Suspend It Quotes & Sayings

What is it about this book - essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War - which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events, almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment - Mrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman's work, but in The Guns of August there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen. — Barbara W. Tuchman

It wasn't just about doing tricks. It's about taking an audience to another place, a special place, so they can really suspend their disbelief. Its about amazing the audience as well as moving them. — David Copperfield

He knew how to touch her, how hard to thrust, when to roll his hips, when and how to angle himself so she could not only feel him inside her, but rubbing against her clitoris, brushing, sensitizing. The fiend knew how to make her agony last, how to suspend it until he would allow her to reach out for it and surrender. — Charlotte Featherstone

I say to my congregants, If you believe in God, the best thing you can do for yourself is to suspend your belief for a while, because undoubtedly your God is too small and you must grow beyond that God. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God, your very disbelief is a stumbling block. Kick it away and place your faith in somehting more ennobling than disbelief. Take a flier. Expand your purview. Take a leap of faith. — Forrest Church

Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts ... [you] still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced ... the lines between sinner and saved [are] more fluid; the sins of those who come to church are not so different from the sins of those who don't ... You [need] to come to church precisely because you [are] of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved you [need] to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away ... that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world ... — Barack Obama

Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues as real-world communication, you basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want. — Palmer Luckey

It is my hope that when a reader chooses to suspend their reality for mine, that it will be time well spent. — Sharon Van Orman

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing ... I do not understand it ... Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is ... , which is to say, I suspend my judgment. — Michel De Montaigne

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. — Clay Shirky

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is — Alan Watts

I will treat all my negative reactions to this form of meditation as merely thought forms prompted by my ego to keep me from taking it seriously. I will suspend judgment, criticism, and doubt. — Ram Dass

Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered him with my gun. It didn't faze him in the least, he kept moving right on past me toward the street-door. Not quickly, either; as slowly as if he was just going out for a walk. He said, 'It isn't my time yet. You can't do anything to me with that.' ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.
There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life. — George H. Smith

I think it's hard for people to suspend the era they live in and understand the decisions that had to be made often during the western [frontier era] were life and death. You had to be resourceful and on your feet to try to figure out somebody. You didn't have the benefit of knowing who somebody was. — Kevin Costner

With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us? — David Henry Hwang

Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just invited close friends and family, the usual suspects whose opinion I value but who I know will enjoy the film [ Before I Go To Sleep]. I don't know how difficult it is for them to suspend their disbelief because they obviously know me and what they're seeing is not me. — Mark Strong

The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all. — Bret Anthony Johnston

It's true, I do sometimes suspend myself over the canvas, but mostly I work at a table when I'm making a painting. When I use 'The Rig,' my feet are firmly anchored. I lower myself horizontally just long enough to make a brush stroke - a matter of seconds - and then I'm upright again. My assistant then erases the painting quickly with a squeegee and I go for it again ... until I get it right. It's like trying to hit a home run. — James Nares

Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child! Away, away! — William Shakespeare

Everyone is a flux - so it's good to suspend judgements forever. — Frederick Lenz

I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference. — Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

Science is an inherent contradiction - systematic wonder - applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming's eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it - a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria - and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory? — Thomas Lewis

The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights. — Gloria Naylor

The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories. — George Santayana

Were my smile not submerged in my countenance, / I should suspend it over her grave. — Else Lasker-Schuler

I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn't in extremis? — Howard Norman

Every character, or actor, on Friends is too pretty. I can't suspend reality for people that good looking - again it's a fantasy. I keep thinking, where are their normal looking friends? Are they only willing to be friends with young, beautiful, thin people of average height? And why is their apartment so big? That's a huge apartment for New York." I shrugged. "It bothers me. — Penny Reid

I heard precious little questioning of the preposterous logic by which the president and vice president had conflated Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It was as if the nation had decided to suspend the normal rigors of logical analysis while we pursued war against a noun (terror) and a nation (Iraq) that had absolutely nothing to do with the attack we were seeking to avenge. — Al Gore

If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense - you're ready for him. You tell him there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you can play it deuces wild. — Ayn Rand

How is it possible to suspend topaz in one cup of the balance and weigh it against amethyst in the other; or who in a single language can compare the tranquillizing grace of a maiden with the invigorating pleasure of witnessing a well-contested rat-fight? — Ernest Bramah

I always like to have faith that an audience will suspend their disbelief, if you present it to them in the right way. I find it peculiar when people scoff at one bold idea, and yet they'll then turn over and watch a man travel through time in a police phone box. I think it's just how you present the idea. — Tom Mison

Everybody is satisfied, that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society; and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate. Now, to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing what is the substance of it; to take away, or at least to suspend, the rights of nature, in order to an approved system for the protection of them ... is a procedure as preposterous and absurd in argument as it is oppressive and cruel in its effect. — Edmund Burke

The best way to stop the problem of agents would be for the NCAA to come down hard and suspend a school for two years if it finds players with agents on campus. — Dean Smith

Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree? — Mortimer J. Adler

It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while. — Seth Grahame-Smith

In addition, it is very likely that United States action in Iraq caused Iran to open its nuclear facilities for international inspection and suspend its uranium enrichment activities. — Jim Gerlach

It is now, at Advent, that I am given the chance to suspend all expectation ... and instead to revel in the mystery. — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Another form on sagacity and self-defence consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and relationships in which one would be condemned as it were to suspend ones 'freedom', ones initiative, and become a mere reagent. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation ... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak ... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. — Albert Hofmann

If ... it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power, namely, suspend judgement ... — Rene Descartes

It is an art of no little importance to administer medicines properly: but, it is an art of much greater and more difficult acquisition to know when to suspend or altogether to omit them. — Philippe Pinel

The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting
Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like "It's Complicated" compensates for five scenes of Diane Keaton being caught half naked in a topiary. But I can't suspend disbelief enough, for instance, if the gorgeous and skinny heroine is also a ravenous pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie - her parents, her friends, her boss - are all complicit in this huge lie. They constantly tell her to stop eating. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who obviously lost weight to play the likable lead character, has to say things like "Shut up, you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!" If you look closely, you can see this woman's ribs through the dress she's wearing - that's how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow. — Mindy Kaling

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses. — Don DeLillo

BIRT likes his daddy's voice," I say softly, absorbing this moment we'll never get back once he's born. He presses his lips to the side of my neck and holds them there. It's almost as if he knows what I'm thinking and feels the same way, so he is trying to suspend time to make the here and now last as well. — K. Bromberg

If what the philosophers say be true, that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage. — Epictetus

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension. — Thomas Jefferson

Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself ... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself. — Adam Miller

It is hard directing. The hours are terrible and you have to sort of suspend your life when you're in production. So, being a mother is very hard. I can absolutely see why there are so few women directing, because it's physically a very demanding thing to do. Fathers can only do it because they have wives at home doing all the other stuff. I can only do it because I have a husband that helps with the kids at home — Gurinder Chadha

A man sometimes starts up a patriot, only by disseminating discontent, and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights, and encroaching usurpation. This practice is no certain note of patriotism. To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend public happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. — Samuel Johnson

Philosophers say that people are all guided by a single standard. When they assent to a thing, it is because they feel it must be true, when they dissent, it is because they feel something isn't true, and when they suspend judgement, it is because they feel that the thing is unclear. — Epictetus

A regime that can suspend or abrogate the constitution and run the country on its whims and caprice should be ashamed of bringing on its lips the word "law". It is like prescribing a punishment for adultery after raping the country. It is like saying that Holy Quran is suspended nobody can escape from the Hadees. — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed - a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil - and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself. — Thomas Mann

It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes. — George Carlin

Rats may scamper across it and remain rats. Birds may fly above it and remain
birds; they may alight and tear and eat and prick up their heads to stare motionless
and beady for a moment before pecking and eating again, and remain birds. But no
man may venture into this space between the lines and remain a man. That is the
difference. No man may enter, either stealthily on his belly alone, or noisily on two
feet racing through glue with a thousand versions of himself firing, falling, on either
side as far as the eye can see, and remain a man. It is possible to become a man
once more if you make it back behind your line again, but you suspend your
humanity for your sojourn in between. That is why the place is called No Man's Land. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. — Steven Pinker

You have to suspend disbelief a little bit to buy into your situation and to the story and to how the character will react. You have to tweak your credibility a little bit, is basically what it comes down to. — Richard Dean Anderson

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. — Ernest Dimnet

Please, Kate. Suspend your dislike of me for a few moments and listen to what I have to say. It makes sense."
"I don't dislike you. It's an oversimplification. — Ilona Andrews

It's freaking football. There are going to be big hits. I don't understand how they can do this after one weekend of hitting. And I can't understand how they can suspend us for it. I think it's a bunch of bull. — Brian Urlacher

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life. — Will Gluck

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

try to explain to her she's dead and therefore has no further need for Romeo's impressive erection, but she's finding it difficult to suspend her disbelief. — Leisa Rayven

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. — Arundhati Roy

I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. — Bev Perdue

There is a challenge of doing something new. Sometimes you have to suspend whether you believe in yourself doing it and just give yourself over to the idea that they believe in you. — Josh Peck

In order that the concept of substance could originate
which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it
it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency
to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just
had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What if you began to expect the best from any situation? Isn't it possible that you could write new chapters in your life with happy endings? Suspend your disbelief? Take a leap of faith? After all, what have you got to lose but misery and lack? — Sarah Ban Breathnach

On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality; but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality. — Steve Maraboli

My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. — Jock Sturges

Good teachers aren't simply born, they perfect their craft over time. Teachers need a chance to practice and improve, especially now as the American education system lags behind international standards. If education in the United States is to raise its standards, we need to nurture our teachers through a combination of accountability and development methods. Actionable advice: Don't discipline children too harshly. It's certainly tempting to punish or suspend children that behave badly. That might fix the problem in the short term, but it actually inhibits a child's overall learning. It's much more effective to solve conflicts through social problem solving. When children can engage with a problem in a safe environment, their behavior is more likely to change for the good. — Anonymous

The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you. — George Carlin

In a drawl so low, it seemed to suspend time, the old man said, "When the last leaf falls from the Widow's Tree this year, she'll be done for good. No coming back. No bothering anyone no more. Nobody will find her bones, and before next spring, nobody'll even remember her. She'll just be a wisp of a thing."
Peggy looked toward the tree, now hidden behind a low patch of morning cloud. She breathed out hard through her nose. "That's a terrible thing to do. Even for you, even to her."
"Set in motion a long time ago," he said blithely. "Just took this long to finish up. — Alex Bledsoe

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative. — Michel Faber

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend. — Hal Rothman

We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase "with the addition of other means" because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. — Carl Von Clausewitz

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams — Dan Davin

Occasionally and frequently the exercise of the judgment ought to end in absolute reservation. It may be very distasteful, and great fatigue, to suspend a conclusion; but as we are not infallible, so we ought to be cautious; we shall eventually find our advantage, for the man who rests in his position is not so far from right as he who, proceeding in a wrong direction, is ever increasing his distance. — Michael Faraday

We've made clear our view, which is we support the Russian proposal. It's within the context of the EU diplomacy aimed at getting Iran to re-suspend its enrichment activities and return to negotiations. — Joseph Adam Ereli

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust — Po Bronson

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work. — Edward Gibbon

When it comes to acting, people talk about the suspension of disbelief that you ask of the audience. Before that starts, you have to, as an actor, suspend your own disbelief. — Helena Bonham Carter

The Buddha encouraged people to "know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong. And when you do, then give them up. And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them."
The message is always to examine and see for yourself. When you see for yourself what is true-and that's really the only way that you can genuinely know anything-then embrace it. Until then, just suspend judgment and criticism. — Steve Hagen

To be successful, suspend your worries and your analytical thinking and just concentrate on reading the script as it is without any self-judgment. — Forbes Robbins Blair

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled. — Rex Stout

You are engaged in repressing an insurrection against the laws of the United States. If at any point on or in the vicinity of the [any] military line, which is now [or which shall be] used between the City Philadelphia and the City of Washington, via Perryville, Annapolis City, and Annapolis Junction, you find resistance which renders it necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety, you, personally or through the officer in command at the point where the [at which] resistance occurs, are authorized to suspend that writ. — Abraham Lincoln

Just as religion can lead its devotees to suspend reason for faith, it can also lead them to suspend morality for piety. Indeed, — Ali A. Rizvi

The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre. — Israel Horovitz

Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions? — Michel De Montaigne

When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot. — Ayn Rand

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it. — Tom Hanks

So that there is no misunderstanding from my perspective, I will suspend any player who tests positive for an illegal steroid. There will be no exceptions. The (players) union is aware of that and they accept it. — Bud Selig

Most of us encounter a great deal more Mystery than we are willing to experience. Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and the world may be quite different than we believe it to be. This can be very stressful, even frightening. But if we are not willing to wonder, we may have to hang up the phone on life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives. — Mindie Burgoyne

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so. — Aphrodite Matsakis

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning. — Brad Feld

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. — Thomas Friedman

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool. — Andrew Sullivan