Dismissal Quotes

“Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.”

“The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.”

“Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.”

“Let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a "yes.”

“Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience.”

“Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse, The author writes on Eisenhower's cold dismissal of his wartime lover.”

“If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, decided to hijack the one I had created.”

“In a life threatening situation, whether terrorism or a rockslide, what kills most people is slowness to react. Regular lives are so safe, so event-less that there is a lack of comprehension when faced with death. It's not necessarily shock. IT's disbelief. It's dismissal. Civilians say to themselves, I've got this wrong, this isn't what I think. But it is, and by the time they've realized, it's too late. And of course sometimes they do in fact have it wrong. They've misread the situation, and they're left embarassed and maybe ashamed. But....." "But they're alive," Mayes finished.”

“When I look back on my life I come to one simple conclusion: there exists an intelligent, loving Presence in the Cosmos that will ultimately have its desire for relationship with us fulfilled; even our arrogant dismissal of its existence will not stop it in its tracks. The Enlightenment's god, the great idol of free will, lies smashed in pieces in its wake. The jealous Presence patiently draws us homeward like some gigantic electromagnetic beam. The Death Star in reverse. This divinity is, I believe, the 'Abba' of Jesus, a transcendence that will not be boxed in by religious misrepresentation...”

“Life turns on small choices.A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.A word spoken with the best intentions.Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero.”