Stringent Quotes & Sayings

The ultimate goal of the political elite is to privatize the air. So as not to destroy their own edifice of democratic compassion they will make provisions for the sick and the poor. Air will be rationed by a privatized bureaucracy and only those who complete a series of stringent means tests will be allowed to breath freely. If this sounds like untenable dystopian sci-fi, you haven't been paying attention. In the 17th century Dean Jonathon Swift satirically proposed that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. Many Lords in Westminster at the time took this as a sign that an Irish voice was finally speaking sense. The descendants of these Lords still stalk the corridors of power today. Never underestimate the callousness or the hereditary madness of the ruling class. — Dean Cavanagh

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. — Ulysses S. Grant

What a situation, now, for a patriotic senator, that had been all the week before spurring up the legislature of his native state to pass more stringent resolutions against escaping fugitives, their harborers and abettors! — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Rs 6500 crore disclosed under compliance window of black money & foreign assets law. People fear the law that has now been created. Stringent provisions will not be diluted despite pressures. — Narendra Modi

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. — Voltaire

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

Perhaps, they reasoned, the poor, stringent lives — Khaled Hosseini

Stringent standards of self-evaluation [can] make otherwise objective successes seem to be personal failures — Albert Bandura

It was apparent that the ladies vying to be Miss Colombia had to first go through a stringent competition of poise, talent, and debate on who had the best abs and biggest breasts to win the right to represent their department. They received lots of cheers from the crowds - and lots of open stares from all the police guarding the boulevard. — Bryanna Plog

The man, most man,
Works best for men, and, if most men indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The bomb was 'born secret,' as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. The atomic bomb marked a powerful turning point in America's stewardship of national security affairs. After its arrival, Garry Willis argues, 'the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People.' But the first stop was a radical restructuring of the government itself, to account for the development and expansion of a nuclear arsenal requiring special means, staffs, oversight, and a stringent and novel regime of peacetime secrecy. The national security state was born. — Scott Horton

Both scepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I'd love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix - full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence; and these standards applied with at least as much rigour to what they hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity. — Carl Sagan

As I got up, I posed the last question to him. 'Baba, somebody told me that your government has initiated stringent measures for wildlife protection. Is that true?' 'Yes. There is a complete ban on the shooting of tigers and elephants. We have explained the importance of conservation to all the villages and they seem to have understood.' 'I wish our government had been as serious about it,' I told him as we headed for the hut where dinner was waiting for us. Instead — Rajeev Bhattacharyya

Every culture feels like their parents are the most stringent as far as, "We came to this country to work hard, we want you to be a doctor or a lawyer." — Ato Essandoh

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. - PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD — Peter Watts

It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls. — Hooman Majd

In North Korea, grass is a vegetable eaten by the people, and they've got nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, something more stringent than what's been done to North Korea is going to have to work; otherwise, a military strike is the only option. — Oliver North

The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction. — Murray Rothbard

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'
'What sort of tools?'
'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. — Robert Anton Wilson

I am beginning to see the fallacy in the Western world's take on dying. Too often we are taught that this one life is all there is and when it ends, that's it. Or, instead of once again returning to a loving God who welcomes us back Home with open arms, we are told that when we die we must stand in front of a stern and unforgiving deity who sits on a throne and looks at every mistake we have ever made, deciding if we are good enough to enter heaven. And, if we do make it past that stringent test, we certainly aren't able to visit our friends and family still living. No wonder so many of us are afraid of death. I also find it fascinating that most religions believe in angels or wise ascended souls who brought messages to certain people on earth (Moses and Noah, for example) thousands of years ago, but deny that such an occurrence can happen now. What, did God just decide not to talk to us anymore? — Donna Visocky

Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child
this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways. — Bertrand Russell

Look, every institution will make mistakes. I acknowledge we make mistakes, and they can hurt my reputation and our company's. But you also must be willing to let go a little bit, trust others, and not always be so stringent, provided you have robust controls. — Jamie Dimon

When any of our faculties retains
a strong impression of delight or pain,
the soul will wholly concentrate on that,
neglecting any other power it has;
and thus, when something seen
or heard secures the soul in stringent grip,
time moves and yet we do not notice it. — Dante Alighieri

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. — Howard Zinn

Mrs Grayshott was no tattle-monger; and since she had a great deal of reserve Abby knew that only a stringent sense of duty could have forced her to overcome her distaste of talebearing. What she knew, either from her own observation, or from the innocent disclosures of her daughter, she plainly thought to be too serious to be withheld from Fanny's aunt. At the same time, thought Abigail, dispassionately considering her, the well-bred calm of her manners concealed an over-anxious disposition, which led her to magnify possible dangers. — Georgette Heyer

The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement. — George Gilder

As a student of business administration, I know that there is a law of evolution for organizations as stringent and inevitable as anything in life. The longer one exists, the more it grinds out restrictions that slow its own functions. It reaches entropy in a state of total narcissism. Only the people sufficiently far out in the field get anything done, and every time they do they are breaking half a dozen rules in the process. — Roger Zelazny

I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I wish that there were more stringent laws to make guns sold anywhere that they're legal harder to get. — Rosie O'Donnell

[...] fundamental PIM problems are surprisingly resistant to technology change. [...] Despite apparent technology improvements, we still forget to deal with vital actionable items. find it hard to judge the value of new information, keep large amounts of infomation of questionable value, and fail to retrieve important information that we have made stringent efforts to organize. — Ofer Bergman

Sensible men were not eager to submit themselves to the Judgement of the Almighty, and a decisive battle seemed to prove that the victor had God on his side. Most people preferred not to put the Lord's Favour to such a stringent, conclusive test. — Sharon Kay Penman

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism's prediction is falsified; 2) Design's prediction is confirmed. — Michael J. Behe

This is someone who has a very stringent morality, and believes the system works, and has been deeply, deeply disappointed, and hurt, by it. You know, so she's in a very different place in life. — Julianne Moore

Even today, more than eighty years after Oort's bold guess, we still don't have a clue what this dark matter is made of. We know it exists. We know where it is. We have maps of its presence within and around galaxies throughout the universe. We even have stringent constraints on what it is not, but we have no clue what it is. And yes, its presence is overwhelming: for every one kilogram of ordinary matter made out of neutrons and protons and electrons, there are five kilograms of dark matter, made out of who-knows-what. — Christophe Galfard

I've never asked him but I'm sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery. — Cassandra Clare

It is statistically irrefutable that those American cities with stringent "gun control" (e.g. N.Y.C., D.C., Chicago, L.A.) have higher crime rates. It is also irrefutable that those 31 states which have made conceal carry of handguns easy for law-abiding citizens have correspondingly enjoyed significant drops in their crime rates. — Kenneth W. Royce

Social Security Disability Plans: This segment of Social Security is different from the more common retirement benefit payout. Two programs are available: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Both programs have stringent eligibility requirements. — Michele Tagliati

There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent. — Douglas Hofstadter

What does a life of total dedication to truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. — M. Scott Peck

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and by that right, he has forged chains around his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor. — Emma Goldman

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. — Samuel Smiles

If we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others
more stringent ones, in fact
plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil — Noam Chomsky

I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature. — Philip Roth

I don't want to paint myself as some villain - I was never a bad guy doing horrible things, but I got too caught up in wanting a very specific thing to happen to the band. Ultimately, I had to find the ability in myself to get over that and stop being so stringent and learn to laugh a little bit more. — Andy Biersack

Repetition acts as an enforcement mechanism: It makes cooperation achievable when it is not achievable in the one-shot game, even when one replaces strategic equilibrium as the criterion for achievability by the more stringent requirement of perfect equilibrium. — Robert Aumann

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide ... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers. — Nick Harkaway

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us. — Sara Sheridan

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development. — William Wardell

Pleasure and sensation are essential features of the second chakra. If desire is the seed of movement, then pleasure is the root of desire, and sensation is the medium of pleasure. Pleasure is essential for the health of the body, the rejuvenation of spirit, and the healing of our personal and cultural relationships. Unfortunately, we are taught to beware of pleasure, that it's a dangerous temptress waiting to lure us away from our true path. We are taught to repress our need for pleasure, and in so doing, repress our natural bodily impulses, and once again, segregate mind and body. We don't easily allow ourselves enjoyment of even the simple pleasures - time for a little extra sleep, a leisurely walk, or comfortable clothing. These stringent measures arise from the mind, but seldom from the body. We then may experience a backlash in our emotions. — Anodea Judith

They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion. I — Walter Tevis

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home. It became part of the now widespread idea of a "continuum of care," which sounds perfectly nice and logical but manages to perpetuate conditions that treat the elderly like preschool children. Concern about safety and lawsuits increasingly limited what people could have in their assisted living apartments, mandated what activities they were expected to participate in, and defined ever more stringent move-out conditions that would trigger "discharge" to a nursing facility. The language of medicine, with its priorities of safety and survival, was taking over, again. Wilson pointed out angrily that even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly. They at least get to have swings and jungle gyms. — Atul Gawande

My nose is Gargantuan! You little Pig-snout, you tiny Monkey-Nostrils, you virtually invisible Pekinese-Puss, don't you realize that a nose like mine is both scepter and orb, a monument to me superiority? A great nose is the banner of a great man, a generous heart, a towering spirit, an expansive soul
such as I unmistakably am, and such as you dare not to dream of being, with your bilious weasel's eyes and no nose to keep them apart! With your face as lacking in all distinction
as lacking, I say, in interest, as lacking in pride, in imagination, in honesty, in lyricism
in a word, as lacking in nose as that other offensively bland expanse at the opposite end of your cringing spine
which I now remove from my sight by stringent application of my boot! — Edmond Rostand

Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business. — Chuck Jones

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer. — Diana Trilling

The Templeton Foundation distributes $70 million yearly in grants and fellowships. To put that in perspective, that's five times the amount dispensed annually by the U.S. National Science Foundation for research in evolutionary biology, one of Templeton's areas of focus. Given Templeton's deep pockets and not overly stringent criteria for dispensing money, it's no wonder that, in a time of reduced financial support, scientists line up for Templeton grants. — Jerry A. Coyne

The lack of stringent laws and the inefficient prosecution of
perpetrators have made it increasingly difficult for victims and their
families to get the justice they deserve. — Oche Otorkpa

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold the principles received by me when I was sane, not mad
as I am now. Laws and principles are not for 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. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand; there I plant my foot. — Charlotte Bronte

Censorship became so stringent that even a scene in which a character complained too strongly about the weather could be considered "antisocial" and ordered removed. — Paul Fischer

We are relational creatures. All humans live in community and most people seek social interaction. In western culture, isolation is seen as one of the most stringent of punishments. Even criminals do not aspire to solitary confinement. — Gary Chapman

As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299) — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie