Unexceptionable Quotes & Sayings

Any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle past the graveyard. — Stephen King

Nationalism as a thesis confuses (almost always deliberately) certain legitimate desires with illegitimate ones. People like to run their own affairs, and most people value the culture they were raised in, are proud of its achievements and wish it well; a significant degree of their sense of personal and group identity derives from it. All this is unexceptionable. But nationalists try to persuade their fellows that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow represents a challenge, and sometimes a threat, to what the natives of the home culture value. (From: Toward the Light of Liberty) — A.C. Grayling

Perhaps you should put an advertisement in the papers. You can have it listed under livestock. Stallion sought, something like that."
Now, that was uncalled for, and outright rude. "What a splendid idea," she responded. "Only why play with metaphors? The direct approach is always best. How does this sound? Gentlemen required for a temporary affair of convenience. Unexceptionable reference from previous lovers required. Must be willing to be named in criminal correspondence. Should be presentable, experienced, and have a strong back. — Madeline Hunter

When a mother, as fond mothers will; vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I
understand it. — Gertrude Stein

Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters. — Samuel Adams

There were always such dwellings
the abode of the cook or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment
the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations. — Alexander McCall Smith

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus. — Richard Kirwan

One word, in this place, respecting asparagus. The young shoots of this plant, boiled, are the most unexceptionable form of greens with which I am acquainted. — William Alcott

Happiness is the inner poetry of women, just as fine clothes are the mask of beauty — Honore De Balzac

Having a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties. — Anthony Trollope

Death via extreme pleasure was a serious concern. — Darynda Jones

Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery. — George Eliot

The event had every promise of happiness for her friend. Mr. Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age, and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship — Jane Austen

Bathsheba looked at Benedict. "You never told me they were matchmaking."
"He didn't notice!" said his father before Benedict could answer. "He didn't notice handsome young misses of unexceptionable family. He didn't notice beautiful heiresses. We tried bluestockings. We tried country girls. We tried everything. He didn't notice! But Bathsheba Winngate, the most notorious woman in all of England, he noticed."
"We notorious women tend to stand out," she said. — Loretta Chase

Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction. — Steven Pressfield

Why did he leave so fast at the end? Who was on the phone? A girl? That's it, he must have a girlfriend. One from another school. One he was just about to call so he could propose to her, but I interrupted, and then he had to run off to take her call, because weddings don't just plan themselves, you know. — Sarah Ockler

All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other bucolic Bronze-Age desert analogy might seem apt. (In Papua New Guinea, where as in most tropical climes there are no sheep, the Christians use the most valued animal of the locals and refer to the congregation as "swine." Flock, herd: what difference does it make?) Against this insane eschatology, with its death wish and its deep contempt for the life of the mind, atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it. Theism cannot coexist with this unexceptionable conclusion. — Christopher Hitchens