Specialised Quotes & Sayings

Guess your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, a boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialised kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once. — Leslie Jamison

I think brands should go back to being more specialised and focused on particular market segments. Sometimes the business you don't do is more important than that which you actually do. — Mark Price

Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world. — Jeffrey Sachs

We are all specialised forms of survivor. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses. — Michel Faber

I thought you specialised in dishonest finesse?"
"I also do a brisk trade in putting knives to peoples' throats and shouting at them," said Locke. — Scott Lynch

Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (technical warrant officer trainee specialised in aircraft jet engines) — Tarja Moles

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. — John Maynard Keynes

A linguist who specialised in the languages of incense and burnt offerings, of moths and radial cremations. — Benjanun Sriduangkaew

I didn't do plays at school, because I didn't have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it. — Joseph Mawle

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform. — Christopher Henry Dawson

By 1914, the royal families of Europe were inbred to the point of pantomine. You feel about them as you do about koalas. Nothing so stupid has any right to exist on the planet. On the other hand, they are rather cute, and in grave danger of extinction due to their specialised needs. — Nancy Banks-Smith

Fundamentally, we have broken our aerospace business into three parts - large parts which go into the wings and fuselage, components for jet engines, and specialised structural components for landing gear. — Baba Kalyani

The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause. — Bertrand Russell

The philosophy of the school was quite simple - the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like. — Aaron Klug

Our time is so specialised that we have people who know more and more or less and less. — Alvar Aalto

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class. — Walter Lippmann

One of the differences between now and then is that the idea of body image is a much bigger issue now. Back then, just being kind of heavy and barrel-chested passed for heroic. Now, you wouldn't dare to play a hero without a lot of dieting and various specialised abdomen machines. But that was one of the things which was interesting about it and I did want to portray because there's good and bad. — Ben Affleck

Angela Carter ... refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale's rescuer, the form's own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.
(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter") — Marina Warner

I have always had the feeling that organic chemistry is a very peculiar science, that organic chemists are unlike other men, and there are few occupations that give more satisfactions [sic] than masterly experimentation along the old lines of this highly specialised science. — Lawrence Joseph Henderson

John Gurdon spent around fifteen years, starting in the late 1950s, demonstrating that in fact nuclei from specialised cells are able to create whole animals if placed in the right environment i.e. an unfertilised egg — Nessa Carey

Back in the 1980s, the 'News of the World' had specialised in digging into the privacy of criminals. In the 1990s, enriched by the excavation of Princess Diana's volatile life, they had widened their work to mine the activities of any celebrity, any public figure. — Nick Davies

There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades. — Walter Moers

'Elitist' doesn't need to mean wealthy and conservative; it can also mean specialised and rarefied, and that's no bad thing. — Mark Morris

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [ ... ] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible. — T. S. Eliot

If I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you'll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it's very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that's not a universal claim, that's a rather specialised claim and so you can't claim to great fame and great success. — Richard Lewontin

I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have. — David Mamet

When I was growing up, hip-hop was still a pretty specialised thing. — Estelle

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures. — Jean Piaget

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead. — Nell Zink

When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality? — Matt Mullenweg

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it. — Patricia Hill Collins

The essence of spirituality does not consist in a specialised or narrow interest in some imagined part of life, but in a certain enlightened attitude to all the various situations which obtain in life. It covers and includes the whole of life. All the material things of this world can be made subservient to the divine game, and when they are thus subordained they become auxiliary to the self-affirmation of the spirit. — Meher Baba

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited — Virginia Woolf

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter. — Christopher Fowler