Mandatory Quotes

1. "After I took two pees- 'cause the news of this mandatory dress rehearsal was way too big of a nuclear bomb to just take one- we made plans to meet by the Fountain before the dress rehearsal began to get our act together."
Author: Alan Sitomer

2. "I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate - treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn't be sustainable for me, and that's what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life."
Author: Alanis Morissette

3. "I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us."
Author: Arundhati Roy

4. "Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

5. "The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything."
Author: Bill Lee

6. "There is little anyone can do with fanatics. Reasoning with them is a fool's errand. Avoiding them is mandatory."
Author: Bill O'Reilly

7. "Mandatory minimums have been shown to be discriminatory and waste the taxpayers' money."
Author: Bobby Scott

8. "Giving a 10-year mandatory minimum for a second offense fist fight is not going to reduce the chance that someone will be stabbed 16 times when you are not funding any of the programs that are desperately needed to actually reduce juvenile crime."
Author: Bobby Scott

9. "Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional."
Author: Chili Davis

10. "We're slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in an occasional outing with friends or significant others, and we're ready for bed at 10:00 PM every night. Really ready for bed. There's barely enough time in a day to cover all our mandatory obligations, so optional activities like novel writing, journaling, painting or playing music--things that feel great but no one will ever take us to task for shirking--are invariably left for another day.Which is how most of us become 'one day' novelists. As in, 'One day, I'd really like to write a novel.' The problem is that that day never seems to come, and so we're stuck."
Author: Chris Baty

11. "In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

12. "Parenting classes should be mandatory, whether you are adopting or not, and would include an evaluation of your current physical, mental and financial state as well as how ready you are to take on the rigors of parenthood. Our children are our most precious natural resource, and there is absolutely no other way to parent but to put them first."
Author: Dale Archer

13. "We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give alcohol to kids."
Author: Dale Archer

14. "Reciprocity is not mandatory."
Author: David Lubar

15. "3) Saturday night is the official meeting night of Penny Lane's Lonely Hearts Club. Attendance is mandatory. Exceptions are for family emergencies and bad hair days only."
Author: Elizabeth Eulberg

16. "If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the "dirty work" of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices."
Author: Emily Matchar

17. "Anyone who lives in Washington and has an official position viscerally understands the cost of a lack of privacy. Every dinner - especially ones with a journalist in attendance - is preceded by the mandatory, 'This is off the record.' But everyone also knows, nothing is really 'off the record.'"
Author: Ezekiel Emanuel

18. "Mandatory sentencing guidelines have become as complicated and detailed as the IRS code!"
Author: Harold H. Greene

19. "China has adopted and is implementing its national climate change program. This includes mandatory national targets for reducing energy intensity and discharge of major pollutants and increasing forest coverage and the share of renewable energy for the period of 2005 through 2010."
Author: Hu Jintao

20. "Your daily war chant: ( screaming it is mandatory! )Ooooooooh today, today I will see,what a happy place the world can be!I will make someone smile,refuse to being vile!I will share what I love,take someone high above,in the sky, between the cloudswith joyful shouts!Today, today even you will see,What a happy place the world can be!Make it happen, enjoy your day,Remember it is a temporary stay,here on earth, this single hour,today I give my love a flower!YEAAAAAH! Today I kick life's behind,making good what is unkind!Making smile who is not grinning!And this is only the beginning!Today.I.am. AAAAAAALIVEE!"
Author: Janosch Fingerhut

21. "Jarod Kintz Day—it's not just my birthday, but it should be a holiday that's mandatory to celebrate, punishable by death if you don't. It'll be a holiday that honors freedom."
Author: Jarod Kintz

22. "Do I have to talk to insane people?""You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory."
Author: Jasper Fforde

23. "The police cannot protect the citizen at this stage of our development, and they cannot even protect themselves in many cases. It is up to the private citizen to protect himself and his family, and this is not only acceptable, but mandatory."
Author: Jeff Cooper

24. "New Yorkers should know that no one in the Administration, at the Department of Defense, or at the Selective Service System is advocating the reinstatement of the mandatory draft in any form."
Author: Jim Walsh

25. "If chocolate were a mandatory part of breakfast, people wouldn't be sogrouchy in the morning."
Author: Joanne Fluke

26. "Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artistsjob to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefsshattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought andemotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has beendone so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier."
Author: Jonathan Culver

27. "Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out."
Author: Kerry Greenwood

28. "Modernism was based on a kind of arrogance ... and led designers to believe that if they thought of something cool, it must be considered universally cool. That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the ground to the exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp or the use of white space as syntax in Python. Or the mandatory use of objects in many languages, including Java. All of these are ways of taking freedom away from the end user "for their own good". They're just versions of Orwell's Newspeak, in which it's impossible to think bad thoughts. We escaped from the fashion police in the 1970s, but many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police."
Author: Larry Wall

29. "I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.Character building, my father said.Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.Still, it was better than jail.I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't."
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

30. "Every night I give a violin recital for six hours, and attendance is mandatory. The word 'mandatory' means that if you don't show up, you have to buy me a large bag of candy and watch me eat it."
Author: Lemony Snicket

31. "After you win all these belts, you cannot fight all these mandatory guys."
Author: Lennox Lewis

32. "Aristocrats never displayedenthusiasm, but rather detached interest. Aristocrats relied on subtle inflections of the voice to conveymeaning. Aristocrats would say "relation" or "kinsman," rather than "relative." And they used the phrase"do be good enough" rather than ask "would you." Furthermore, it was mandatory that an aristocraticlady should never express herself directly, but instead hint gracefully at her meaning."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

33. "Forgiveness is mandatory; reconciliation is optional."
Author: Lysa TerKeurst

34. "You're also going to be out of luck with weapons. And weapons are mandatory for zombie apocalypse survival.'Camilla is silent for a moment. 'You couldn't just beat them to death with Tupperware? That stuff's tough.'I grin. 'Maybe if it's filled with Adrian's grandma's cupcakes. I think those are a valuable addition to any arsenal."
Author: Melissa Keil

35. "[On hearing that 86% of gay teens have experienced harassment] Eighty-six percent? Eighty-six per-fuckin-cent WERE harassed?! That means fourteen per-fuckin-cent WEREN'T harassed? WHAT?!At MY school a hundred percent of the children - gay, straight, transgendered, bi, sell... or trade - WERE harassed. She's saying that fourteen percent of the gay students were NOT harassed? That seems impossible.At MY school any one of us would have sucked Elton John's COCK at a mandatory school assembly for a fourteen percent chance of NOT being harassed."
Author: Penn Jillette

36. "I love you too, I wanted to say with as much hurtful sarcasm as I could muster, but she hadn't seen me, and I kept quiet. I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mother is mandatory, not because she's someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street. Which she wouldn't be anyway; walking is for poor people"
Author: Ransom Riggs

37. "For example, new EU member Poland survived the communist era without collectivizing its small family farms. But now that they've joined the EU, collectivization is mandatory."
Author: Rick Steves

38. "...we are saved by Christ alone who raises us from the dead - from the absolution of our death. We come before him at the judgement with no handwriting whatsoever against us. It's simply cheating to say you believe that and then renege on it by postulating some list of extra-rotten crimes for which Christ has to send you to hell. He, the universal Redeemer, is the only judge; as far as he's concerned, the only mandatory sentence is to life and life abundant."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

39. "Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long."
Author: Ron Paul

40. "When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional, and now it's legal. I'm getting out before the Democrats make it mandatory."
Author: Sgt. Harry Berres

41. "Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks."
Author: Steven D. Levitt

42. "We can't reform mandatory spending in this area until we first deal with ours. I tell my colleagues, 'Let's get the moral high ground and demonstrate that we want to make changes to our pension, and then we can deal with the big problems.'"
Author: Timothy Griffin

43. "...this culture of mandatory happiness actually promotes dishonesty and more suffering."
Author: Tullian Tchividjian

44. "I volunteered to deploy to Iraq. I was one of the few soldiers who were not on the mandatory deployment roster - close to 3,000 Hawaii soldiers were."
Author: Tulsi Gabbard

Mandatory Quotes Pictures