Rarified Quotes & Sayings

... the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can - in fact, must - be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.
While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death. — Philip Gourevitch

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. — Meghan Daum

To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It's very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness. — Neil Peart

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background. — Paul Giamatti

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery - in
morals, in art or in spirituality - the more you see that you are playing a
rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of
any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with
someone else's depth or failure. — Alan W. Watts

All of us in the Senate live in an iron lung-the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from that rarified atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe. — John F. Kennedy

I think one of the things about Donald Trump that's interesting is he lives in a rarified atmosphere where it's possible that he doesn't get enough feedback, enough people rolling their eyes at him. It's a danger more in show business than it is with wealth. — Penn Jillette

I think he lives in such a rarified bubble these days, he doesn't understand what reality is any more. — Shane Warne

The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity. — Naomi Klein

In a real world, the one outside the rarified atmosphere where Popes meet Archbishops of Canterbury, people no longer care whether somebody is an Anglican or a Roman Catholic. They already take it for granted that being a "believer" is more important than having a denominational name-tag any day of the week. — Tom Harpur

Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb - an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt. — Sally Mann

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. — Carl Sagan

[Harvey] Weinstein appointed himself as the arbiter of your family safety. When was the last time his life was in danger, probably choking on a veal chop. He doesn't need a gun because he has security. He travels in rarified air. His feet never touch the street - feet, mind you, that he can't see because he's a corpulent cretin. — Kimberly Guilfoyle

The universe will finally become a ball of radiation, becoming more and more rarified and passing into longer and longer wave-lengths. The longest waves of radiation are Hertzian waves of the kind used in broadcasting. About every 1500 million years this ball of radio waves will double in diameter; and it will go on expanding in geometrical progression for ever. Perhaps then I may describe the end of the physical world as-one stupendous broadcast. — Arthur Eddington

I feel like I'm on top of the world. Honestly, I feel like I've climbed a very giant mountain, and I'm just standing right on top with my arms wide open and breathing rarified air. — Shania Twain

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his. — Chuck Schumer

A picture can be funny and also weep inducing. One cries for many reasons. The state of weeping, for me, is induced by recognition of a rarified level of integration - thinking about what must it have taken to reach that integration. — Joe Bradley

One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted. — Adam Mansbach

The ideas of science germinate in a matrix of established knowledge gained by experiment; they are not lonesome thoughts, born in a rarified realm where no researcher has ever gone before. — Seth Shostak

Eventually, the Sun will swell to occupy the entire sky as its expansion subsumes the orbit of earth. Earth's surface temperature will rise until it matches the 3,000-degree rarified outer layers of the expanded Sun ... But not to worry. We will surely go extinct for some other reason long before this scenario unfolds. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified. — Anjelica Huston

Utterly sure of himself, convinced of his power, certain that the laws that governed other men couldn't touch him, he made straight for any goal he set himself, however rarified and dazzling, even if it were folly for anyone else to even consider it. — Alexandre Dumas

The art business is a rarified business and appeals to an audience capable of spending money on a luxury. Too often the atmosphere in a gallery borders on snobbishness. — Scott Kahn

Astronomy may be revolutionized more than any other field of science by observations from above the atmosphere. Study of the planets, the Sun, the stars, and the rarified matter in space should all be profoundly influenced by measurements from balloons, rockets, probes and satellites ... In a new adventure of discovery no one can foretell what will be found, and it is probably safe to predict that the most important new discovery that will be made with flying telescopes will be quite unexpected and unforeseen. (1961) — Lyman Spitzer

As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was not an experience completely without interest or even pleasure. The clown's shibboleth of "here we are again" took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself a novitiate of a more rarified order of harlequinry. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin") — Thomas Ligotti

For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way. — Simon Beaufoy

and in that she's not merely pretty. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, "a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment." Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it's perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others'), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana — Alena Graedon

I was surfing the Internet, and I came across a school in Atlanta where you could learn how to climb trees with ropes the way the pros do. It sounded terrific, and so I went down there, and I began to learn these kind of rarified techniques for how you get up and down trees while using special ropes and gear. — Richard Preston

I want to create the airplane that flies in the rarified atmosphere of Mars. This is what galvanizes a generation to want to become scientists and engineers in the first place, not we need a scientist to develop a plane that's 20 percent more fuel-efficient than the one your parents flew. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as. — Damien Chazelle

You're curious about someone, or why they're doing what they're doing. Because everyone who gets to work in this field is so lucky, and it's such a rarified world, I understand that. At the end of the day, I'm interested in demystifying it. — Joan Cusack