Special Force Quotes & Sayings

The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due. — Carl Sagan

But what is chance? What is genius?
The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius.
To a heard of rams, that ram the herdsman dries each evening into a special enclosure to feed, and that becomes twice as fat as the others, must seem to be a genius. — Leo Tolstoy

The voice of women has a special role and a special soul force in the struggle for a nonviolent world. — Betty Williams

Taking a trip with the Air Force Special Operations Wing folks is not like a flight on a normal airliner. For one thing, passengers and crew are all armed to the teeth. The seating is awful, the noise is incredible, and there is no movie. Your stewardess is likely to be a guy wearing a shoulder holster, and he will not bring you a pillow. — Frank Antenori

I was never a Republican, because those gentlemen, distinguished as they are, have only one real interest, and that is the making of special laws in order to protect their fortunes. I also know they have no compassion for the masses of the people in this country who are without money and who are, many of them, without food or houses. I have always thought that only as a Democrat, reflecting Jefferson and Jackson, could justice ever be done the people because, at this moment in history, ours is the only party which is even faintly responsive to the force of ideas. — Samuel J. Tilden

Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring, 'It's business.' That is, 'it's business' has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges. — Ida Tarbell

On the other hand, in the case of hypnotism, at first it looked as though that also would be impossible, when it was described incompletely. Now that it is known better it is realized that it is not absolutely impossible that hypnosis could occur through normal physiological, though as yet unknown, processes; it does not obviously require some special new kind of force. — Anonymous

All events and people are set in place for special souls to enter this world at a certain place and time. They follow a direct path and no matter what the circumstance they can't be stopped until their mission is complete. They go against all the odds. Everything is suddenly set in motion, the correct people, the right moment and with a driving force they have an lasting impact that will bring a change in the world. We have witnessed this phenomenon time after time. — Joan Singleton

The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another - or others - always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. — James Baldwin

I've travelled a huge amount, but almost all of it has been through work. I spent five years stationed in London in the special services of the American Air Force, producing and directing shows for the troops, which I absolutely loved. — Larry Hagman

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life. — Marc Chagall

At the Auditorium Building on September 8, the labor movement hosted a rally to organize against the Loeb Rule. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor told the crowd that businessmen were engaged in a campaign "to eliminate men of brain and heart and sympathy and character" from the teaching force. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a former member of Mayor Dunne's progressive school board, spoke about the threat the Teachers Federation had long posed to corporate interests more interested in lowering their own taxes than in improving the education of other people's children. "All over this country, in one form or another, it is a fight between what has been called the Interests, the special interests, and the interests of the public, the interests of the common people. That is the fight. — Dana Goldstein

When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I had a burning desire in me to win and started to get him on the back foot. I was looking for that one special shot when I put him down with the famous Horsley Muckspreader right hand ... an unstoppable force. Incredibly, he got up and took the count and the ref waved us to continue. — Stephen Richards

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompts, severe, inflexible. It is there an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs ... is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud? ... Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? ... — Maximilien De Robespierre

Jim Fregosi will be deeply missed in the baseball world. Joni and the rest of the family are in our prayers. Fregos, was the best manager I've ever played for. Our relationship was so special.and he was the one that taught me how to be a leader. Fregos and I could relate to each other whether we were in the clubhouse or on the field. In 1993 The City of Brotherly Love changed the world..Fregos was the driving force!!! — Darren Daulton

After a bout of sex,
Sam: And P.S., if I'm going to have to do this Bible-holding business twice a year, I ought to get paid a special stipend.
Nick: I just made a deposit. — Marie Force

I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They're very efficient. They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers. — Sylvia Earle

What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field. — Albert Einstein

The dedication of the United States Air Force, Special Forces, and others involved in the mission to tracking down terrorists can not be matched. We express our gratitude to these men and women who defend the freedom America represents. — Tim Murphy

God has become the name of some special physical force or causal principle located somewhere out there among all the other forces and principles found in the universe: not the Logos filling and forming all things, not the infinity of being and consciousness in which all things necessarily subsist, but a thing among other things, an item among all the other items encompassed within nature. — David Bentley Hart

I'm still here. I'm a force to be reckoned with ... you have to come take my spot, and not through Twitter and not through the media, come take my spot. I'm ready to go. As big men in the league, there are two who have done something special during this millennium. I'm one and Tim Duncan is the other. Anyone else has to come upstairs and see the Shogun. I'm still the Shogun. — Shaquille O'Neal

Jesus, by example, tells us that every true leader should be a helper, a servant, or even a bondslave. This is a command, not a suggestion, and applies with special force to leaders. — Billy Graham

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. — Ernest Becker

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos. — Gary William Flake

Eisenhower's speech contained an unsubtle dig at Rockefeller, in the guise of a dig at Kennedy: "Just as the Biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who ... continually mouth the allegations that America has become a second-rate military power." He was proceeded at the podium by his black special assistant E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown in with the President on Air Force One. "One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave," radio and TV audiences heard. "Tonight I stand before you as a trusted assistant to the President of the United" - and then the networks cut away for fear of offending their Southern affiliates. — Rick Perlstein

As far as the command centers are concerned in Raqqa and to a lesser degree Mosul, cut those off. Do the same kind of thing that we did with Sinjar , working with our embedded special forces with the Kurds, shut off the supply route, soften them up, then we go in with specials ops followed by our air force to take them over. Those are things that work. — Benjamin Carson

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms: On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970. — John Dinges

I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease. — Abraham Verghese

If you think of a special operations team - SEALs, Special Forces, Rangers, and the Air Force Pararescuemen and combat controllers - like a boat, everybody rows. — Mark Owen

She'd never trusted her own natural impulses and instincts Among her greatest fears was the possibility that she might never discover and develop her deepest talents and intuitions. Her special gifts. Her life would be wasted in pursuing the goals set for her by other people. Instead, she wanted to reclaim a power and authority - a primitive, irresistible force - that transcended gender roles. She dreamed of wielding a raw magic that predated civilization itself. — Chuck Palahniuk

The heavy odds against finding the desired ... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search. — Janet Malcolm

Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre. — Tina Brown

Twas a special gift of God that speech was given to mankind; for through the Word, and not by force, wisdom governs. — Martin Luther

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird ... — Jasper Fforde

As the Libyan engagement has shown, "Western" air power can be a most appropriate and useful instrument in the context of so-called asymmetric conflicts. Yet it succeeded (and even then only after six months) only because NATO nations decided to arm the insurgents and sent in special forces to teach the untrained rebels how to become a skilled military force that could exploit favorable air situations on the ground. — John Andreas Olsen

The Sheldon Adelsons, the Koch brothers, the George Soroses, what we want to try to do is force them into the parties, not so that Kasich or whoever is going to straight to them and trying to kiss up to special interests, but so the parties have the power and they can direct the money. — Mark Shields

Well,' he said, 'I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance. — D.H. Lawrence

The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development. — Sune Bergstrom

No need to mince words. And you don't need to force yourself to like me. No one likes me now. It's only to be expected. I don't even like myself much. I used to have a few really good friends. You were one of them. But at a certain stage in life I lost them. Like how Shiro at a certain point lost that special spark. ... But you can't go back. Can't return an item you've already opened. You just have to make do. — Haruki Murakami

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else's views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others. — J.P. Moreland

Power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person's brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less. One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu. — Daniel Goleman

You could be a member of a special, macho, elite force, protecting mankind from insidios evil in all forms, including the triple-decker bacon cheeseburger."
"I can saftly say I've never battled a cheeseburger. — Kerrelyn Sparks

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is. — James Thurber

I'm also a sucker for a view. Take me to a high place where I can see the landscape or the stars or the whole city, and I'm putty, I'm melting in your arms. Then I think having a romantic night, getting a little dressed up, but don't kill yourself trying to force the romance. A bunch of little subtle changes that will make the day more special will amount to a big awesome day in your memory. I like little breadcrumbs along the way. Draw it out! — Evan Rachel Wood

The plain truth is that labor is the chief representative force that keeps the real special interests from dominating American political life. — Lane Kirkland

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. — Edward W. Said

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.
Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you'll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected? — Octavia E. Butler

To me the special quality (which of course many men have as well) is first of all a sharpness, a clarityIt cuts through - especially intellectual ossification. Itgets to the point. To me the dakini principle stands for the intuitive force. — Tenzin Palmo

If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other. — Milton Friedman

Religious people are not entitled to special rights, even if they are elected leaders or in the majority; they are not allowed to force everyone to support their religion. — Ed Buckner

Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked. — Natalie Angier

Today, you have achieved something special, something only 92 percent of Americans your age will ever know: a college diploma. That's right, with your college diploma you now have a crushing advantage over eight percent of the work force. I'm talking about dropout losers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. — Conan O'Brien

Our paths are all different and unique. Embrace your space and also cherish and support the dreams and goals of those around you. Someone around you might not have complete clarity of their own path. Remind people of how special and unique they are and that they are enough, worthy and exactly where they need to be right now. Choose Love and Peace, Joy and Light and apply it to your life. Trying to force the future or control the future comes from fear and darkness within us. Trust. — Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino

According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe. — G.M. Jackson

Unfortunately, we both lead incredibly hectic lives that force us to spend a majority of our time apart. I will always admire and respect Tiger. He and his beautiful family will always hold a special place in my heart. — Lindsey Vonn

There are people we meet who have but little roles to play in our lives, who happen to be no more than a special appearance to our story.
People, who influence, who possess the drift, the force whose implication leads us forward in our course of life. We might have never come across them until today and probably not hear from them tomorrow or ever after, for all that exists is this moment, a moment enough for them to fulfil their purpose that being to help us find our way and enough for us to fulfil ours that being to actually find it, reach it, accomplish it.
They are the ones who bring meaning to our lives, who happen to inspire, who spark a fire that we carry with us for the rest of our days, who are but pillars of hope and sometimes sacrifice, life-changers, life-savers, catalysts. — Chirag Tulsiani

I regret that the Army felt it was necessary to rescind their invitation to the National Day of Prayer Task Force to participate in the Pentagon's special prayer service. I want to express my strong support for the United States military and all our troops. I will continue to pray that God will give them guidance, wisdom and protection as they serve this great country. — Franklin Graham

Maybe there's a grand conductor, and maybe there's not. I do happen to believe in God, or the Spirit of Life, or the Force for all I know, but regardless of belief or disbelief, one thing I know for certain is that no matter WHAT or WHO is out there, he or it doesn't "care" if you define "care" in terms of life and death. Nobody is special. Nobody gets a pass. — Johnny B. Truant

Notice how they'll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once ... There's a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They've got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them - because they don't exist within him and that's the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man. — Ayn Rand

Deronda ... gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning ... The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men. — George Eliot