Sanctioned Quotes & Sayings

Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things. — George Fetherling

Child abuse is still sanctioned - indeed, held in high regard - in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents. — Alice Miller

In my mortal life, I saw mainly those texts that the church sanctioned
the gospels and the Orthodox commentary on them, for example. These works were of no use to me, in the end. — Elizabeth Kostova

We have taken a loan from God, fortunately or unfortunately we don't know how much he has sanctioned it. — Jerrin Mathew

I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further. — Lord Byron

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. — Azar Nafisi

I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. — Charlotte Bronte

The actions we took in the aftermath of 9/11 were harsh but necessary and effective. These steps were fully sanctioned and carefully followed. The detention and interrogation of top terrorists like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi yielded breakthroughs which have kept this country safe. — Jose Rodriguez

He believed that "a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, ... will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections."31 — Louis Menand

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I'm not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner. — Laurell K. Hamilton

As you know, we don't have relationships with Iran. I mean, that's - ever since the late '70s, we have no contacts with them, and we've totally sanctioned them. In other words, there's no sanctions - you can't - we're out of sanctions. — George W. Bush

A vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil terminates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady; the latter, constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender is lost, he too often flings the remainder of his virtue after it in despair. — Thomas B. Macaulay

And the humans were brutish and ungovernable. They had killed one another so frequently that murder had been an accepted part of life. The various tortures they'd devised over the few millennia they'd lasted had been too much for me; I hadn't been able to bear even the dry official overviews. Wars had raged over the face of nearly every continent. Sanctioned murder, ordered and viciously effective. Those who lived in peaceful nations had looked the other way as members of their own species starved on their doorstep. There was no equality to the distribution of the planet's bounteous resources. Most vile yet, their offspring - the next generation, which my kind nearly worshipped for their promise - had all too often been victims of heinous crimes. And not just at the hands of strangers, but at the hands of the caretakers they were entrusted to. Even the huge sphere of the planet had been put into jeopardy through their careless and greedy mistakes. — Stephenie Meyer

People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith. — Desmond Tutu

If the DHS insists, as bureaucracies are apt to do, that open-source must be certified via a sanctioned, formal process, it will interfere with the informal process of open-source itself. It seems to me the DHS is trying to turn an open-source development project into a Microsoft (or IBM or Oracle) software development project. And we know what that means: more, not fewer, errors
security and otherwise. — Mark Hall

God, who is the embodiment of Truth and Right and Justice, can never have sanctioned a religion or practice which regards one - fifth of our vast population as untouchables. — Mahatma Gandhi

Iran is a country of 80 million people, educated and dynamic. It sits astride a crucial part of the world. It cannot be sanctioned and pressed down forever. It is the last great civilization to sit outside the global order. — Fareed Zakaria

Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me. — G. Willow Wilson

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle. — Mo Willems

Bigotry should never be sanctioned, whether intentionally or unintentionally. — Barry O'Farrell

Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? — Mahatma Gandhi

When I go there to Afghanistan or Pakistan, the question both asked - and if it's not asked, implied - is, 'Are you staying this time?' because we left last time, in 1989 in Afghanistan, and we sanctioned Pakistan from 1990 to 2002. So I think it's a fair question. — Michael Mullen

Whatever country you live in, any law based on "glory" instead of real harm is dangerous. The glory of the nation, or the glory of the monarchy, or the glory of the superior race, or the glory of the church have been the cause of horrible wars and legally sanctioned discrimination. Any laws based solely on these glories should be morally denounced. They cause unnecessary harm. — Dan Barker

What was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights. — Hillary Clinton

For nothing is of greater importance than that a powerful, long-established, and irrational custom should be once again confirmed by the act of some one who is recognized as rational. In this way the proceeding is thought to be sanctioned by reason itself! All honor to your opinions! but little unconventional actions are of still greater value. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But patents are not market devices. They are the opposite. They are a government-sanctioned monopoly permitting exclusive sales of a product for a limited period of time, protected by courts of law. — Linsey McGoey

Animal liberation is also human liberation. Animal liberationists care about the quality of life for all. We recognize our kinship with all feeling beings. We identify with the powerless and the vulnerable, the victims, all those dominated, oppressed and exploited. And it is the non-human animals whose suffering is the most intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned of all. — Henry Spira

Conquest by force is not sanctioned by God. The Americans have no right to be here. We will defeat them because we believe that this land they usurp is ours; God created it for us. The whole history of mankind has shown how faith endures while steel rusts.
-Istak — F. Sionil Jose

War is sanctioned murder, no matter what side you're on. — Sarah J. Maas

Art is sanctioned pornography — Stewart Home

We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. — Bryan Stevenson

In the Saviour's manner of healing there were lessons for His disciples. On one occasion He anointed the eyes of a blind man with clay, and bade him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. . . . He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing." John 9:7. The cure could be wrought only by the power of the Great Healer, yet Christ made use of the simple agencies of nature. While He did not give countenance to drug medication, He sanctioned the use of simple and natural remedies. — Ellen G. White

What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it. — William Lloyd Garrison

Although the medieval witch-cult of Western Europe derived from a primitive, non-selfconscious nature-religion, with sophistication it had become corrupt (as had paganism in ancient Greece) and developed into a pathological cult in which the doctrine and rites of the Christian Church were deliberately parodied, and evil instincts and desires were sanctioned and encouraged. — F. Marian McNeill

What I teach is a process of becoming a soulmaker. Soulmaking, as John Keats noted, is the work of creating our unique bliss. In this process, we liberate our creativity and our joy, our power and our purpose. We become imaginatively rich and spiritually vibrant. The interesting thing about soulmaking is that everyone craves it- an enlarged imaginative perception of themselves and the world, a deeper emotional connection to their own heart and to the hearts of others, a wilder capacity for joy- and yet we have almost no societally sanctioned space for this endeavor. — Carolyn Elliott

Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor. — Margaret Atwood

The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them ... Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions ...
Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947 — Fazul Rahman

How many things both just and unjust are sanctioned by custom? — Terence

No gaming outside of the venue without a sanctioned game master. — Leah Rae Miller

Bingo!! Once again, privatization
*total* privatization
is the best solution. Get government, and government-sanctioned business collectives, out of the health 'care' picture entirely and, just maybe, I can go back to typing the word 'care' (in relation to 'health') without the quotes. — Edward Britton

The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine. — Oliver Bullough

The confidence with which a Sovereign is invested, is solid only when it is sanctioned by the suffrages of the people, who clothed him with the supreme magistracy. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Our Constitution's separation of church and state never meant that religion could have nothing to do with the governing of our nation. The Founders simply intended that the United States would not have an established state religion and that no one could be sanctioned by the state for being of the wrong faith. Separation of church and state does not mean, as many people inside government believe today, that religion can never be discussed when investigating a threat or interrogating a suspect. And it definitely does not mean that a subject under surveillance as a threat to American lives cannot be recorded or otherwise monitored when he steps into a mosque. If someone is suspected of being a terrorist, it matters not whether he steps into a mosque, a church, or a temple; he is still a threat and should be treated as such. — Sebastian Gorka

What kind of world results if the power to dominate and control others, inflicting enormous suffering in the process, is sanctioned by a divine being who can at the same time redeem that suffering and release the perpetrators and their victims from that world's evils? — John Lamb Lash

Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil? — Mark A. Noll

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. — Terence McKenna

Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain. — Tara Brach

Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance ... A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love. — Bell Hooks

The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time. — William Hazlitt

In the Muslim world, much of it, they cannot conceive of something coming out of the United States that wouldn't be sanctioned by the government, because in their countries, everything is sanctioned by the government. — Bill Maher

Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host. — Herbert Spencer

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy. — Theodor Adorno

What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty. — Mahatma Gandhi

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination. — Terence McKenna

In Star Wars, there was monetary confusion and competition. Despite being backed by metals, credits were refused by planets during periods of uncertainty, such as the Clone Wars. The credit was later known as the "Imperial Credit" and was used by Luke Skywalker to pay Han Solo for transport to the planet Alderaan. Yet smugglers avoided using state-sanctioned money and opted for precious metals like platinum. Those in the Ferengi Alliance traded gold-pressed latinum, a material that could not — Kabir Sehgal

Fear is a dangerous thing. Once it is sanctioned by the state there is no telling where it might lead. It is always a short path to walk from being suspicious of our fellow citizens to taking actions to restrict their liberty. — Justin Trudeau

What sensitive, sane soul can stand in the presence of such insanity and do nothing? Yet to expose the slaughter of seals in Canada is to deliver oneself into the hands of a bureaucratic inquisition. To witness the killing of a seal is a crime. To film or photograph the slaughter is a felony. To oppose the massacre is to subject oneself to jail time, beatings, heavy fines, and officially sanctioned harassment. - Paul Watson — Paul Watson

It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed - deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist - reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence. — Gary Chartier

The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now. Infantile foods in the form of crisps, chips, sweet fizzy drinks and pappy burgers or hot dogs smothered in sugary sauce are considered mainstream nutrition for millions of adults. Intoxicating drinks disguised as milkshakes and soda pops exist for those whose taste buds haven't grown up enough to enjoy the taste of alcohol. As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple. — Stephen Fry

There's no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most - many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country. — John Perkins

The Crusades, waged intermittently from 1095 to 1291, but which continued in waves for centuries after that, were military campaigns sanctioned principally by the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land. American students barely learn about the Crusades, but they are essential to understanding the wars of the last decade. — Richard Engel

In that tremendous flash of freedom, on my way to do The Thing for the first time, sanctioned by Almighty Harry, I receded, faded back into the scenery of my own dark self, whole the other me crouched and growled. I would do It at last, do what I had been created to do. And I did. — Jeff Lindsay

What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

By characterizing the use of illegal drugs as quasi-legal, state-sanctioned, Saturday afternoon fun, legalizers destabilize the societal norm that drug use is dangerous. They undercut the goals of stopping the initiation of drug use to prevent addiction ... Children entering drug abuse treatment routinely report that they heard that 'pot is medicine' and, therefore, believed it to be good for them. — Andrea Barthwell

A grand explosion of culturally sanctioned greed. Presents, presents, presents. — Lora Leigh

This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It's a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans, and strips trans women of their humanity. — Janet Mock

God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of her that she should not have sex with anyone except you
yet you are not willing to observe the same restraint in return. Where you ought to be ahead of your wife in virtue, you collapse under the onset of lechery ... Complaints are always being made about men's lechery, yet wives do not dare to find fault with their husbands for it. Male lechery is so brazen and so habitual that it is now sanctioned [= permitted], to the extent that men tell their wives that lechery and adultery are legitimate for men but not for women. — Augustine Of Hippo

We are doing one of two things when we sing to our children. We are either indulging in a cynical duplicity that is only creating the conditions for disenchantment, or we are passing on to them, as we had passed on to us, something that the human imagination has sanctioned as being in some way perennially valid. — Thomas Howard

Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. ("Dissenting" meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But — Chip Heath

Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller. — Laila Lalami

They had taken see-no-evil and had made it their own by adopting a state sanctioned Orwellian see-no-evil policy — Jonathan Dunne

Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify. — Christopher Ryan

The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. I don't suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure. — Olivia Laing

You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think. — Hermann Hesse

Of all sports, football seems to be the most sanctioned homosocial opportunity for straight men to be with each other, pat butts, struggle, strive, and take showers together. All that talk of tight ends and penetration. The reason there are face masks on those helmets is so that can't kiss each other. — Kate Clinton

Their suffering is intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned. And the victims are unable to organize in defence of their own interests. — Henry Spira

Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctioned by its justice and sustained by a virtuous people. — Jefferson Davis

To the followers of the murdered Caesar:
Do you march against Decimus Brutus Albinus in Gaul, or against the son of Caesar in Rome? Ask Marcus Antonius.
Are you mobilized to destroy the enemies of your dead leader, or to protect his assassins? Ask Marcus Antonius.
Where is the will of the dead Caesar which bequeathed to every citizen of Rome three hundred pieces of silver coin? Ask Marcus Antonius.
The murderers and conspirators against Caesar are free by an act of the Senate sanctioned by Marcus Antonius.
The murderer Gaius Cassius Longinus has been given the governorship of Syria by Marcus Antonius.
The murderer Marcus Junius Brutus has been given the governorship of Crete by Marcus Antonius.
Where are the friends of the murdered Caesar among his enemies?
The son of Caesar calls to you. — John Edward Williams

Anyone interested in becoming a professional umpire and becoming eligible to work in the minor leagues must attend one of the two umpire schools sanctioned by Major League Baseball. — Jim Evans

It is because of me that today the union government has sanctioned special funds for the development of Bihar. — Lalu Prasad Yadav

Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that. — Philip Pullman

Now, when I assert that Islam is not a religion of peace I do not mean that Islamic belief makes Muslims naturally violent. This is manifestly not the case: there are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights. — Thomas Jefferson

Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one's being and in achieving one's own perfection within the fixed parameters that one's individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one's own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first. — Julius Evola

I came across Nell like you would a Robert Mapplethorpe at a street art fair, gobsmacked that something so valuable would be lumped in with a bunch of other crap like that. She'd been slumped against the bathroom wall in Butterfields, a dorm we later took to calling Butterfingers, for the lacrosse team residents who manhandled girls made Gumby-legged by Popov vodka. Even with her mouth hanging open, her tongue dry and pebbled white from all the medically sanctioned stimulants, there was no question that she had a movie star face. "Hey," I said, my — Jessica Knoll

Sometimes people will think, I need to have pre-sanctioned spiritual joy. Getting joy from my contemplative meditation practice or getting joy from reading Thich Nhat Hahn books. Those things can be joyful but I think it's the small, simple joys of playing with dogs or having sex with someone you love or going for a walk outside, stuff that we tend to ignore. — Moby

It's bad enough to be a baby-making machine with no epidural in sight in exchange for the state-sanctioned title of 'Mrs' before one's name. But to be a 'Miss' with an ever-increasing brood of children, just waiting for the man to grow weary of stretch marks and spit-ups? No thank you? — Laurie Viera Rigler

Tact ops is a unit which breaks into homes and offices to plant bugging devices. They get into mafia hangouts, they go into embassies, they go into terrorist hangouts, and they describe themselves as court-sanctioned burglars. — Ronald Kessler

My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair - the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure. — Carlene Bauer

Workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues. — Alain De Botton

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind — Terence McKenna

After so much suffering, after enduring so much sacrifice, sanctioned and embraced by our people, what is it that the people of East Timor expect as a result of independence? — Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao

To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. — James Boswell

I have never paid a policeman myself. I have never sanctioned, knowingly sanctioned, a payment to a police officer. — Rebekah Brooks

In most Arab countries, it is still taboo for a woman to live alone and honour killings are still sanctioned. It is estimated that in Jordan, approximately 20 women are murdered by their own relatives every year. Most — Harvey Tripp

Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance. — Walter Lippmann

The evidence is clear that increasing the severity of punishment is a far less effective deterrent than increasing the perception that a person will be caught and sanctioned. With respect to interrogations, experiments reveal the benefits — Anonymous

As you know, the International Poker Tour, by its own admission, knows very little about poker games, one of which ended tragically last week when an IPT-sanctioned tournament aboard a yacht in Australia accidentally used tarot cards instead of playing cards. That's right, it's true! Apparently no one noticed until someone laid down a full house and the dealer died. — Elle Lothlorien

As he said it Mark, belted in in the back seat, had watched the holy water glint inside the plastic bubble next to the Virgin Mary and had wondered if the holy water was selective too, and if that's what God was these days, and whether everybody now simply had a private god who sanctioned his or her own choices — Ali Smith