Reduced Quotes & Sayings

When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides. — Walter Cronkite

The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world's economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China's portion had been reduced to 5 per cent.4 — Yuval Noah Harari

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself ... Anybody can have ideas
the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. — Mark Twain

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other — Jeffrey D. Sachs

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm told my father cemented a number of profitable deals in this room." Alan eased down beside her.
Shelby opened her eyes to slits. "I imagine he did.By the time he was through, he could've reduced most normally built men to puddbles." Idly the trailed a fingertip down Alan's thigh. "Do you ever use saunas for vital government intrigue, Senator?"
"I'm inclined to think of other things in small hot rooms." Bending,he brushed his lips over her bare shoudler-the touch of a tongue,the quick pressure of teeth. "Vital,certainly, but more personal."
"Mmm." Shelby tilted her head as he trailed his lips closer to her throat. "How personal?"
"Highly confidential. — Nora Roberts

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life. — Raoul Vaneigem

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become. — Jaron Lanier

If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble. — Cornel West

In a climate of tight budgets, reduced workforces and stiff competition, internal training can be a great substitute for costly offsite workshops and conferences. — Harvey MacKay

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity. — George Sand

Put a pair of high heels on a fellow and just look what he was reduced to. — Celeste Bradley

The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War. — Tom Wolfe

Contrary to the myth that Mr. Bush cut taxes only for the wealthy, the 2001 tax cut reduced taxes for every income-tax payer in the country. — Ari Fleischer

A man who is depleted by worry is he who natural immunity is reduced — Sunday Adelaja

Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that. — William Hazlitt

Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions. — Carroll Quigley

If the oil runs out, we'll be reduced to fracking Alex Salmond. — Rory Bremner

If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and it was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration. — Timothy Snyder

Buzz has reduced my range. Running safely with him means using fewer and shorter routes, with multiple laps per day or multiple returns there per week. Neither of us minds repeating ourselves. This is what runners do. — Joe Henderson

We have a chance to wind down and expedite the removal of 96 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. What an achievement it would be, if at the end of the next administration, we could say that the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the United States had been reduced to the barest minimums. — Dianne Feinstein

In dealing with many words and different cultures every day, I have come to realize that the essence of life can be reduced to the magic of three sentences, in the order of their strength: "I apologize", "I love you", "Hi". The use and the meaning you replenish them with become the mirror of yourself, eventually of an entire humanity. (Soar) — Soar

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours. — Tullian Tchividjian

These academic guys have to feel important. They give papers and present TV programs to show they're useful and valuable. But you do useful, valuable work every day. You don't need to prove anything. How many people have you treated? Hundreds. You've reduced their pain. You've made hundreds of people happier. Has Antony Tavish made anyone happier? I'm sure there's something wrong — Sophie Kinsella

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. — James A. Baldwin

When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her. — Doris Lessing

...we must be careful to avoid the error of reductionism, as if the whole of the Spirit's ministry can be reduced to Christology, as if the Spirit does nothing but glorify Christ. It's the mistake of arguing that the primary purpose of the Spirit's coming is the sole purpose of his coming. The principal aim of the Spirit in what he does is to awaken us to the glory, splendor, and centrality of the work of Christ Jesus. But this does not mean that it is less than the Spirit at work when he awakens us also to his own glory and power and abiding presence. — Sam Storms

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that. — Virginia Woolf

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. — Albert Camus

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour. — Lewis Carroll

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to
ironically-fait h! — Ravi Zacharias

If I write in my name to the agents of England and France residing in Asia and inform them that Japan is ready to make a commercial treaty with their countries, the number of steamers will be reduced from fifty to two or three. — Townsend Harris

Even if it could be shown that all explanations can be reduced ultimately to those of science, and even if all the reductions were then to be carried out, the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning. — Bryan Magee

I am so satiated with the great number of detestable books with which we are inundated that I am reduced to punting at faro. — Voltaire

When God and spirituality are reduced to our standards or our feelings, God will never be to us the awesome Holy One of Israel. With God reduced in our eyes, a fear of people will thrive. — Edward T. Welch

Human beings should not be reduced to a state to where they almost get into a fight over a small bar of soap. — Henry Rollins

How quickly, how neatly the chaos of a living person could be reduced to an insignificant box. — Josh Lanyon

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was — Richard Flanagan

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. — Jaron Lanier

The dead man's face was pale and bloodless. The fierce white lights in the morgue showed up every detail mercilessly and every last pore and pock-mark was revealed, the history of a life, now reduced to a mere handful of scars.
'Always nice to see you Mark, but what brings you in so late on Friday afternoon?' Lambert said nothing, staring at Petrie's corpse, before turning to the coroner. John Humby was older and getting close to retirement and the two had been friends for a very long time. Humby resembled a large blood-hound, the more so the older he got and he was smiling over at Lambert, who was still thinking about the murder. — Stevie O'Connor

What do we forget when we talk to machines? We forget what is special about being human. We forget what it means to have authentic conversation. Machines are programmed to have conversations "as if" they understood what the conversation is about. So when we talk to them, we, too, are reduced and confined to the "as if. — Sherry Turkle

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?
But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion. — Blaise Pascal

...and, my dear aunt, if you do not tell me in an honourable manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks and stratagems to find out. — Jane Austen

Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some quality time.
In sharp contrast to such a weak view, God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God's behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). — Tedd Tripp

But the sun will rise the day after tomorrow
A millennium without us silences our last echo
To tiny fragments even our plastics are reduced
In Eden Reincarnate all life but ours is renewed — A.A. Patawaran

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good dea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comps out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended. — Tom Robbins

the schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing the grand tour, while his elderly relative was reduced to the position of a courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything like a patron. — G.K. Chesterton

As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular. — Sophie Barthes

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws. Not only are there 60 percent fewer gun massacres after states adopt concealed-carry laws, but the death and injury rate of such rampages are reduced by 80 percent. — Ann Coulter

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction. — Scott Turow

Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk. — Michael Greger

Kirk Erickson and colleagues in Art Kramer's lab hypothesized that the well-documented shrinkage of the brain with age would be reduced by exercise. They used structural scans to measure hippocampal volume in 165 healthy older people who varied in their level of physical fitness. The hippocampus is a structure deep in the temporal lobes long known to be critical for forming new memories. They found that people who showed higher aerobic fitness had larger hippocampi bilaterally. Moreover, the fitter group also showed better spatial memory performance than the less fit group. — Pamela M. Greenwood

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone(117). — J.M. Coetzee

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries. — Voltaire

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half. — Plato

The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. — Jen Wilkin

But it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived. — Paul Auster

If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it. — James Howard Kunstler

Disease, which had reduced the number to less than fifty persons, subsided; the oppressive heat lessened; and Indian crops of peas, corn, and beans began to mature. — Charles E. Hatch

Good evening, London. I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name. You can call me "V". Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. In anarchy, there is another way. With anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say anarchy's dead, but see ... reports of my death were ... exaggerated. Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the Head reduced to ruins, an end to what has gone before. Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains. Choose carefully. And so, adieu. — Alan Moore

There is no city in America that has reduced crime as much as we have in the last three years. This is not the product of accident. This is the product of design. — Rudy Giuliani

All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington ... — Margaret Ayer Barnes

U.S. corn exports to CAFTA countries will benefit from reduced tariffs and duty-free access for corn products. — John Shimkus

I've enjoyed programming on NPR, but 'we're broke' and therefore all spending must be reduced. — Jaime Herrera Beutler

Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. — David Levithan

And these great natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense. — William Blackstone

The Awa are a distinctive-looking, diminutive forest people, smaller than any of the dozen other Amazon tribespeople I have met. Reduced size is adaptive in a rain forest. You can move around more easily and unobtrusively. Not only humans but other species are smaller in rain forests. — Alex Shoumatoff

That sort doesn't like to admit she's been reduced to stealing food, thought the cook. Poor soul! It's only a few apples. Lord, if you're watching, those apples are freely given. You don't hold them against her soul. (The cook was in the habit of lecturing the Lord, whom she considered a colleague.) — T. Kingfisher

In Haida's brain there must have been a kind of high-speed circuit built to match the pace of his thoughts, requiring him to occasionally engage his gears, to let his mind race for fixed periods of time. If he didn't - if he kept on running in low gear to keep pace with Tsukuru's reduced speed - Haida's mental infrastructure would overheat and start to malfunction. Or at least, Tsukuru got that impression. — Haruki Murakami

My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him. — Rachel Joyce

People of very different opinions
friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility
are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique. People who merely roll their eyes at hate crimes feel compelled to write jeremiads on declining standards when a newspaper uses the wrong form of its. Challenge my most cherished beliefs about the place of humankind in God's creation, and while I may not agree with you, I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. But dangle a participle in my presence, and I'll consider you a subliterate cretin no longer worth listening to, a menace to decent society who should be removed from the gene pool before you do any more damage. — Jack Lynch

I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced. — Tom Waits

We have reduced the understanding of prayers to incantations. — Sunday Adelaja

Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Our position as the policing agency within fiction gave us licensed access to abstract technology. One blast from the eraserhead in Bradshaw's rifle and the Minotaur would be reduced to the building blocks of his fictional existence: text and a bluish mist - all that is left when the bonds that link text to meaning are severed. — Jasper Fforde

This could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. — Margaret Atwood

The killing of mature members of any species leads to a reduction not only in biomass and species density and diversity but also in that species' accumulated knowledge of how to most efficiently fill its ecological niche and interact with the rest of the ecosystem around it. The accumulated wisdom of the species is severely reduced or, sometimes, even lost in the process. Thus the tremendous loss of human languages around the globe that were generated out of thousands of generations of human interaction with specific habitats by unique groups and which encode unique understandings of ecosystem functioning is a tragedy greater than we yet know. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

She gave up combing her hair, which the salt air had reduced to a kind of scrim of brown hessian, and, lying down, proceeded to keep her fingernails short in the way Kate admired least. Then she overslept. — Dorothy Dunnett

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. — Donna J. Haraway

Mindfulness means being present to whatever is happening here and now - when mindfulness is strong, there is no room left in the mind for wanting something else. With less liking and disliking of what arises, there is less pushing and pulling on the world, less defining of the threshold between self and other, resulting in a reduced construction of self. As the influence of self diminishes, suffering diminishes in proportion. — Andrew Olendzki

I want to weep too, not for me but for us all
for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter's night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter - and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce. — Jeff Lindsay

The position is clear - there is no ambiguity in Sinn Fein's position. We, along with all the other parties, have signed up to a reduced rate of corporation tax of 12.5 % by 2018. — Martin McGuinness

The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity. — Edward Gibbon

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. — H.L. Mencken

The measure of woman's distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr's crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain. — Quentin Crisp

What has become clear to me is that it is not the inherent nature of being gay that causes such a reduced life; it is, rather, the social circumstances around being gay: the perceptions of it and the cultural norms that it is said to violate. As some of those norms have changed, I have been able to be gay, to have a marriage, to have a family, and to have - if there is wood to knock on - a fortunate and happy life. — Andrew Solomon

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable. — Marcel Proust

In a way, all recorded music is reduced to the same level, no matter what it is. You find it in the store, you put it on and, "Oh, that's not cool. That's gangsta rap. That's white supremacist punk." But in a way, the content is removed from the intention of the people that made it. That's the commercial level of music. — Eyvind Kang

Long shadows of evening creep up the walls, inching closer. Gradually, they reach fully across us, holding us in the stillness that only night can bring. In the hazy gloom of dusk, we are silhouettes of ourselves, reduced to our very essence. The night grows bolder. Unafraid, it opens its mouth and swallows us whole. — Libba Bray

The path to glory is rough, and many gloomy hours obscure it. May the Great Spirit shed light on your path, so that you may never experience the humility that the power of the American government has reduced me to. This is the wish of a man who, in his native forests, was once as proud and bold as yourself. — Black Hawk

Science is wisdom reduced to practice. — Phineas Quimby

Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose. — Geoffrey Elton

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When you hear her say,
'What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?'

You look right at the sky,
Clear through the bullet holes
she has for eyes.

And you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plateglass clatter
around the shatter proof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand. — Arun Kolatkar

I full well realize that politics is a rough and tumble business, but politics should not be reduced to lobbing partisan hand grenades. Politics is not war. Terrorism is. — Pat Roberts

They need policies and visions that speak to their own interests and circumstances and not to be reduced to data points in some abstract political competition. — Ken Robinson

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence. — Stanley Crouch