Troublesome People Quotes & Sayings

On a regular basis I go over in my mind some of the most troublesome things I see about how people approach eating, and the wonder mess we have made out of a very simple thing. — Gabrielle Reece

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media
none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty. — Howard Zinn

When people treat you ill, blame your conduct,
or report anything to your disadvantage, enter into
the very soul of them ; examine their understandings,
and see of what nature they are. You will be fully
convinced that the opinion of such mortals is not
worth one troublesome thought. However, you must
be kind to them, for nature has made them your
relations. Besides, the gods give them all sort of
countenance, warn them by dreams and prophecy,
and help them to those things they have a mind. — Marcus Aurelius

While patriotism is often lauded as an unquestionable value, the status of patriotism is a problem for many thoughtful people. It is particularly troublesome for people who care about the common good but are alienated by the all too frequent use of patriotism and patriotic symbols to stifle debate, tarnish the images of rival candidates, or arouse popular support for aggressive military policies. — Stephen Nathanson

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it. — Terry Pratchett

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They're rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft. — Terry Pratchett

Mental strength is extremely important. We must be able to put troublesome people out of our minds. They should not be able to distract our focus. This relates to casting our cares on the Lord (1 Peter 5:7). — Phil Pringle

Christ-as always, the model-never sat back, crossed his arms, and dismissed the annoying, the troublesome, or the unpromising. He never name-called, never judged, never treated a single person with contempt. Christ talked to everybody, he mingled with everybody, he shared his message with everybody, and he also loved everybody. So don't count the cost with anybody either. We don't waste our time with people who don't want what we have to offer. But if they do, one form of martyrdom is to give a listening ear or an understanding smile to all comers. — Heather King

HELEN: Life is complex and bewildering, isn't it? You meet someone. He's not spectacular, but he impresses you with his goodwill. You have a child. She's troublesome but kind of entertaining in her own loosey-goosey, head-up-her-ass way. For a time you all seem connected to the same life, on the same course. But after a while, not so much. And eventually not at all. And now, although most people would find it odd that we're trying to have each other killed, it actually seems to be a very natural thing. — George F. Walker

three things were most important in easing life's final journey. People needed strong relief from physical pain and troublesome symptoms, they needed to preserve their dignity, and they needed help with the psychological and spiritual pain of death. — Annie Clara Brown

I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that. — Richard Rodriguez

We have no power over the attitudes and actions of other people. We can't make our spouse grow up. We can't stop our spouse from exhibiting a troublesome habit or character flaw. We can't force our spouse to come home on time for dinner, to refrain from yelling at us, or to initiate conversations with us. The fruit of the Spirit is self-control, not other-control (Galatians 5:23). God himself does not exercise such power over us, even though he could (2 Peter 3:9). — Henry Cloud

Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion; and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty. — Edward Gibbon

The thirties were troublesome in Belfast, and then of course there was no work for people, and it was terribly religiously divided. — Frank Carson

Our people are not calculated to be confined in garrisons or kept in any particular service; they soon grow troublesome and uneasy by reflecting on their folly in bringing themselves into a state of subjection when they might have continued free and independent'. This was a society unlike any in the world, in which people placed great value on their status as independent individuals, beholden to no man. They were suspicious of standing armies and impatient of discipline, and while they realized the need to resist the enemy, they preferred to do so on their own terms at a time and place of their own choosing. It did not make for the kind of army on which generals could pin great hopes. — Richard M. Ketchum

She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in troublesome actions. — Ruth Ozeki

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. — Mary H. Eastman

Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else. — Pseudonymous Bosch

It is troublesome sometimes when people get up in your face in public, you know? And say, 'How could you, how dare you?' Well, they don't know me. — Shepard Smith

Looking to that future, there is every reason to believe that science and religion will both continue to flourish, to enlighten, to inspire; as well as to frustrate, to obfuscate, and to oppress.
Some people may wish that one half of this essentially modern pairing could be disposed of, or could be persuaded to relinquish its troublesome claims to authority in some or other sphere of knowledge, morality, or politics. But such people should be careful what they wish for. Would they really prefer to live in a society where everyone agreed about the questions that this book has been about? What sort of place would that be? — Thomas Dixon Jr.

OK, some people might think he's a degenerate, troublesome, drug dealing, coke dependant, alcoholic, but that doesn't make him a bad person. — Peter L Masters

Knowing too much is very apt to make us troublesome to other people — Mary Wortley Montagu

What I've learned is that the most troublesome people don't tell you 100% of the story, and keep some facts to themselves. They just don't give you the full picture, and that's very worrisome to me. — Penny Pritzker

The Only Power You Need to Be Free of Troublesome People
Since what other people do to you is not in your power to change, you need only concern yourself with what you do to yourself, for that is in your power — Guy Finley

All this, in the midst of a city already plagued by the Ku Klux Klan - a group more sinister and suspicious than most people have any idea, and their public face is troublesome enough without any secret agenda hiding beneath their ridiculous robes. I tell you, they're stranger than the Freemasons and not half as well thought out, but they're radical, blind believers of awful things. — Cherie Priest

A Pleasant Theology One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? - from Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

People say that red is the color of fate, right? Now you may think it's only troublesome, but it might connect you with something unexpectedly good. — Sorata Akizuki

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking. — James Bryce

This was a troublesome supplication, because at the dawn of July, Ukraine was to celebrate the first birthday of its ultramodern constitution, which makes
us feel very nationalistic, and so many people would be on vacation in foreign places. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Relationships, it seems to me, are timeless. What works between two people always works; what doesn't is always troublesome. Over time, people learn - or not - how to negotiate what's difficult, but that doesn't mean the misfit has gone away entirely. — Rafael Yglesias

I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome. — Elif Safak

One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies'
is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent. — Lemony Snicket

If you feel ... that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good. — Lemony Snicket

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included. (pg. 202-203, Conservation and Local Economy) — Wendell Berry

The failure to adopt other people's points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka once referred to war as "a monstrous failure of imagination.") Perspective taking helps us at once to see others as fundamentally similar to ourselves despite superficial differences (in that we share a common humanity) — Alfie Kohn

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No
that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. — Mark Twain

You haven't learned anything yet, have you? Don't you know My hand sustains you?" I began to shiver in the chilly wind, and wrapped my cloak tighter. Then - I just couldn't help it - I said, "You - have a hand?" "Only in a manner of speaking. I thought you'd understand it better that way." "Oh, I'm sorry." "You ought to be. You're very troublesome, for a woman." "For a woman - ? Are You a man, then, after all?" "I am what people expect Me to be. It's all they are capable of comprehending. After all, doesn't it surprise you that I'm speaking in English instead of Latin?" "But I don't know any Latin." "Exactly. — Judith Merkle Riley

Don't sign on for more problems than you must. Resist the temptation to involve yourself in other people's zones of expertise and responsibility. Monitor troublesome situations if you need to, but don't insert yourself unless you're running out of time and a solution is nowhere in sight. In short, stifle your inner control freak. — Twyla Tharp

And sometimes we discuss frightening and troublesome animals that might be nearby, and this topic always leads to much disagreement over which part of a frightening and troublesome beast is the most frightening and troublesome. Some say the teeth of the beast, because teeth are used for eating children, and often their parents, and gnawing on their bones. Some say the claws of the beast, because claws are used for ripping things to shreds. And some say the hair of the beast, because hair can make allergic people sneeze. But I always insist that the most frightening part of any beast is its belly, for the simple reason that if you are seeing the belly of the beast it means you have already seen the teeth of the beast and the claws of the of the beast and even the hair of the beast, and now you are trapped and there is probably no hope for you. — Lemony Snicket

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. — Carl Sagan

I've never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it's much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that's probably just because it's you. Ordinary people seem to make it through the day without so many catastrophes. — Stephenie Meyer

Henceforth no Jew, no matter under what name, will be allowed to remain here without my written permission. I know of no other troublesome pest within the state than this race, which impoverished the people by their fraud, usury and money-lending and commits all deeds which an honorable man despises. Subsequently they have to be removed and excluded from here as much as possible. — Maria Theresa