Unsparing Quotes & Sayings

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words. — Frederick Weisel

Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abeyance. To question Danton's patriotism was to cast in doubt the whole Revolution. A tree is known by its fruits, and Danton made August 10. First he made the republic of the Cordeliers, then he made the Republic of France. If Danton is not a patriot, then we have been criminally negligent in the nation's affairs. If Danton is not a patriot, we are not patriots either. If Danton is not a patriot, then the whole thing - from May '89 - must be done again. — Hilary Mantel

I know that you'll survive the upcoming battle," he said, "because I'll be fighting right beside you and I'll lay down my own life to protect yours."
"I ... oh," she said. It took her some moments to understand. "You ... will come with me?"
"Your fight is my fight," he said. Stark and direct, his words filled her with unsparing joy. "Your cause is mine. And more than that. Your heart is my heart. I love you, Astrid. My place is with you. Always with you. — Zoe Archer

No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense. — John Trudell

But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion. — Gerald Durrell

The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly 'radical' ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason. — Murray Rothbard

I don't think that you can fake warmth. You can fake lust, jealousy, anger; those are all quite easy. But actual, genuine warmth? I don't think you can fake it. — Keira Knightley

Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteousness is thorough; it is the very spirit of unsparing truth. — Phillips Brooks

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms: On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970. — John Dinges

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant. — Janice Erlbaum

The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church. — Pope Benedict XVI

I wanna do movies that in ten years time people will respect me for, as an actor. So if I do take two years off or three years off, the next movie I have that comes out you want people to go 'ooh, that's Frankie Muniz's new movie, it's gonna be a good movie cause he's in it.' — Frankie Muniz

There is a saying from the Southlands that there is truth in wine. There must be a bit of it in ale, also. — Robin Hobb

If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Create peace in your heart before you can express it in words. — Debasish Mridha

For they who can come through this - and, as I say, there can only be a few, what can there be that they can not come through? And so I see in old Europe a new and commanding breed rising up, fearless and fabulous, unsparing of blood and sparing of pity, inured to suffering the worst and to inflicting it and ready to stake all to atain their ends - a race that builds machines, to whom machines are not soulless iron, but engines of might which it controls with cold reason and hot blood. This puts a new face on the world. — Ernst Junger

The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred. — Lucian

The unsparing savagery of stories like the Robber Bridegroom is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as the culture of childhood ... they capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience — Maria Tatar

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity. — James Fallows

This country hates professors. It likes Toby Keith - 'I'm gonna put a boot in their ass.' If you don't do that, somehow you can't be strong. — Bill Maher

When we are not too anxious about happiness and unhappiness, but devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, then happiness comes of itself
nay, even springs from the midst of a life of troubles and anxieties and privations. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

If Michelle Pfeiffer gave Mel Gibson a vial of blood to wear around his neck in a movie you'd think it was terribly romantic, everyone would cry and they'd win awards. But in real life if someone does that they'd be considered weird. — Billy Bob Thornton

People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much. — Anjelica Huston

He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people. — Zia Haider Rahman

She was difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent. — Gordon Dahlquist

Self-Enquiry is not asking you to believe or to trust - it is putting a mirror in front of you and asking you to look. Enquiry is suited to many people in the West, because we are more mental. And it is very direct. So unsparing is its look that nothing can escape. — Mooji

The proof of true love is to be unsparing in criticism. — Moliere

Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil, is life and breath for the proletarian movement. — Rosa Luxemburg

While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people. — John O. Brennan

All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. — Theodore Roosevelt

You can always close your eyes to the truth and you can be sure that the truth will in no way take this into consideration! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When we ... devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, ihen happiness comes of itself. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt