Underwent Quotes & Sayings

HERE IS THE MOST CHILLING WAY I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, "waterboarding" was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict. — Christopher Hitchens

How much of assumed national and personal character comes from the fact that we have never truly known need to the point of having our character tested? Willing conscientious objectors underwent controlled starvation and confirmed how quickly it impacts the initiative and generosity we like to think of as "American" characteristics. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Besides a fascinating story, the John/Joan/David Reimer case highlights several issues of prime importance about sex and gender that can be applied to questions surrounding sexual orientation. First, the body of evidence collected over several decades from adults who underwent unnecessary and wrong gender assignment and sex reassignment surgeries teaches us that trying to match gender to genitals should not be a standard. Gender and genitals do not necessarily align. Gender is an innate trait established within the fetal brain. Furthermore, the attempt to change what is natural and inborn in a person has devastating effects on lives. — Kathy Baldock

I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them. — Nelson Mandela

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one. — Andrzej Wajda

It takes as little as 1% of a population to create positive change, and I believe that if 100 million people underwent a personal transformation in the direction of peace, harmony, laughter, love, kindness, and joy ... the world would be transformed. — Deepak Chopra

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey
chanced, unplanned, solitary
was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own ... — Rohinton Mistry

I'm not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person. — Frank Pittman

The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton. As will be seen, the national consensus that the slavery issue should be tabled to preserve the union meant that the southern plantation economy was effectively ruled off-limits to political discussion, while Hamilton's system, by default, underwent the most searching scrutiny. Few, — Ron Chernow

Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which transported them to Paradise, in the midst of ever-blooming shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given them a slight foretaste." "Then," cried Franz, "it is hashish! I know that - by name at least. — Alexandre Dumas

Ah, how many Marahs have been sweetened by a simple, satisfying glimpse of the Tree and the Love which underwent its worst confict there. Yes, the Cross is the tree that sweetens the waters. 'Love never faileth. — Jim Elliot

Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy - the removal of a kidney stone - in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.) — Bill Bryson

I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter. Oh! - to speak the truth, and drop that tone of a false calm which long to sustain, outwears nature's endurance - I underwent in those seven weeks bitter fears and pains, strange inward trials, miserable defections of hope, intolerable encroachments of despair. This last came so near me sometimes that her breath went right through me. I used to feel it like a baleful air or sigh, penetrate deep, and make motion pause at my heart, or proceed only under unspeakable oppression. The letter - the well-beloved letter - would not come; and it was all of sweetness in life I had to look for. — Charlotte Bronte

So small footprint yet the shovelling jealous sea has not erased it.
You were for me the necessary exemplary figure of dedication and endurance. Whatever your inner life truly was it was ardently pursued. You observed with acute imagination. When you spoke you drove to the heart of things though sometimes through wry indirection. You manifested the value of the life dedicated to an art. Whatever terrors you underwent they may have been very great you did not evince them. You were never indecent.
Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience. — Lachlan MacKinnon

Years ago, when it underwent a rapid increase to the current level of 21%. The amount of oxygen in today's atmosphere is far greater than could ever be sustained without the influence of living creatures, which not only produce oxygen in huge quantities but use it up again, in particular — Terry Pratchett

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation. — Paul Nurse

I thanked the lucky stars for my great metabolism, because Karsen had showed me pictures of her mom once and it was scary the transformation she underwent after popping three kids out. She went from a small, dainty beauty to a giant pineapple blob of a body. — Holly Hood

Griffin Hansbury, who was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college, has another well-informed view of the powers of testosterone. "The world just changes," he said. "The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women." Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: "She's attractive. I'd like to meet her." But after the injections, no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, "nice ankles or something," was enough to "flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another ... Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex." He concluded, "I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot. — Christopher Ryan

None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian Ultra Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume they underwent gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole. — Douglas Adams

I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe - but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors - for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame - that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them ... — Gene Wolfe

Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day. — Wilhelm Dilthey

After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No. — Wole Soyinka

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation. — Angela Carter

A study of over 10,000 patients shows clearly that chemo's supposedly strong track record with Hodgkin's disease (lymphoma) is actually a lie. Patients who underwent chemo were 14 times more likely to develop leukemia and 6 times more likely to develop cancers of the bones, joints, and soft tissues than those patients who did not undergo chemotherapy . — John Diamond

She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. — Simone De Beauvoir

I trained with an ex-Navy Seal. We shot a lot of guns. Real bullets ... I underwent commando training. — Michelle Rodriguez

Unfortunately I had an ankle problem and underwent three operations. — Jessica Brown Findlay

To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. — Thomas Merton

As soon as I put my foot on Indian soil, my painting underwent a change not only in subject and spirit but in technique. — Amrita Sher-Gil

This minimally invasive approach to hysteropexy involves laparoscopic plication of the round ligaments to the rectus sheath. A case series by O'Brien and Ibrahim (1994) of nine postmenopausal women with "moderate or marked" uterovaginal prolapse who underwent laparoscopic ventrosuspension provide discouraging results with 89% of women experiencing complete recurrence within 3 months, all of whom required additional surgery. Other authors have reported success with this procedure (Lin et al., 2005), although most literature focuses on uterosacral ligament plication and sacrohysteropexy, which are thought to provide more durable and anatomic repairs. — Mark D. Walters

Someday, i dream we will medically address mental illness in a way that helps people WITHOUT completely crippling them, creatively or robbing them of their precious sensitivity. No one wants to live life feeling like they underwent a chemical lobotomy, that is not living. And, "Normal" needs a much broader definition ... perhaps we could just replace that word with, "harmonious living. — Jaeda DeWalt

One of the ice cubes in Doob's glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing. Doob — Neal Stephenson

Desperate with the endless tedium, thoughts racing and roving and deepening since they could not find outlet in immediate action, she underwent a profound metamorphosis in character. It is questionable whether the painter known as Frida Kahlo would have existed were it not for that year of suffering and constraint. — Bertram D. Wolfe

and perhaps not even Dr. Sproul, since his text underwent certain editorial revisions. However, this commentary represents an effort at making clear the precise position of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy as a whole. — R.C. Sproul

For the history of left-hand-path ideas, the all-important figure of Odin underwent a radical, yet predictable, splitting of image. He was - like all the other gods - portrayed as the epitome of evil. In parts of Germany, the speaking of his name was forbidden. It is for this reason that the modern German name for the day of the week usually called after him was renamed Mittwoch, "Mid-Week," while Thor (German Donar) keeps his weekday name, Donnerstag. The original name survives in some German dialects as Wodenestag or Godensdach.28 However, even after Christian conversion he still retained his patronage over the ruling elite. All the Anglo-Saxon kings continued to claim descent from Woden,29 and in the English language he retains his weekday name, Wednesday (Woden's day). — Stephen E. Flowers

A decade or so ago, all over the world, cinemas underwent one of those prince-into-frog mutations, and became, instead popcorn-restaurants, which offered the option of visual diversions for diners. — Kevin Myers

The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement. They see the long-buried prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot! - how his senses left him - how his nerves, first inflamed, underwent nameless agony, and then sunk to palsy - is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension ... And long, long may the minds to whom such themes are no mystery - by whom their beings are sympathetically seized - be few in number, and rare of reencounter. Long may it be generally thought that physical privations alone merit compassion, and that the rest is a figment. — Charlotte Bronte

Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil. — Basil Hume

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns. — Francis Collins

My husband. No! A moment!" He was tearing himself apart from her. "We shall not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart by-and-bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God will raise up friends for her, as He did for me." Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to both of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying: "No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel to us! We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know, now what you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it. We know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for her dear sake. We thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and duty. Heaven be with you!" Her father's only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair, and wring them with a shriek of anguish. — Charles Dickens

The Earth has been lawned with life for something over 3.5 billion years. That's a span of time great enough to encompass some honest-to-goodness catastrophe. For example, 700 million years ago, Earth underwent a planet-wide deep freeze, with ice covering the oceans from the poles to the equator. — Seth Shostak

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The phases of this change were numerous and successive. — Victor Hugo

It is not enough to know the Son of God in the Father's nature only, unless we acknowledge Him in what is ours without withdrawal of what is His own. For that self-emptying, which He underwent for man's restoration, was the dispensation of compassion, not the loss of power. For, though by the eternal purpose of God there was 'no other name under heaven given to men whereby they must be saved' (Acts 4:12), the Invisible made His substance visible, the Intemporal temporal, the Impassable passable: not that power might sink into weakness, but that weakness might pass into indestructible power. — Pope Leo I

Well, if you sat eating as though nothing mattered save your dinner I'm not surprised," said Juliana
viciously. "If I were not so angry with her, the deceitful, sly wretch, I could pity her for all she must
have undergone at your hands."
"Seeing me eat was the least of her sufferings," answered the Marquis. "She underwent much, but it
may interest you to know, Juliana, that she never treated me to the vapours, as you seem like to do."
"Then I can only say, Vidal, that either she had no notion what a horrid brutal man you are, or that she
is just a dull creature with no nerves at all."
For a moment Vidal did not answer. Then he said in a level voice: "She knew." His lip curled. He
glanced scornfully at his cousin. "Had I carried you off as I carried her you would have died of fright
or hysterics, Juliana. Make no mistake, my dear; Mary was so desperately afraid she tried to put a
bullet through me. — Georgette Heyer

Many of you have asked the Lord, looking at Him: Why, Lord? And the Lord answers to each one of you, to your heart, Christ responds with His heart. It's the only thing I can tell you. Let us look to Christ, He is the Lord and He understands us because He underwent all the trials that we go through. — Pope Francis

In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. — Howard Bloom

After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably, environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics. — Murray Bookchin

A sudden thought struck him - maybe I really did die. When the four of them rejected me, perhaps this young man named Tsukuru Tazaki really did pass away. Only his exterior remained, but just barely, and then over the course of the next half year, even that shell was replaced, as his body and face underwent a drastic change. The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast. The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn't actually him. It was merely a container, was labeled with the same name - but its contents had been replaced. He was called by that name because there was, for the time being, no other name to call him. — Haruki Murakami

by the Draft Committee. The present text makes clear exactly what the Council affirmed and denied. Obviously, those who signed the articles do not necessarily concur in every interpretation advocated by the commentary. Not even the members of the Draft Committee are bound by this, and perhaps not even Dr. Sproul, since his text underwent certain editorial revisions. However, this commentary represents an effort at making clear the precise position of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy as a whole.
In the editing process, we strove to take account of the comments that were forwarded to us. In some cases, we could not concur with those who made comments,
and therefore the — R.C. Sproul

[If Jesus died for all men] ... why then, are not all freed from the punishment of all their sins? You will say, "Because of their unbelief; they will not believe." But his unbelief, is it sin, or not? If not, why should they be punished for it? If it be sin, then Christ underwent the punishment due to it; If this is so, then why must that hinder them more than their other sins for which he died from partaking of the fruit of his death? If he did not, then he did not die for all their sins. — John Owen

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease. — Bram Stoker

After the dismissal of Hamrouche and until 1999, the state underwent a severe financial crisis and was on the verge of stopping all payments. Loans had to be negotiated with international financial institutions, particularly with the IMF, which required a structural adjustment program. State finances were saved by credits from the IMF and the European Union. Algerian negotiators, who played on the fear of the European states about the Islamist threat, said in effect, "It's either us, with all our defects, or an Islamist republic just one hour's flight from Europe." Alarmed to the point of panic, the West paid up without any conditions on how their credits were to be used. Policy thereafter fluctuated between rhetoric and laxity in letting deficits mount. — Ellen Lust

In all the co-temporary discussions and comments, which the Constitution underwent, it was constantly justified and recommended on the ground, that the powers not given to the government, were withheld from it. — James Madison

His joy was somewhat sullied by immediate awareness that his brother did not fully share it . . . in truth, he seemed more distressed than was possible save in one about to discorporate because of some shameful lack or failure. But Smith had already learned that these creatures, so much like himself in some ways, could endure emotions dreadful to contemplate and still not die. His Brother Mahmoud underwent a spiritual agony five times daily and not only did not die but had urged the agony on him as a needful thing. His Brother Captain van Tromp suffered terrifying spasms unpredictably, any one of which should have, by Smith's standards, produced immediate discorporation to end the conflict - yet that brother was still corporate so far as he knew. — Robert A. Heinlein

Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures. — Eric A. Havelock

A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy "failure" experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same "failure" group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure. — Elizabeth F. Loftus