Unconstructive Quotes & Sayings

Reporting Iran's dossier to the UN Security Council will be unconstructive and the end of diplomacy. — Ali Larijani

And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. — Carl Sagan

Even as a supporter of Roe v. Wade, I am compelled to acknowledge that the language both sides use on this subject can be unfortunately misleading and unconstructive ... Everyone is worse off for it — John F. Kerry

Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. — Mina Loy

I never dreamed about one day becoming Secretary of State. It's not that I was modest; it's just that I had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt. — Madeleine Albright

The time of the autumn floods came and the hundred streams poured into the Yellow River. ... Then the Lord of the River was beside himself with Joy, believing that all the beauty in the world belonged to him alone. — Zhuangzi

One can only learn by teaching. — John Archibald Wheeler

President Obama is launching a new $6 billion space policy that will ultimately take astronauts to Mars. Of course, it's $6 billion and $45 if the astronauts have a carry-on. — Jimmy Fallon

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be. — Julia Glass

Newton's First Law, also known as the Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something stops their momentum. Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes. Achievers - people who get into a successful rhythm - continue busting their butts and end up achieving more and more. — Darren Hardy

First step to success is to drop what we are not and accept who we are. Always be yourself. — Joshua Okello

The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss. Nothing to my son, except my name! — Napoleon Bonaparte

I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others' voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. — Nicholson Baker

It will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and, after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. — George Orwell

I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing "Yellow Submarine", and I didn't understand why. It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and I freaked out on my dad: 'Why didn't you tell me you were in The Beatles?' And he said, 'Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.' — Dhani Harrison

Call on God, but row away from the rocks. — Hunter S. Thompson

I saw Farrah Fawcett originally when she and her boyfriend, Lee Majors, came over to my house for a birthday party that I was having for my ex-wife, Leigh Taylor-Young. — Ryan O'Neal

What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster. — John Steinbeck

Liberate yourself from unconstructive beliefs forced upon you by others for imprisonment sake. Allow into this space a new-fangled reality which warrant viewpoints increasing a new understanding. — Michaelson Williams

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction. — Immanuel Kant

Domestic travel and tourism-related spending has reached $1 trillion a year. — Mark Foley