Quotes & Sayings About Thwarting

Dean Burk, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute (head of their Cytochemistry Section and 32-year veteran at the agency) declared in a (May 30,1972) letter to (congressman Louis Frey, Jr.) that high officials of the FDA, AMA and ACS (American Cancer Society), were deliberately falsifying information, literally lying ... and in other ways thwarting potential cancer cures to which they were opposed. — Barry Lynes

Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one's own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals. — Bertrand Russell

Cockblockers are everywhere tonight, thwarting my attempts at poor decision making. — Helena Hunting

Literary history and the present are dark with silences ... I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences
what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)
that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. — Tillie Olsen

Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,
her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. — Virginia Woolf

Creativity is our true nature; blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem. — Julia Cameron

See, I know my life probably sounds glamorous and all, but trust me, it's not. Living with a bunch of do-gooders comes with some major drawbacks. At the top of the list is the fact that while superheroes are really great at the big things - like thwarting the forces of evil - they really stink at the little things. Like, for example, remembering their kid's birthday.
- Elliott Harkness, age 12 — R.L. Ullman

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see ... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture. — Henry Miller

From a leader's perspective, the most serious betrayal has to do with thwarting human potential, with quenching the spirit, with failing to deal equitably with each other as human beings. — Max De Pree

Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. — Scott Adams

And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me - against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born - I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for awhile; and shall later on be my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. — Bram Stoker

When tha day comes, that you sit down broken, without one human creature to whom you can cling, with your loves the dead and the living-dead; when the very thirst for knowledge through long-continued thwarting has grown dull; when in the present there s not craving, the in the future no hope, then, oh, with a beneficent tenderness, Nature enfolds you. — Olive Schreiner

Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds. — Arthur Koestler

Misliking the Harrow as I do, I would find no small joy in thwarting him. Have I not admitted that I, too, am prone to greed? But here I personify the united will of the Insequent. Any deviation from that resolve will breach the sacred prohibition which enables the Insequent to endure and prosper. Answering you, I will bring down my own destruction and accomplish only sorrow. — Stephen R. Donaldson

And watch two men washing clothes,
one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.
Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work. — Rumi

The Compromise of 1850 provided that the prohibition of slavery should be left up to the individual States, thus thwarting the Canaanites in their attempts to make this problem an excuse for federal intervention and a cause of war between the States. — Eustace Mullins

If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws. — Robert Reich

If the fallen lord had ever once lived with a sense of moral goodness in his whole long existence, he had certainly lost it all ... with his craven madness for domination." ~Roe'vaash "Then'diel's SONG — K. Farrell St. Germain

The thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. — Freya Stark

I think the pleasure of completed work is what makes blogging so popular. You have to believe most bloggers have few if any actual readers. The writers are in it for other reasons. Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. All you get is the pleasure of a completed task. — Scott Adams

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness. — William Godwin

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness. — Freya Stark

The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence. — Peter Singer

No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory - a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story. — Joseph O'Neill

Just as our adversaries and threats continue to evolve, so, too, must the FBI. The key to this evolution lies with our greatest assets: our people and our partnerships. Every FBI professional understands that thwarting the threats facing our nation means constantly striving to be more effective and more efficient. — James Comey

I never go but where I have some great purpose to serve," returned he, "either in the advancement of my own power and dominion or in thwarting my enemies. — James Hogg

Hebrews 11:1," says Mr. Taylor. "The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen." "NO. Wrong-you messed it!" Cedric laughs. "It goes: 'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' Man, Mr. Taylor, you always getting 'em wrong." Mr. Taylor howls, "All right, extra point for you," but, as usual, he wrestles the boy back to middle ground, thwarting an outright victory, "The Word, of course, is the Word my young friend. But make it into what's right for you. That's the lesson for today. Take from the Holy Scripture only what you need, nothing more. — Ron Suskind

Everything you're trying to reach - by taking the long way round - you could have right now, this moment. If you'd only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you'd only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice. Reverence: so you'll accept what you're allotted. Nature intended it for you, and you for it. Justice: so that you'll speak the truth, frankly and without evasions, and act as you should - and as other people deserve. — Marcus Aurelius

Islam is not an excuse for thwarting democracy. — Shirin Ebadi

The senseless killing of 20 children and their teachers and principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School was not part of God's grand plan. It was a thwarting of God's plan. It was the misuse of human freedom. — Adam Hamilton

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon. — George Santayana

The people are the best guardians of their own rights and it is the duty of their executive to abstain from interfering in or thwarting the sacred exercise of the lawmaking functions of their government. — William Henry Harrison

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. — Geoff Dyer

Nationalism is the sworn enemy of civilization, whether past, present or future, its malodorous presence thwarting the development of intelligence, — Stefan Zweig

The ditch we were digging cut through the middle of an olive grove. Our supervisor gave us instructions to be careful not to damage the roots of the trees. The minute he was out of sight, overseeing work at another ditch, Carlo would take his pickaxe or shovel and hack at the uncovered roots with a satisfied malice and then mask the destruction he had achieved with a new layer of earth. At the time I thought it madness that someone could believe he was thwarting the fascist war effort by mutilating the roots of a few olive trees. But the world still seemed relatively sane to me in those days before the Nazis arrived in Florence. — Glenn Haybittle

How often do we experience delays, changes of plans, and redirections and treat them as intrusions? God can use inconveniences in our lives if we look at them as divine appointments. From Our Daily Bread: " Disappointment - His appointment, change one letter, then I see; That the thwarting of my purpose is God's better choice for me". — Our Daily Bread Publications

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. — Evgeny Morozov

He had a thwarting day. The heath and moor were crisscrossed with little tracks, dusty and twisting between the heather and bracken and the little juniper trees with their clinging roots. There was not one way but many, all athwart each other like the cracks on a crazy jug, and he followed first one and then the other, choosing the straightest and stoniest and finding himself always under the hot-sun at another crossing just like the one he had just left. After a time he decided to got with the sun behind him always
at least this led to consistency of proceeding
though it must be told that when he decided this he had only the haziest idea, dear readers, of where the sun had been at the beginning of the venture. So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction.
Possession — A.S. Byatt