Precipitously Quotes & Sayings

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. — Ian McEwan

If wells are constructed right and operated right, hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem. ... Our natural gas supplies would plummet precipitously without hydraulic fracturing. — Scott Anderson

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions. — Philip G. Zimbardo

We phone each other because it's only in these long-distance calls, this groping for each other along cables of buried copper, cluttered relays, the whirling contact points of clogged selector switches, only in this probing the silence and waiting for an echo that one prolongs that first call from afar, that cry that went up when the first great crack of the continental drift yawned beneath the feet of a human couple, when the depths of the ocean opened up to separate them, while, torn precipitously apart, one on one bank and one on the other, the couple strove with their cries to stretch out a bridge of sound that might keep them together yet, cries that grew ever fainter until the roar of the waves overwhelmed all hope. — Italo Calvino

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging. — Robert Caro

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective. — Malcolm Forbes

Until well into the evening, when the vermillion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. — Stacy Schiff

But he found it strange to think of these little changes of scene, the little gains, the little losses, the thing brought, the thing removed, the light given, the light taken, and all the vain offerings to the hour, — Samuel Beckett

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. — Anais Nin

Professor Lyall, cursing his Alpha for departing so precipitously, balled up the piece of paper and, after minor consideration for the delicacy of the information it contained, ate it. — Gail Carriger

It's only now you're gone I see how you're my reason for doing things. Now I'm a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can't remember how to walk without being precipitously propped. — Sara Baume

I've been married for 10 years and, you know, it's hard, you spruce it up and you go places. How do you spruce up anything? Artificially. You go places and do things. — Chris Rock

Anything you dream [can] be yours simply because you've focused on the steps you could take instead of the distance to get there. — A.J. Darkholme

We've given more resources. On housing, we are now establishing a regional housing pot. — John Prescott

We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people. — Joan D. Chittister

Happiness should always remain a bit incomplete. After all, dreams are boundless. — Anatoly Karpov

In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change — Steven Pinker

At the fourth grade level, girls at the same percentages of boys say they're interested in careers in engineering or math or astrophysics, but by eighth grade that has dropped precipitously. — Chelsea Clinton

If Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist wasn't addicted to the pain-killing drug his doctor prescribed, but instead it was just that the drug had 'established an interrelationship with the body, such that if the drug is removed precipitously, there is a reaction,' you needn't question that his decisions might have been influenced by his drug addiction. — William Lutz

Kosciusko. - The hero of Poland once wished to send some bottles of good wine to a clergyman at Solothurn; and as he hesitated to trust them by his servant, lest he should smuggle a part, he gave the commission to a young man of the name of Zeltner, and desired him to take the horse which he himself usually rode. On his return, young Zeltner said that he never would ride his horse again unless he gave him his purse at the same time. Kosciusko enquiring what he meant, he answered, "As soon as a poor man on the road takes off his hat and asks charity, the horse immediately stands still, and will not stir till something is given to the petitioner; and as I had no money about me, I was obliged to feign giving something, in order to satisfy the horse." Mysterious — Various

In this age of electronic money, investors are no longer seduced by a financial 'dance of a thousand veils.' Only hard and accurate information on reserves, current accounts, and monetary and fiscal conditions will keep capital from fleeing precipitously at the first sign of trouble. — Lawrence Summers

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins. The first is to act precipitously without thought and the second is to not act at all. — Carl Icahn

The Constitution is very clear on the - on the declaration of war or reacting to international crimes - crimes against nations. It is the role of Congress to debate and authorize this before the President acts precipitously. — Joe Pitts

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously. — William Odom

What you are, I once was. What I am, you will become. — Isaac Marion

With the horses, you can't let them call the shot part of the time and then you call the shot part of the time. They're not really designed to be your leader, but they can be a great partner, but you need to lead, and they need to respect you and respond with respect. Don't think of respect as a dirty word. You need to respect them as well. — Buck Brannaman

Man may be considered as having a twofold origin - natural, which is common and the same to all - patronymic, which belongs to the various families of which the whole human race is composed. — Adam Clarke

Most people who fall obsessively in love claim that it happens precipitously, unexpectedly [ ... ]
But I believe there's almost always a prerequisite. Falling in love in this way will usually occur at a time of transition. We may not be conscious of it, but something has ended and something new must begin. Romantic obsession is like a cataclysm breaking up the empty landscape. Like a strange exotic plant, it grows in arid soil. (pp. 27-28) — Rosemary Sullivan