Restrictive Quotes & Sayings

Anybody who wants to make television has a tremendous problem because it's a financially restrictive media in this day and age. — David Jason

Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or. — Tom Robbins

The standards for what is "normal" have become so formalized and yet so restrictive that people need a break from that horrible feeling of never being able to measure up to whatever it is they think will make them acceptable to other people and therefore to themselves. People get sick with this idea of change; I have been sick with it. We search for transformation in retreats, juice fasts, drugs and alcohol, obsessive exercise, extreme sports, sex. We are all trying to escape our existence, hoping that a better version of us is waiting just behind that promotion, that perfect relationship, that award or accolade, that musical performance, that dress size, that raucous night at a party, that hot night with a new lover. Everyone needs to be pursuing something, right? Otherwise, who are we? How about, quite simply, people? How about human? — Emily Rapp

You have a mayor who hates guns. If it was up to me, we wouldn't have any handguns in the District of Columbia. I swear to protect the Constitution and what the courts say, but I will do it in the most restrictive way as possible. — Muriel Bowser

No one can deny that the feudal wars, which were quite localized and subject moreover to restrictive regulation by the spiritual authority, were nothing compared to the national wars that have resulted, following the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, in armed nations, and we have seen in our own day new developments hardly reassuring for the future.
By compelling all men indiscriminately lo take part in modern wars, the essential distinctions among the social functions are entirely ignored, this being moreover a logical consequence of 'egalitarianism'. — Rene Guenon

I'm a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America's ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment. — Garry Kasparov

The plants have taught me they don't like to be potted too long - it's very restrictive to them so I would plant them outside if you could, or in a green house. — Doreen Virtue

I am very easy. I like to have my work out. I am not restrictive about any of that. It is the collectors that are possessive, not me, not me. — Robert Barry

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the "demon-possessed," menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth - none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the rituals unless first purified according to the priestly code. With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood. — Reza Aslan

Boys' connections - to other people and to their selves - can enable them to think and act of their own volition and to resist overly restrictive norms and expectation when they are faced with pressures to conform. — Judy Chu

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student. — Sebastian Thrun

A covenant made with God should be regarded not as restrictive but as protective. — Russell M. Nelson

Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge historic turning point, the revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones. — Stephanie Coontz

My secretary stopped and got gas (Wednesday) for $2.67. (Yesterday at) the same gas station, she got gas again. It was $3.12, ... It has really gotten very, very restrictive to people. It's really hurting ... My impression, of course, is that they have certainly gone up more than they should have. — Andrew Spano

There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind — Noam Chomsky

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive. — James Frain

[In] the 21st century, the mainstream can satisfy your every whim. I guess the idea of walking around with groups of people dressed the same and saying, "I'm only into ska" or "I'm only into whatever" - is kind of restrictive in the 21st century. I don't know if it's a bad thing that these movements have run their course. I think what I miss about it is the collective experience. — Don Letts

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other; it is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, as long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget - just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In short, the paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. — Ronald Reagan

When we lose our waged jobs we are not freed from work! We are supposed to go on doing the work of reproducing labour power and to make the labour market function by looking for waged jobs. Part of our effort must be to make these dynamics clear so that we can struggle for what we really want, which is a secure income and less work-for-capital so that we have more time to re-craft our lives. Thus, instead of demanding "full employment" and strenuously searching for new jobs, we can demand less restrictive and more unemployment compensation or even "citizen wages" independent of jobs. — Harry Cleaver

I love the opportunity to just let my imagination run riot! Non-fiction can be very restrictive. — Raymond Buckland

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. — Charles Bukowski

You were mad, do you think I should hate you?" "I do indeed, sir." "Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat - your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for — Charlotte Bronte

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience. — Charles Bukowski

The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated. — Louis Menand

Culture is a fibreglass condom suit - highly restrictive, uncomfortable and itchy as hell. — Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone. — Charles Bukowski

The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They've brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they've brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have. — Thomas Sowell

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. — Alan Moore

Lunchtime choices are small, subtle public acts that allow you to set yourself apart within the restrictive office environment. — Harry Wallop

Any business situation is restrictive. — Prince

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP. — Gunter Grass

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema. — Julia Leigh

In my own home, where I've been able to create an environment that works for me, I'm hardly disabled at all. I still have an impairment, and there are obviously some very restrictive things about that, but the impact of disability is less. — Stella Young

Many rules for the creation of colour schemes have been published in recent years, but, while they are popular in commercial studies, I know of no creative artist who employs them. They are, per se, restrictive; their use precludes any chance of adventuring in this interesting field. — Walter J. Phillips

He wonders whether young women raised under such restrictive conditions can ever overcome the disadvantage of deliberately engineered lacunae in their mental, moral, and emotional development. The — Edith Wharton

I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it's in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It's about oneness. — Hugh Jackman

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions. — Rachel Kushner

If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the 'comfort' of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment. — Tom Robbins

The rationale for the FDA's rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would have died from side-effects under a less restrictive regime. We count and recount the costs of such side-effects. We do not count the costs of not allowing new drugs to be made available. — Niall Ferguson

Why should it be that just when technology is
most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive? — Lawrence Lessig

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved. — A.J. Ayer

I love you in this dress, Evangeline, but it's much too restrictive for what I want to do to you. — Adriane Leigh

Bring the mind into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself. — Bruce Lee

I'm at this point in my career where I'm trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it's a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day. — Vik Muniz

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it. — Brian Helgeland

I've enjoyed, to a certain extent, any country I've been in, of course like Serbia and Croatia can be very restrictive and oppressive, and frustrating, but they're still very beautiful. — Henry Rollins

I didn't grow up in one of those restrictive Christian households where you couldn't do this or that. We were brought up with a great collection of good morals and good values, but we also had fun. We'd go to church on Sunday, but then have ice cream, roller skate or play in the park afterwards. — Yolanda Adams

[W]e declare it is a grievous sin before God to adopt restrictive measures in disobedience to God's divine command from the beginning of time to 'multiply and replenish the earth.' Surely those who project such measures to prevent life or to destroy life before or after birth will reap the whirlwind of God's retribution, for God will not be mocked. — Harold B. Lee

You know, how much order is good? And when does order become too restrictive? Is a little bit of chaos okay, or is chaos always an evil force? I mean, these are questions that any kid who's ever been in a school cafeteria can relate to. — Rick Riordan

Increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace. — Elisabeth Badinter

I'm the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It's a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don't like - and the fact that it's not reversible. — J. Cole

The supply-side effect of a restrictive monetary policy is likely to be perverse, in that high interest rates enter into costs and thus exert inflationary pressure. — William Vickrey

One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it's incredibly restrictive - very, very restrictive. There's so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost. — Bruce Springsteen

What Paul is saying not only answers the objection that marriage is oppressive and restrictive, but it also addresses the sense that the demands of marriage are overwhelming. There is so much to do that we don't know where to start. Start here, Paul says. Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow. This is the secret - that the gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind. — Timothy Keller

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society. — Edward Abbey

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)] — James A. Michener

Shaking off restrictive chains requires action. They cannot be wished away. A declaration will never break chains. It requires commitment, self-discipline, and work. — Marvin J. Ashton

From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Venus Factor weight loss system has nothing to do with silly exercise machines, cardio, restrictive or pre-packaged diets, or whatever weird berry pill the diet industry is talking about these days. — John Barban

Winter's palette is clear and spare, restrictive enough to curb the excesses of even the most daring gardeners. — Rosemary Verey

Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god. — John Harvey Kellogg

I believe that most, if not all, of the restrictions on women in society have no basis in Scripture, and that those maintained in the Church are based on an inadequate interpretation of a few restrictive passages, which put them in contradiction with the manifest special concern and love of God for women articulated from Genesis to Revelation. — Roger Nicole

In recent years, a trend toward a more restrictive approach to transfusion therapy has emerged.9,10 For example, as per the American Society of Anesthesiologists Task Force transfusion guidelines, RBC transfusion is rarely indicated when the hemoglobin (Hgb) concentration is above 10 g/dL and is usually indicated when the hemoglobin is less than 6 g/dL.2 — Gerard J. Criner

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations,surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. — Gustav Le Bon

Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them - fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systemically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices. — Darrel Ray

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. — Charles Bukowski

Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act. — Jonathan Mooney

A 'diet' is simply an individual's eating regimen: it doesn't have to mean the restrictive plan we've come to associate this word with. — Daphne Oz

Our moral and practical attitude ... impulses, inhibitions ... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar ... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287] — William James

That means following a very restrictive fiscal and monetary policy which will squeeze the monopolies and cut their subsidies. On the micro level we will allow other economic agents, both domestic and foreign, to compete with them. — Vaclav Klaus

I'm not an ageist, and I'm not looking for a man in a certain restrictive age range, however I've found over the years that people younger than me tend to be immature. The problem with this is that, as I get older, all the good men have already been snapped up. — Brett Kiellerop-Morris

Certainty sees things in restrictive, protective, aggressive ways, and thus isn't seeing at all. — Jerry Saltz

Television is kind of restrictive in its directing, but it would be nice to get some chops doing TV. — Thomas Jane

... each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It's like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us?
Perhaps it doesn't. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed? — Neil Strauss

A lot of people think a high armhole is restrictive, but it gives you total movement because it's cut right up to your arm. — Tom Ford

restrictive life. What Kit — Elizabeth George Speare

The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside. — Marcia Muller

A destructive thought process exists within all of us, and we are plagued to varying degrees by an internal dialogue that is harmful, restrictive, and at its ultimate extreme, self-destructive. — Lisa Firestone

The temperature in that hangar would sometimes get down to 40 degrees, and very often I had to put on long underwear, which was so restrictive I suffered from an acute vascular disorder for days afterward. — Larry David

One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what in reality is chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient. Obviously, this does not lead to order. On the contrary, people feel acutely lost, in time and space among other things. As everywhere in the country, a person does not know where to go with a particular problem. So he goes to the head of the detention facility. That's like taking your problem to Putin outside of jail. When we describe the system in our lyrics - I guess you could say we are not really opposed - We are in opposition to Putinist chaos, which is a regime in name only. When — Masha Gessen

I can't say that electronic gear is restrictive. I think it is a challenge to play with electronic gear, and I regularly [perform] concerts with guys who are processing sound. — Volker Bertelmann

Stupid Crusaders with their stupid rules. For a homicidal group, they're appallingly restrictive.
No, Meda, you can't leave campus.
No, Meda, you know we have a curfew.
No, Meda, you can't eat that guy. — Eliza Crewe

Politicians have often declared that unbridled competition among financial intermediaries promotes failures that will harm the public. Although the evidence that competition does this is extremely weak, it has not stopped the state and federal governments from imposing many restrictive regulations. — Frederic S. Mishkin

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Just saying "celibacy is the solution" doesn't make it so. People have to be able to do it. Paul, a huge proponent of celibacy, knew this. The difficulty that divorced people have maintaining lifelong celibacy was part of the pastoral dilemma that forced us to take a closer look at our very restrictive policies regarding remarriage, policies that most contemporary pastors are unfamiliar with because it was the controversy of an earlier era. — Ken Wilson

The tale of the Monkey Girl gave me wat I needed most at a critical time in my life: the image of the creative and complex woman, unique to herself but willing to share those considerable gifts with a man capable of intuiting the wealth of her worth hidden beneath the skin. But more than that, the Monkey Girl also suggested that I need not be afraid of the fragile happily-ever-after, that I had resources of my own, and that I would not have to contort myself into a restrictive social role for fear of losing that fairytale ending. — Midori Snyder

I think an erotics of place may be one of the reasons why environmentalists are seen as subversive. There is a backlash now: ... [ellipsis in source] take all the regulations away; weaken existing legislation; the endangered species act is too severe, too restrictive; let there be carte blanche for real-estate developers. Because if we really have to confront wildness, solitude, and serenity, both the fierceness and compassionate nature of the land, then we ultimately have to confront it in ourselves, and it's easier to be numb, to be distracted, to be disengaged. — Terry Tempest Williams

Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected. — Bell Hooks

Your aunt is the dearest woman in the world, and nobody could be fonder of her than I am, but I sometimes find her presence ... what is the word I want ... restrictive. She holds, as you know, peculiar views on the subject of my running around loose in London, as she puts it, and this prevents me fulfilling myself. — P.G. Wodehouse

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak. — Katherine Dunn

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress. — Mick Jagger

A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree ... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die. — Joshua Zeitz

English restrictive legislation merely hastened the process and inadvertently pushed Americans toward self-sufficiency. At — Robert G. Ahearn

The Greens have never been on the ballot in Georgia because of restrictive ballot access laws. — Cynthia McKinney

We recall the joy and excitement of a nation that had found itself, the collective relief that we had stepped out of our restrictive past, and the expectant air of walking into a brighter future. — Nelson Mandela

I think if I ever stopped pushing myself, I would revert quickly to quite repetitive, restrictive behaviour. But in pushing myself and concentrating on what I can do, I think I can contribute to society. And that gives me the desire to keep pushing, to see what I'm capable of. The thing to do is not to stop. — Daniel Tammet

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us. — Sigmar Polke

The average citizen expresses pride in the American Bill of Rights and then seeks to protect his real estate by restrictive covenants. — Harry Allen Overstreet

The teaching that we receive is not necessarily very accurate. The value systems that our cultures have developed are not every open. They are very restrictive. We live in an age that is not enlightened. — Frederick Lenz