Strictures Quotes & Sayings

I've never forgotten what it's like to be in your early twenties, which is not a particularly easy time. You've left your family, you've left the strictures of high school, and you're trying to break free and form yourself but you have to support yourself as well. We don't really give enough credence to that time of life and to its troubles. — Julia Leigh

The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations - both callers and receivers - and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar — Tim Weiner

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's. — Michael Sandel

But the paradox of their success is that most modern readers are unaware of the overwhelming obstacles both women had to overcome. Without knowing the history of the era, the difficulties Wollstonecraft and Shelley faced are largely invisible, their bravery incomprehensible. Both women were what Wollstonecraft termed "outlaws." Not only did they write world-changing books, they broke from the strictures that governed women's conduct, not once but time and again, profoundly challenging the moral code of the day. Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind. They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end. — Charlotte Gordon

The myth persists in Egypt to this day that Napoleon's soldiers actually disfigured some of these ruins, and are even said to have used the Sphinx as target practice for their cannons, shooting off its nose. This last is a calumny: it is known that the Sphinx was defaced as early as the eighth century by the Sufi iconoclast Saim-ed-Dahr,28 and was further damaged in 1380 by fanatical Muslims prompted by the Koran's strictures against images. During these early times the Sphinx was not regarded as a precious historical object, but instead inspired fear: through the centuries it became known to the Egyptians as Abul-Hol (Father of Terrors), and would only begin to be regarded more favorably when it became a tourist attraction in the later nineteenth century. — Paul Strathern

When a hot trend turns into a sub-category, new strictures arise along with it. Tropes turn into shortcuts, character paradigms become cardboard cutouts. Publishing pulls the bandwagon, true enough, but when feel-alike fiction floods the market its impact declines because it is starved of what makes fiction rich, surprising, moving, and masterful. — Donald Maass

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre. — James Thurber

The shaping of a golem, to [Joe] was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something
one poor, dumb, powerful thing
exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. — Michael Chabon

Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish religion, the Hellenist preachers began to gradually shed Jesus's message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman milieu. In doing so, they unchained themselves from the strictures of Jewish law, until it ceased to have any primacy. Jesus did not come to fulfill the law, the Hellenists argued. He came to abolish it. Jesus's condemnation was not of the priests who defiled the Temple with their wealth and hypocrisy. His condemnation was of the Temple itself. — Reza Aslan

Onerous moral strictures weed out the uncommitted and guarantee a minimum level of solidarity and trust within the group. — Eduardo Porter

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan. — P. J. O'Rourke

Torah is not merely a collection of prohibitions, rigid strictures and boring observances. Rather, it is a narrative of the blessings and promises of God initially offered to one person and family, but through which the whole world will ultimately be blessed. — Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

movement behind us, each of us had to overcome deeply held values and traditional social strictures. The struggle was personally painful and — Lynn Povich

At its most basic level, behind the grand poetry and superb characterizations, Shakespeare shows Macbeth succumbing to the temptation of pride, the same sin as Adam. Both wanted to live without God, to lead their own lives, follow their own paths, and ignore any limits on their freedom imposed by God's strictures. — William Shakespeare

Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges. They grow less determinate and more porous and lose some of their resolution. This particular in-difference lends them an aura of friendliness. Rigid delimitation with respect to one's surroundings is suspended: — Byung-Chul Han

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety. — Stephen Young

Religious strictures are often the source of attitudes toward nudity. Society urges the wearing of clothing partially as a means of controlling the powerful sexual urges that are feared will be released by nudity, causing chaotic behavior. — Patricia Garfield

Set strictures on a person all you like, but the mind remains adulterous. — Tom Holland

Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.") — Wendell Berry

In contrast to what the women have been told (that they are dumb and ugly) and how they have been controlled with confined strictures, the dance class is a safe place in which the women have choices and can improve their self-concept. — Judith Lynne Hanna

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s. — Bill Bryson

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. — Adrienne Rich

In this modern day, when only what we see is allowed to have certainity, and when scientific data seems to hold the trump card for truth, when only what can be measured exists, love defies all these strictures and dances joyfully before the eyes of human beings, teasing them with the promise of the unknown. — Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

.. and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms. — Paul Theroux

Within the strictures of commonsense reality and personal ability, we can choose to do anything we like in this world ... with one exception: We cannot choose what any of our choices will be. To do that, we would have to be capable of making ourselves into self-made individuals who can choose what they choose as opposed to being individuals who simply make choices. For instance, we may want to become bodybuilders and choose to do so. But if we do not want to become bodybuilders we cannot make ourselves into someone who does want to be a bodybuilder. For that to happen, there would have to be another self inside us who made us choose to want to become bodybuilders. And inside that self, there would have to be still another self who made that self want to choose to choose to make us want to become bodybuilders. — Thomas Ligotti

Liberating ourselves from the traditional strictures of marriage altogether, and/or transforming those strictures to include all of us -- gay, feminist, career-focused, baby crazy, monogamous, non-monogamous, skeptical, romantic, and everyone in between -- is the challenge facing this generation. As we consciously opt out or creatively reimagine marriage one loving couple at a time, we'll be able to shift societal expectations wholesale, freeing younger generations from some of the antiquated assumptions we've faced (that women always want to get married and men always shy away from commitment, that gender parity somehow disempowers men, that turning 30 makes an unmarried woman into an old maid). — Courtney E. Martin

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. — Anna Quindlen

Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external percepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority. — Baltasar Gracian

It often struck me as strange and disagreeable to hear him utter severe strictures upon some of these persons who seemed to me so good. — Leo Tolstoy

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer. — John McWhorter

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law's treatment.

But 'fairness' is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed--the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. — David Mamet

Strictures, reproaches, and intemperate speeches from the Senator of Louisiana are really the wailings of an apostle of despair; he has lost control of himself, he is trying to play billiards with elliptical billiard balls and a spiral cue. — Huey Long

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be ... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work. — Andrei Tarkovsky

His grandfather was scathing about "speculative faith," which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. _Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God._ — Nick Harkaway

What are they doing here, these difficult young persons and their still more difficult guardians? This - this sacred Elysian garden of the great humanistic tradition of classic wisdom and classic art - must not be invaded by clamorous babes and agitated elders, must not be profaned either by the plaudits or the strictures of the unlettered mob. Somewhere in human life, and where should it be if not in the cloistered seclusion of noble literature? - there must be an escape from the importunities of such people and from the responsibilities of the ignorance they so jealously guard. — John Cowper Powys

Such is the tragedy of girls and women who by the strictures of their upbringing and culture cannot own up to their body's desires, even to themselves. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

( ... ) the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date - to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother's generation. ( ... ) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny. — Joshua Zeitz

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights - a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature — Steven Pinker

George Zimmerman is a foot soldier in a rapidly privatizing country. He is a new centurion of 21st-century America. Law enforcement is tied down by the strictures of, well, the law. There is only 'so much they can do' to take care of the 'problem.' — Henry Rollins

After over six hundred hours of listening, John knew two more things: That the most profound truth lay in the labyrinths that coiled behind a green door in the interviewee's mind the very second that Alfred Kinsey said, "Tell me about your fantasies"; and, two, that with the proper information and the correct stimuli he could get carefully chosen people to break through those doors and act out their fantasies, past moral strictures and the boundaries of conscience, taking him past his already absolute knowledge of mankind's unutterable stupidity into a new night realm that he as yet was incapable of imagining. Because the night was there to be plundered; and only someone above its laws could exact its bounty and survive. — James Ellroy

I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it. — Raymond Pettibon

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world. — Jane Hirshfield

But we [women] are only at the beginning [of revamping feminism]. And our strictures on each other prove this. Our enforcement of thinness, of non-sexuality, of 'good' feminism versus 'bad' feminism, are proofs of our being at the beginning, not the end of a process. That younger feminists are embracing their sexuality is a sign of hope
a sign that women's lives will some day be less constricted, less fearful of the dark side of creativity (to which Eros provides the key). If that happens, we will at least have the full gamut of inspiration so long denied us. We will have access to all parts of ourselves
all the animals within us, from wolf to lamb. When we learn to love all the animals within us, we will know how to make men love them too. — Erica Jong