Unsupported Quotes

“In the bazaar today I noticed a shopkeeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight - but there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledge resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it, and got to his feet - and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilising this huge football of tissue as a book-rest.”

“Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.”

“The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.”

“And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.”

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”

“As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was bingeing on food. Of course I was still very much a lonely unsupported child myself when I got pregnant - one who had never been nurtured or mothered and as such I struggled with the responsibilities of parenthood.”

“Only the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives.”

“Our government is certainly going to fall like a rope of sand if unsupported by the moral fabric of God’s Word. The moral structure in our country grew from Judeo-Christian roots. When those values are applied, they produce moral fruits. But if that structure disappears, the moral sentiment that shapes our nation’s goals will disappear with it.”

“The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself believed in it. Besides, though faintly (and themselves unable to explain why), they felt that this faith defended their cruel occupations. If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience. The inspector was such a kind-hearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith.”