Reaffirmation Quotes & Sayings

It's like watching some rare exotic butterfly. Pleasant to watch, but you can't touch it, for as soon as you do, it dies, it's brilliance gone. — Haruki Murakami

Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation. — Christopher Hitchens

Winning takes character and intelligence. It is the most important thing you can do because it's a reaffirmation of your character. — Pete Carril

Above all else, we need a reaffirmation of political commitment at the highest levels to reducing the dangers that arise both from existing nuclear weapons and from further proliferation. — Kofi Annan

Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes," Jia said. "When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon. — Ken Liu

We're at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism. — Newt Gingrich

In these days of instant gratification and electronic wizardry there are still some people, real people, who do not panic when their telephones fail because the batteries need re-charging. Instead they plug, not into an electronic device but into the earth, feel the wind in their hair, listen to the joyous, constant reaffirmation of running water and feel the good sun or refreshing rain on their skin. They, and only they, can be truly re-charged. — Anonymous

If there are flaws they are in ourselves, and our task therefore must be one not of redesign but of renewal and reaffirmation, especially of the standards in which all of us believe. — Elliot Richardson

The Constitution was a reaffirmation of faith in the principles painfully evolved over the centuries by the English-speaking peoples. It enshrined long-standing English ideas of justice and liberty, henceforth to be regarded on the other side of the Atlantic as basically American. — Winston S. Churchill

The first grand federalist design ... was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament ... Biblical thought is federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) from first to last
from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term Natural Law to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth. The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching. — Daniel J. Elazar

Here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it — Winston Churchill

Indeed, redemption through Christ represents a reaffirmation of the creation mandate, not its annulment. When people are saved by God through faith in Christ they are not only being saved from their sins, they are saved in order to resume the tasks mandated at creation, the task of caring for and cultivating a world that honors God and reflects his character and glory. — James Davison Hunter

When Nietzsche made his famous definition of tragic pleasure he fixed his eyes, like all the other philosophers in like case, not on the Muse herself but on a single tragedian. His "reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed" is not the tragedy of Sophocles nor the tragedy of Euripides, but it is the very essence of the tragedy of Aeschylus. The strange power tragedy has to present suffering and death in such a way as to exalt and not depress is to be felt in Aeschylus' plays as in those of no other tragic poet. He was the first tragedian; tragedy was his creation, and he set upon it the stamp of his own spirit. It was a soldier-spirit. Aeschylus was a Marathon-warrior, the title given to each of the little band who had beaten back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught. — Edith Hamilton

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!'
And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good. — Christopher Isherwood

Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality - a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. — James K.A. Smith

If there is a conflict in your mind between what you know and what you are seeing, paint what you see because if you don't, the result will look like something that isn't there. — Richard Schmid

When a mother elevates her communication, she naturally elevates the outcomes of her child's life since a mother's words become her child's universe of possibilities. — H. L. Balcomb

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. — D.T. Max

Whoever gains the palm by merit, let him hold it. — Horatio Nelson

I always think there are people looking not so much for information as for reassurance and reaffirmation of their views. — Tom Brokaw

A person who knows all the answers, has an opinion on everything, has a certainty backed up by rational argument, has very little possibility of further progress. Such a person is unlikely to walk away from a discussion with anything more than a reaffirmation of how right he or she has been all along. — Edward De Bono

Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer. — William O. Douglas

I love to laugh and dance. That's kind of my nature, though I end up always playing these angry, depressing characters. — Brendan Sexton III

Every time there has been an attempt to disturb it, it led to two things. It led to immediate intense conflict with China, and it led to a reaffirmation in the end, because nobody wanted a major confrontation with China to this principle of a "one China" policy within which Taiwan is finding a place now. Its own position has greatly improved since the Nixon policy. It is richer, it is stronger and it is participating in many international organizations. — Henry A. Kissinger

I am not a collection of members which we call the human body: I am not a subtle air distributed through these members, I am not a wind, a fire, a vapour, a breath, nor anything at all which I can imagine or conceive; because I have assumed that all these were nothing. Without changing that supposition I find that I only leave myself certain of the fact that I am somewhat. — Rene Descartes

I love the idea of something beautiful happening, and then it being abrasively cut into. Because in a way it's similar to switching channels or surfing the web; I like people getting lulled into something and then taking them somewhere else. — Reggie Watts

The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture. — Maulana Karenga

For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow. — Peter F. Drucker

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation. — Agnes Repplier