Professions Quotes & Sayings

While other professions are concerned with changing the environment to suit the weakened body, chiropractic is concerned with strengthening the body to suit the environment. — B. J. Palmer

Once more September marveled that even the Dodo knew what she wanted to be when she was grown. She simply could not think what she herself might do. September expected that destinies, which is how she thought of professions, simply landed upon one like a crown, and ever after no one questioned or fretted over it, being sure of one's own use in the world. It was only that somehow her crown had not yet appeared. She did hope it would hurry up. — Catherynne M Valente

By now, legions of tireless essayists and op-ed columnists have dressed feminists down for making such a fuss about entering the professions and earning equal pay that everyone's attention has been distracted from the important contributions of mothers working at home. This judgment presumes, of course, that prior to the resurgence of feminism in the '70s, housewives and mothers enjoyed wide recognition and honor. This was not exactly the case. — Mary Blakely

Unlike other professions - doctor, lawyer, teacher, journalist, sales clerk, stock broker - when a cop makes a bad mistake, it could mean someone is dead. They take home mental baggage unlike anything carried in almost every other job. — Mike Barnicle

All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship. — Thomas Berry

The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to earn a living, rather than sit around in offices and wait for clients.
W.A. Clark (MT Senator, 1901-1907) — Bill Dedman

Fortunately I've got a weak character, so I never did decide to dedicate myself to only one of my professions. And I'm very glad. After all, if I'd rejected chess or music then my life wouldn't have been two times, but a hundred times less interesting. — Mark Taimanov

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? ... Let us never cease from thinking
what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? — Virginia Woolf

There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery. — James Payn

Unlike those in other professions, artists cut the branch they are sitting on. — Sarah Thornton

Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice. — Joseph Addison

Culturally speaking, I was raised in a Jewish household. In addition to the religious side of it, I was taught respect for books and learning and the higher professions like medicine and law and teaching. — Woody Allen

As a child I wanted to be everything from a doctor, lawyer, flight attendant to an IT pro- fessional and could never make up my mind. I figured as an actor I'd get to play all these professions. — Lavrenti Lopes

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it. — Tobias Wolff

In professions where the criteria of professionalism, expertise, good manners and ethics apply, the gender aspect, i.e., whether a person is a man or woman, is not relevant at all. What is important is that citizens' confidence in politicians and the politics is strong enough to make politicians proud of their profession. — Dalia Grybauskaite

Being creative isn't confined to a specific set of professions
everyone can and should be innovative. — Paul McDonald

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety. — Irvin D. Yalom

Jack Bogle's passionate cry of Enough! contains a thought-provoking litany of life lessons regarding our individual roles in commerce and society. Employing a seamless mix of personal anecdotes, hard evidence and all-too-often-underrated subjective admonitions, Bogle challenges each of us to aspire to become better members of our families, our professions and our communities. Rarely do so few pages provoke so much thought. Read this book. — David F. Swensen

Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence. — Noam Chomsky

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nice dress you're almost wearing. You ever think about changing professions?
-Ranger — Janet Evanovich

All women should feel as Sex Subjects if they want and choose so without fear of repressions, condemnations and put down and without the need to pay them for that.

Being freely a sexy and seductive woman is allowed only for few privileged professions: actresses, dancers, models, singers, prostitutes. They all do it for work. You can pay for them being sexy.

If a sexy woman is openly adored by a man, the woman remains as a woman, she is not turning into a table, a cup or a bill of money. She is still the Subject who knows her power. — Mai Loog

The goalkeeper plays in a psychological position, and he's dealing with mental things. I wanted to describe the things I've done wrong and, most of all, what I've done right, so that other people, including those in other professions, could learn from my experiences. — Oliver Kahn

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. — Neil Postman

[May] this civic and social landmark [the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center] ... be a constant reminder of the inspiring service that has been rendered to civilization by men and women of the Jewish faith. May [visitors] recall the long array of those who have been eminent in statecraft, in science, in literature, in art, in the professions, in business, in finance, in philanthropy and in the spiritual life of the world. — Calvin Coolidge

No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience. — Adam Smith

Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce and for potential students to know what professions to study for. — Ha-Joon Chang

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians - I will not speak of my own trade - soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell ... — Jonathan Swift

All professions have some element of theater to them. — David Halberstam

That education is the most important of all professions is a message the public should hear and understand. And, as importantly, a message that our educators need to hear as well. — Lowell Milken

first settlers were emigrants from different European nations, and of diversified professions of religion, retiring from the governmental persecutions of the old world, and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but as brothers. The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them a state of society, which countries long harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments, had neglected to cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and the example shows to the artificial world, that man must go back to nature for information. — Thomas Paine

The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article. — Jon Weisman

For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than # agriculture — Marcus Tullius Cicero

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice. — Marcel Proust

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars. — Jack Weatherford

Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently? — Michael Crichton

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. — Henry David Thoreau

The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high
whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward
that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives
professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values
indeed, that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people. — Barack Obama

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom. — William Hazlitt

We are still living with a double standard. I know it. Every woman I know knows it, whether you're in the media as a woman, or you're in the professions or business or politics. — Hillary Clinton

More than nine-tenths of all literate men and women certainly read nothing but newspapers, and consequently model their orthography, grammar and style almost exclusively on them and even, in their simplicity, regard the murdering of language which goes on in them as brevity of expression, elegant facility and ingenious innovation; indeed, young people of the unlearned professions in general regard the newspaper as an authority simply because it is something printed. For this reason, the state should, in all seriousness, take measures to ensure that the newspapers are altogether free of linguistic errors. A — Arthur Schopenhauer

Sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm with an old family was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them. — Malcolm X

Cricket, like all sport, offers glory to few and a lifetime of it to even fewer. For the investment it demands, it offers short careers that end when people in other professions are starting to flourish. — Harsha Bhogle

The qualities that one needs to be a good goalkeeper are exactly the same as to be a good sculptor. In both professions one should have a good relationship with time and space. — Eduardo Chillida

We're all on a journey. The average American switches professions four times. I'm lucky to be in a business where I can change the character I am playing every couple of months. — Josh Hartnett

The 'verbalizers' may eventually be successful in careers where verbal abilities are an advantage, for example journalism or the legal professions, — Tony Attwood

One of the most fruitless, irritating wastes in the world is arguing-the contentious, endless kind of arguing that is akin to quarreling, and causes feuding in families and among friends, and leaves resentful feeling in homes, in hearts, in businesses and professions, and in all kinds of gatherings in public and private places, and in all relationships of life-and with so little that it ever seems to settle! — Richard L. Evans

The ultimate objective [of comedy] is to get a laugh, so if you can get a laugh off the fact that you did not get a laugh, then you've kinda saved the moment. Other professions don't have that luxury. You don't want to hear a brain surgeon say, "Man, am I so stupid! I cut on the wrong side of your head!!" — Brian Regan

It's a law of the universe that 87 percent of all people in all professions are incompetent. — John Gardner

The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them. — Jerzy Kosinski

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits. — John Locke

In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers. — Robert Anton Wilson

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing. — Peter Singer

I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future. — Joan Didion

In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they're not enough. — Daniel H. Pink

We divide the roles of mystic, doctor, therapist, artist, herbalist, naturalist, and storyteller into separate, often inimical professions. In most other societies, there was one word, one job assignment, for somebody who was all these things at once. — Martha N. Beck

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce. — Clive Bell

Using one's beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that's how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife. — Shannon Celebi

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all. — Betty Friedan

The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It's the root of all professions. — Daniel Suelo

I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy. — Michael Ignatieff

Human nature is the same in all professions. — Laurence Sterne

Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions. — Harriet Martineau

Modelling is no better or worse than many other professions, but it is more obvious, more accessible. — Cameron Russell

A profession that we are a nation "under God" is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation "under Jesus," a nation "under Vishnu," a nation "under Zeus," or a nation "under no god," because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion. — Alfred Goodwin

The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades, but the best of all professions. — Isaac

In certain professions, you can love your profession; you can do it in a very professional way and do it wonderfully, but you do not have this possibility to communicate with others - I express myself singing, and I think this is a real luxury. — Jose Carreras

Everything is technocratic - the development of expertise - and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms. Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean at this point is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. — William Deresiewicz

I'm fully aware," Firth told a reporter for the English magazine Now, "that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: 'Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars. — Colin Firth

Ladies and gentlemen, on the occasion of my election I received many letters from people representing all segments of the population and all professions, especially from the younger generation, linking my inauguration with great - far too great - expectations. — Gustav Heinemann

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life. — Emile Durkheim

Study after study confirms that even when you control for variables like profession, education, hours worked, age, marital status, and children, men still are compensated substantially more - even in professions, like nursing, dominated by women. No wonder there's a gender gap. — Dee Dee Myers

Having your beautiful woman free and uncovered, for all to see, with everyone knowing that she's with who she chooses - you - and that no one else, no matter how much they want her or lust for her, can lay a finger on her." He focussed on Mae. "Tell Hansen what you studied in school."
She wasn't expecting the question and presumed he wasn't talking about her military training. "Music," she said.
Hansen, however, was one step behind. "You went to school?"
"All our women do," said Justin. "They can learn what they want, take on what professions they want, and be with the men they want. We don't cover them up either. We let them show off their beauty. And we don't let men who are full of themselves crush others who've done the work. A man who serves gets his rewards. They aren't snatched up by others. — Richelle Mead

The practice of patience toward one another, the overlooking of one another's defects, and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family, in the professions, and in society. — Lawrence G. Lovasik

For a long time visits among lovers and professions of love are kept up through habit, after their behavior has plainly proved that love no longer exists. — Jean De La Bruyere

Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell. — William S. Burroughs

The qualities that made for success in a fighter-pilot seemed to be just those sturdy qualities that made for success in other professions; observation, initiative, determination, courage, including the courage to run away. In course of time it appeared that men who had a private axe to grind beyond the public axe of the King's enemies were especially successful. — Jim Bailey

From "Not For Ourselves Alone:"
In Elizabeth Cady Stanton's time:
Women were barred by custom from the pulpit and professions
Those who spoke in public were thought indecent
Married women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property: in fact, wives were the property of their husbands, who were entitled by law to her wages and her body.
Women were prohibited from signing contracts
Women had no right to their children or even their clothing in a divorce
Women were not allowed to serve on juries and most were considered incompetent to testify.
Women were not allowed to VOTE. — Ken Burns

That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them. — William Hazlitt

Compared to art, all other professions are but chores. — T.L. Rese

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. — Anonymous

The medical profession (is) a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity ... (U)ntil there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it. — George Bernard Shaw

It is a great happiness when men's professions and their inclinations accord. — Francis Bacon

Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate address; a castle in Spain. [ ... ] Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish lady, married and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. — G.K. Chesterton

Why are women so fearful? The answer to that question lies at the root of The Cinderella Complex. (...) Many women achieve a certain amount of success in their careers and professions and still remain inwardly insecure. In fact (...), it's remarkable how many women these days retain a hidden core of self doubt while performing on the outside as if they were towers of confidence. (...)
Lack of confidence seems to follow us from childhood (...) No matter how fiercely we try to live like adults - flexible, powerful and free - that girl-child hangs on (...). The effects of such insecurity are widespread, and they result in a disturbing social phenomenon: women in general tend to function well below the level of their native abilities. For reasons that are both cultural and psychological - a system that doesn't really expect a great deal from us, in combination with our own personal fears of standing up and facing the world - women are keeping themselves down. — Colette Dowling

Women do not enter a profession in significant numbers until it is physically safe. So until we care enough about men's safety to turn the death professions into safe professions, we in effect discriminate against women. But when we overprotect women and only women it also leads to discrimination against women ... If [an employer works] for a large company for which quotas prevent discrimination, they find themselves increasingly hiring free-lancers rather than taking on a woman and therefore a possible sexual harassment lawsuit ... — Warren Farrell

Each and every one of us was created to carry out justice, judgment, truth and equity on the earth. It could be in different spheres of life, in various professions or in diverse gifting — Sunday Adelaja

Through their teachings they dignify even the most mundane professions. According to them any profession or work that adds to the common good of man must be respected and it is dignified — Sunday Adelaja

What if airplane pilots said, 'my first three years were a wreck'? We worry about the safety of people at the hands of these other professions. Why don't we worry about children being at the hands of an adult, even a well-meaning adult, who doesn't know what he or she is doing? — Deborah

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it. — Octavia Butler

I think it must be apparent to every thinking mind that the noblest of all professions is that of teaching, and that upon the effectiveness of that teaching hangs the destiny of nations. — David O. McKay

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. — Virginia Woolf

My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football ... Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport. — Camille Paglia

I think we have to acknowledge that people are different and succeed at different things, first of all. Men are better than women at some professions like firefighting, construction work, and physics. But women are better than men at some professions, too, like elementary teaching, prostitution, and giving birth. Who's to say which is more important? — Zach Braff

There are more ways to choose a profession. One can choose it by
intention, by strong parental influence or even by accident. — Eraldo Banovac