Reduces Quotes & Sayings

within an established totalitarian regime the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade, much less to inform, but rather to humiliate. From this point of view, propaganda should not approximate to the truth as closely as possible: on the contrary, it should do as much violence to it as possible. For by endlessly asserting what is patently untrue, by making such untruth ubiquitous and unavoidable, and finally by insisting that everyone publicly acquiesce in it, the regime displays its power and reduces individuals to nullities. — Anthony Daniels

When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework. — Sheryl Sandberg

Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think. — Adolf Eichmann

Hip-hop is contributing to American society's misogyny and racism, hyper-sexuality anti-Black representations. Hip-Hop isn't setting the standard for misogyny. No one reduces the presidency to misogyny, although we've had misogynistic presidents. No one reduces our government to being solely homophobic, although we have a government with a don't ask, don't tell policy for gays and lesbians in the military. — Bakari Kitwana

There has never been any evidence that the death penalty reduces capital crimes or that crimes increased when executions stopped. Tragic mistakes are prevalent ... It is clear that there are overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty. — Jimmy Carter

Going meat-free can make a huge difference. Studies show that vegetarians are, on average, 10 to 20 pounds lighter than meat-eaters and that a vegetarian diet reduces our risk of heart disease by 40 percent and adds seven or more years to our lifespan. — Ingrid Newkirk

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour. — Gottfried Leibniz

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present. — Eckhart Tolle

Looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to dissent from our brother. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces human beings to slavery. — Pope Benedict XVI

What I do know is that with a celebrity's death comes an avalanche of media, and in that media is most often another death - it takes a life that is filled with complicated talent, hope, success and drive and reduces it to the 'story.' — James Belushi

Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation. — Albie Sachs

It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction. — Elie Wiesel

Familiarity reduces the greatness of things. — Seneca The Younger

But time lessens all extremes, & reduces them to mediums & unconcern. — Aphra Behn

Friendship matters, especially in old age, when death reduces the number of one's friends. — Marilyn Yalom

I love to explore new and strange things in detail.
This habit reduces element of surprises in my life. — Toba Beta

Labeling and diagnosis is a catastrophic way to communicate. Telling other people what's wrong with them greatly reduces, almost to zero, the probability that we're going to get what we're after. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

A newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well — Warren Buffett

Time lessens all extremes and reduces 'em to mediums and unconcern ... — Aphra Behn

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing — Soren Kierkegaard

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? — Jeanette Winterson

Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away ... and forgiveness descends. — Julian Barnes

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant. — Christina Romer

Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an origincal affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free
nor error servile
but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this. — Michel Foucault

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream. — Catherine Millet

The simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity ... What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent. — Susan Cain

People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease." Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers. — Martha Manning

As Shantideva says, suffering has many good qualities because it purifies our negative karma, increases our renunciation and compassion, reduces our pride, and helps us to overcome our bad mental habits. If we think in this way we will feel that difficult circumstances are our best friends. When our mind is balanced in this way it becomes as stable as Mount Meru, and nothing can cause it to shake. — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Contrary to any claim of a systematically "neutral" effect of taxation on production, the consequence of any such shortening of roundabout methods of production is a lower output produced. The price that invariably must be paid for taxation, and for every increase in taxation, is a coercively lowered productivity that in turn reduces the standard of living in terms of valuable assets provided for future consumption. Every act of taxation necessarily exerts a push away from more highly capitalized, more productive production processes in the direction of a hand-to-mouth-existence. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The only way to maximize group creativity - to make the whole more than the sum of its parts - is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong. — Jonah Lehrer

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud. — P.G. Wodehouse

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people. — Philip Zimbardo

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations. — Rolf Potts

In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes. Almost all these wastes and pollutions are the result of activities carried on for the benefit of man. A prime national goal must be an environment that is pleasing to the senses and healthy to live in. Our Government is already doing much in this field. We have made significant progress. But more must be done. — Lyndon B. Johnson

The American Heart Association reports: There are numerous benefits of daily physical activity: reduces the risk of heart disease by improving blood circulation throughout the body; keeps weight under control; improves blood cholesterol levels; prevents and reduces high blood pressure; prevents bone loss; boosts energy levels; helps manage stress; releases tension; improves the ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well; improves self-image; counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism; increases muscle strength; gives greater capacity for other physical activities; provides a way to share an activity with family and friends; establishes good heart-healthy habits in children and counters the conditions — Michael Todd Wilson

Ego can't sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control. — Robert K. Greenleaf

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash. — Rita Mae Brown

There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what is in the United States. — Michael Pollan

Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution. — Frank Chodorov

Infidelity reduces and diminishes, leaving nothing where you once had a sense of self-worth. — Sue Grafton

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception. — Samuel Moyn

A company is a moral imbecile. It has no sense of right or wrong. Any restraints have to come from the outside, from laws and customs which forbid it from doing certain things of which we disapprove. But it is a restraint that reduces profits. Which is why all companies will strain forever to break the bounds of the law, to act unfettered in their pursuit of advantage. That is the only way they can survive because the more powerful will devour the weak. And because it is the nature of capital, which is wild, longs to be free and chafes at each and every restriction imposed upon it. — Iain Pears

Lyotard addresses... in Postmodern Fables... [that] ideas of difference, alterity and multiculturalism have become nothing more than streams of cultural capital, streams which themselves fashion, and are fashioned by, the demands of the global market. Hence, the following irony: 'What cultural capitalism has found is the marketplace of singularities'. The result of this discovery, which even reduces the 'postmodern' celebration of difference or otherness to a marketable strategy, is that ideas are stripped of their intrinsic value (value-rationality) and are judged by their value as commodities. This leads to the production of thought that is itself devoid of difference, for streams of cultural capital 'must all go in the right direction' and 'must converge'. Global capitalism, while appearing to affirm the potentiality of cultural differentiation, in fact subordinates difference and alterity to an instrumental logic of exchange, performance and control. — Nicholas Gane

Yes, dear reader, that's the other reason we cats purr. Arguably, it's the most important reason: to make you happy. Purring is our V - our way of reminding you that you are loved and special, and that you should never forget how we feel about you, especially when you're vulnerable. What's more, purring is our way of ensuring your good health. Studies show that having a feline companion reduces stress and lowers the blood pressure of humans. Cat owners are significantly less likely to have heart attacks than people who live in a catless world. — David Michie

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth! — Ronald Reagan

The first beneficiary of compassion is always oneself. When compassion, or warmheartedness, arises in us and our focus shifts away from our own narrow self-interest, it is as if we open an inner door. It reduces fear, boosts confidence and brings us inner strength. By reducing distrust, it opens us to others and brings us a sense of connection to others, and sense of purpose and meaning in life. — Dalai Lama

Both the Hopi and Zuni Indians, who have used the venom in purification rituals, assert that it effectively reduces the human soul to its rarest elements, stripping away all that is false, illusory, or fearful. — Nicholas Christopher

Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called 'the virginity of senses' where words cannot match the impressions received. — Brian Keenan

What do I actually mean when I say 'delusion'? I mean the absurdity of the claim that the excessive atomic armament of both sides creates a 'balance of terror' that reduces the danger of war; that in the long run it even offers a minimum of security ... Hence the cynical saying: He who strikes first will die second. — Christa Wolf

The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others. — Robert Cialdini

People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you're choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you're on is about to destroy the country. — Chris Hayes

We all know that working out reduces stress, but it's equally true that stressing out reduces work. — Mardy Grothe

Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him. — Anais Nin

The Life we have is very great.
The Life that we shall see
Surpasses it, we know, because
It is Infinity,
But when all Space has been beheld
And all Dominion shown
The smallest Human Heart's extent
Reduces it to none. — Emily Dickinson

No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously. — E. O. Wilson

If the Christian faith gets too identified with a party, it reduces Christianity to a political position — Timothy Keller

Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them. — John McGinnis

We gave away most of our belongings. Interestingly, the more we gave away, the better we felt. Happiness researchers call this a 'helper's high,' in which helping others through volunteering or giving reduces stress and releases endorphins. — Tammy Strobel

Anything that reduces fuel consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gasses is good news. — Norman Foster

Meekness, the subtraction of self, reduces the multiplication of words. — Neal A. Maxwell

Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures? — Nancy Snow

As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature. — Richard Louv

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically. — James Baldwin

Government spending reduces the capital that could be invested to serve consumers and to produce new employment opportunities. — Sheldon Richman

A good dose of hearty laugh strengthens mood, reduces anxiety or stress and keeps the entire nervous system balanced. — Jessica Cambridge

Avoid sunscreen! Regular sun exposure reduces risk of melanoma. — John Durant

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. — Paul Krugman

From the first, the act of conquest, which reduces persons to the status of things, is necrophilia — Paulo Freire

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. — Margaret Atwood

The question to ask about education is not 'What can I do with it?' That is the wrong question because it concentrates on instrumental values and reduces everything to a useful art. The right question is rather 'What can it do to me? — Arthur F. Holmes

Perhaps the most important reason of all for taking action now is that time is finite. No matter how proficient you are, you can only accomplish so much in a lifetime. Every second that's wasted reduces the totality of what you can accomplish by one second — Robert Ringer

Someone has said,"Education is going from an unconscious to conscious awareness of one's ignorance."..No one has a corner on wisdom. All the name-dropping in the world does not heighten the significance of our character. If anything, it reduces it. Our acute need is to cultivate a willingness to learn and to remain teachable. — Charles R. Swindoll

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted. — George Orwell

You win when you refuse to fight petty people. Fighting little people reduces you to their size. — David J. Schwartz

Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them. — Frank Gohlke

Vanity, showing off, is an attitude that reduces spirituality to a worldly thing, which is the worst sin that could be committed in the church. — Pope Francis

Women do not avoid fighting because they are dainty or scared, but because they have a greater stake than men in staying alive to rear their offspring. Women compete with each other just as tenaciously as men, but with a stealth and subtlety that reduces their chances of being killed or injured. — Anne Campbell

But time lessens all extremes, & reduces them to mediums & unconcern. — Aphra Behn

If you know who you are, it reduces your fear of trials — Sunday Adelaja

Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols. — Gael Garcia Bernal

More than the choking heat, more than the blinding flames that rise up into the night sky, more than the endlessly leaping colours that change shape with every moment, more than all of these is the transforming power of fire. Fire takes solid wooden beams and reduces them to charcoal. It licks at everything with a scarlet tongue and leaves it black. It spreads like the folds of a golden robe over human bodies and what is left is gray and chalky: ash, blown up and up by every breath of wind only to fall like dust on the ground. When it is burning most fiercely, it seems that it might go on forever and devour everything in its path. It does not cower and withdraw in front of princes. Palace and hovel alike are good fuel and nothing more. It is unstoppable. And when it has moved, what remains is desolation. — Adele Geras

Heaven's Way is like stretching a bow. The high is lowered and the low is raised. Excess is reduced and deficiency is replenished. Heaven's Way reduces excess and replenishes deficiency. People's Way is not so. They reduce the deficient and supply the excessive. — Laozi

Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all. — DaShanne Stokes

Excessive administration secrecy ... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government. — John McCain

Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams. — Nathan Myhrvold

Ethanol reduces our dependence on foreign sources of oil and is an important weapon in the War on Terror. By investing in South Dakota's ethanol producers, we will strengthen our energy security and create new jobs. — John Thune

I employ 20 people in Vienna. The other 130 coworkers are pilots and flight companions. The Overhead is limited with me. Reduces naturally the costs of my fliers. — Niki Lauda

When the kingdom of light increases, the kingdom of darkness reduces — Sunday Adelaja

it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. — Margaret Atwood

We also have a responsibility not to let ourselves be judged. We do not have to accept others' evaluations of our worth, nor are we obligated to believe in their superiority. Whichever role we are assigned, we can stop the game by refusing to play our expected part. When someone suggests that our recent behavior has undone our right to exist, a useful question to ask is, "What do you want? What can I do to make the situation better?" This often reduces the Judge's voice to silence, because what the Judge really wants- but cannot admit- is to make you feel bad, not to get the floor clean. When we feel secure in our inherent value, we do not have to argue about our worth as human beings. Instead, we can attempt to solve the problem. — Starhawk

The central idea in this book is that highly aroused, negative emotion - dysregulated emotion - is the core problem for high-conflict couples and that there are specific skills partners can learn to manage their emotions effectively, which in turn makes effective communication (accurate expression followed by understanding and validation) possible. With enough practice, conflict can be transformed into closeness and couples can achieve the closeness, friendship, intimacy, peace, and support that brings us joy and reduces our suffering. — Alan E. Fruzzetti

Our current state of affairs reduces to poverty people born for better things. — Matthew Desmond

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Too much of anything reduces the overall effect of happiness and satisfaction. — Kelley Armstrong

Girl power reduces the theoretical complexity of feminism to a cheery slogan ("GIRLS KICK ASS!"); it represents the ultimate commodification of empowerment; it reinforces the simplistic conception of feminism as being, at heart, "all about choices." But most of all, it it grabbed the rhetoric from one of the most potentially powerful, yet woefully misunderstood, feminist uprisings of my generation, discarded every ounce of political heft, and reduced it to cheap iron-on letters on a baby T. — Rachel Fudge

Part of what makes a situation traumatic is not talking about it. Talking reduces trauma symptoms. When we don't talk about trauma, we remain emotionally illiterate. Our most powerful feelings go unnamed and unspoken. — Tian Dayton

Ignorance strips a man of his rights and privileges, and reduces him to a 'nobody'. — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

I quit because I'm so tired of hearing bad news about cigarettes ... Even if they discover good news, they don't publicize it - like the fact that smoking seriously reduces the risk of jogging. — Arj Barker