Anna Julia Cooper

Don't put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person's other features. — David McRaney

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home
all the more powerful because forbidden
terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. — Winston S. Churchill

I think that, as African-Americans, oftentimes we have to put ourselves on pedestals as opposed to really looking at ourselves and trying to understand ourselves and become better people. We always have to be on pedestals. — Lee Daniels

Until her last moment on earth she was unaware that her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman was a daily disaster. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Each generation takes a special pleasure in removing the household gods of its parents from their pedestals, and consigning them to the cupboard. — William Ralph Inge

Waterlilies always come in Buddhist sculpture. The Buddhas all stand on lotus pedestals, because the lotus is grown from the mud. The mud represents the stained world, a dirty world, but growing from the dirt is such a beautiful, pure thing. This is the way the spirit should be. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Being an actor is looked at like a prolonged game of dress-up. America puts movie stars on pedestals. In college, it's the flip side. I sometimes have to justify my job to my professors because they're focused on intellect and ideas. — Julia Stiles

Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again, until you lose all interest in being on pedestals. — Jeff Foster

Well, here we are. Let's change. Let's change the world. Together." "You sound like my father." "Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we'll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke." "You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first." "A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world." "I kind of like it the way it is. — Max Gladstone

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. — Cormac McCarthy

The difference is that with fame comes a spotlight, one which has recently made it impossible to ignore the fact that more and more of those folks we place on pedestals aren't even pausing to consider an option other than lying. — Michael Musto

When smashing monuments, save the pedestals. They always come in handy. — Stanislaw Lem

The practice of putting women on pedestals began to die out when it was discovered that they could give orders better from there. — Betty Grable

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects. — Greg Carlson

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around. — Margaret Atwood

Pedestals are always lonely. — Myrtle Reed

People tend to put entertainers on pedestals. We're human beings, just like you. You may see us smiling, and whether we have money or not, we still have bills to pay, we still have our stresses. I think a lot of people want to focus on others' shortcomings to make themselves feel better. And it's a very sad thing. — Janet Jackson

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream"
that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts? — Douglas R. Hofstadter

Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug. — Neal Shusterman

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. — Agnes Repplier

I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums. — Zaha Hadid

It's to be a person who's able to shoot little arrows into sacred cows and knock politicians off their pedestals, to look out for hypocrisy, advocate for all sorts of things from social justice to peace. — Jonathan Shapiro

Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men. — Hugh Hefner

Don't kneel please. Sometimes people put people on pedestals so they can see them more clearly and knock them off more easily — Maya Angelou

Sometimes, I think ... people we put on pedestals ... they've got that much further to fall when you realize they're human. — Charles Sheehan-Miles

The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of Truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life's novelties.
We've all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets.
I'd always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside. — Christopher Hawke

If you put people up on pedestals, there's only one way for them to go, and that is down. — Samantha Bond

Pedestals aren't safe ... one wrong move and a nasty tumble is sure to follow. Humility is a great grounding tool. — Sanjo Jendayi

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told that she must occupy a Place Apart - and indeed, so far Apart did her place prove to be that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. You practically never see a happy cow in India. — Stella Benson

But the war proponents tried desperately to continue the glorification of war by praising anyone who had been sent off to war or even just put on a uniform. Troops and veterans were placed on pedestals as great heroes - warriors who had saved us from some imagined modern-day Hitler. — Ron Paul

Time and space are different in this realm," he explained. "Your body needs a chance to adjust." At the top of the staircase we entered a room with bronze helmets decoratively set on stone pedestals. — C. Gockel

Avoid pulpits, platforms, stages and pedestals. Keep to the hard ground. It is the only way you can judge your approximate status as a man. — Antonio Machado

Freedom and justice for all are infinitely more to be desired than pedestals for a few. — Honore Daumier

You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind - where children denounce their parents to the police - where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world. — Winston Churchill