Tendencies Quotes

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

I think there's a tendency for actors like myself, and I don't mean to generalize myself, but I've played 'men's men,' if you will, characters that are simmering rage and calculated. There's a trend not to play anything that is opposed to that.

I deal with pressure. I have a tendency to probably be at my best under pressure.

As women, we have more of a tendency to be people-pleasers, and I know a lot of women who are not vocal about what makes them happy.

Every character I've ever played, I always try to take him right to the edge and not allow him to fall over, but directors have a tendency to pull me back a little bit.

Human life is full of the play of samskaras - tendencies developed by repeated actions.

Some men are deeply likable but have attitudes I don't like. Does that mean I should completely dismiss them? It's like saying: if someone votes Tory can you like them? And, yes, I can. I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways. We have a tendency to oversimplify things.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

The funniest things just come from honesty. We have a tendency to see female characters as representative of something larger than what they are, when male characters are just characters.

...after a certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the emotional needs they are meant to support.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

I learned how to be a learner. When you get in a job, the tendency is to say, 'I've got to know it. I've got to give direction to others. I'm in this job because I'm better and smarter.' I always took a different view, that the key was to identify the people who really knew and learn from them.

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.

Paradox is an overrated threat. There is...a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference." I frowned. "There's...a law of conservation of history?

Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

I have a tendency to be lucky and make the right choices based on limited information.

There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

You're sure your new roommate won't be like the last one who wore tinfoil socks and had a tendency to occasionally urinate in the refrigerator. You're sure you'll pass Math 106 this time around. You're determined to actually join some clubs this year and not just sit around in your dorm eating spray cheese from a can and watching youtube videos about cats.

Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture .

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.

I am surprised that in various countries, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S., you see isolationist tendencies that would tend to work against the co-operation, whether it's climate change, immigration, innovation, helping the very poorest. Those are things where you want to think across country boundaries and see a win-win-type solution.

If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.

The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!"

The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.

Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling...I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.

People have an annoying tendency to compare shoe prices with the cost of other things. They might say, 'Wow - those shoes cost as much as a sofa!' Well, this may be true, but the comparison is so silly. After all, you can't wear a sofa.

It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

Animals love. They love their being. They strive to survive, to celebrate, to propagate . So certainly something we learn from animals is love. To survive and to celebrate, propagate and to love life. To be the best we can be - the right to be here and the responsibility to be the best dog or bear or horse that they can be. Humans have the tendency to self pity that other animals don't indulge in.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

The tendency of modern American women to exclaim 'Hiiiiiiiiiiii!' in soprano octaves and hug each other upon sight can be disconcerting to those unfamiliar with it.

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.

The computer actually may have aggravated management's degenerative tendency to focus inward on costs.

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.

The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.

As we move forward, I am looking for a new leader of the Chicago Police Department to address the problems at the very heart of the policing profession. The problem is sometimes referred to as "the thin blue line." The problem is other times referred to as "the code of silence." It is this tendency to ignore. It is the tendency to deny. It is the tendency, in some cases, to cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.

My tutors at drama school commended and criticised my use of comedy in my acting for a long time at drama school. They said I had a tendency to somehow perform the most tragic of scenes in a slightly flippant way.

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.

The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going?

The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

In the eighties and nineties, the innovation agenda was exclusively focused on enterprises. There was a time in which economic and social issues were seen as separate. Economy was producing wealth, society was spending. In the 21st century economy, this is not true anymore. Sectors like health, social services and education have a tendency to grow, in GDP percentage as well as in creating employment, whereas other industries are decreasing. In the long term, an innovation in social services or education will be as important as an innovation in the pharmaceutical or aerospatial industry.