Proposition Quotes

1. "So I pulled a gun on him and demanded his wallet."The soda in my mouth becomes the soda in my nose. "You had a gun?" I cough and sputter into my napkin.Mom's eyes go round and she pressed her finger to her lips, mouthing, "Shhh!""Where did you get a gun?" I hiss."Oliver lent it to me. He was always looking out for me. Told me to shoot first and run. He said the asking-questions-later part was for the police." She grins at my expression. "Does that earn me cool points?"I swirl a fry in the mound of ketchup on my plate. "You want cool points for pulling a gun on my father?" I say it with all the appropriate disdain and condescension it deserves, but deep down, we both know she gets mega cool points for it."Psh." She waves her hand. "I didn't even know whether or not it would fire. And anyway, he didn't hand me his wallet. He propositioned me instead.""Okay. Ew.""Not like that, you brat."
Author: Anna Banks

2. "Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies."
Author: Anne Rice

3. "I have already thought it over,' said Rubashov. 'I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don't want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell."
Author: Arthur Koestler

4. "Another tradition to politics, a tradition (of politics) that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."
Author: Barack Obama

5. "I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere."
Author: Bill Wilson

6. "Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions."
Author: Brennan Manning

7. "Who is the best marshal they have?'The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?"
Author: Charles Portis

8. "Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

9. "I could never feel like that about any public issue. Sometimes I wish I could. For me, if I'm honest, politics is background, news, almost entertainment. Something you switch on and off, like the TV. What I really worry about, what I can't switch off at will is, oh, sex, or dying or losing my hair. Private things. We're private people, aren't we, our generation? We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy are private. Live is private. Property is private. Parts are private. That's why the young radicals call for fucking in the streets. It's not just a cheap shock-tactic. It's a serious revolutionary proposition."
Author: David Lodge

10. "Getting a handle on why wolves do what they do has never been an easy proposition. Not only are there tremendous differences in both individual and pack personalities, but each displays a surprising range of behaviors depending on what's going on around them at any given time. No sooner will a young researcher thing, 'That's it, I've finally got a handle on how wolves respond in a particular situation,' than they'll do something to prove him at least partially wrong. Those of us who've been in this business for very long have come to accept a professional life full of wrong turns and surprises. Clearly, this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning."
Author: Douglas W. Smith

11. "You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can end up focusing on misleading factors. Stuff that really has more to do with personality-the fact that some people are simply more expressive or emotional or needy in a relationship. But beyond such smokescreens, the answer is there. Love is seldom-almost never-an even proposition."
Author: Emily Giffin

12. "Is that how you get propositioned at the court? 'Mylady, would you be so kind as to allow me to put my manhood in your vagina'?"
Author: Erica Dakin

13. "Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations."
Author: Euler

14. "It is a matter for considerable regret that Fermat, who cultivated the theory of numbers with so much success, did not leave us with the proofs of the theorems he discovered. In truth, Messrs Euler and Lagrange, who have not disdained this kind of research, have proved most of these theorems, and have even substituted extensive theories for the isolated propositions of Fermat. But there are several proofs which have resisted their efforts."
Author: Fermat

15. "Today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-humanproposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as peoplesay, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act outa ‘demonstration' of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is whatthe oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,too, has such very strong festive aspects! –"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

16. "But nearly all of the people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

17. "Hurried and worried until we're buried, and there's no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all."
Author: George M. Cohan

18. "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition... A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says." No, it's not..."
Author: Graham Chapman

19. "On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks."
Author: H. Allen Smith

20. "Is Jase already gonna marry you?" I start coughing again. "Uh, No. No, George. I'm only seventeen." As if that's the only reason we're not engaged. "I'm this many." George holds up four, slightly grubby fingers. "But Jase is seventeen and a half. You could. Then you could live in here with him. And have a big family." Jase strides back into the room, of course, midway through this proposition. "George. Beat it. Discovery Channel is on." George backs out of the room but not before saying, "His bed's really comfortable. And he never pees in it."
Author: Huntley Fitzpatrick

21. "-Those who never face oppositions always stop at propositions.-Those who never confront obstacles live with delays and postponements"
Author: Ikechukwu Joseph

22. "Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge."
Author: Isaac Watts

23. "Preparing for a future in music is an expensive proposition."
Author: Itzhak Perlman

24. "By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly...This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual."
Author: James K.A. Smith

25. "For is it not the common experience of all of us - you and I - that we do no incorporate the truth of these propositions in our lives? We say we know, but we do not do as we know. We say we believe, but we do not act like it."
Author: James W. Sire

26. "One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life."
Author: Jesse Ball

27. "O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost."
Author: John Gardner

28. "One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant."
Author: John Locke

29. "I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible to see your opponent is you …"
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

30. "Nicholas is gay, isn't he," she says, her voice dripping with dejection. I shrug, again remembering his proposition from last night. "Not necessarily. The jury's still out. There's hope for a Christmas wedding yet," I tell her."
Author: L.H. Cosway

31. "People get so frightened for no reason, but I'll tell you, to live with no purpose is a far more frightening proposition... You bring yourself to say yes when you always thought the only possible answer was no, and your whole world changes."
Author: Liz Rosenberg

32. "In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them."
Author: Louis De Bernières

33. "It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems."
Author: Maimonides

34. "In simple terms, madam? I am your prisoner. At the whim of your mercy-or devilment-for the remainder of the day and the better part of the night....er, assuming you desire my company, that is.""Desire your company?" She flung herself into his arms with a small cry. "If I thought it would keep you here, I would burn your clothes and tie you hand and foot to the bed.""An interesting proposition," he mused. "Perhaps when all of this is over, we might explore it more thoroughly."
Author: Marsha Canham

35. "Philosophy is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered; it is a question of what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge.[Moritz Schlick interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's position]"
Author: Moritz Schlick

36. "...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition."
Author: Muhammad Asad

37. "In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated."
Author: Phillip E. Johnson

38. "In the Christian religion, though perhaps not in any other, we frequently find a conception of god that is selfcontradictory and therefore corresponds to nothing. That is the conception formed by the following three propositions taken together:1. God is all-powerful.2. God is all-benevolent.3. There is much misery in the world.A god who was all-powerful but left much misery in the world would not be all-benevolent. An all-benevolent god in a world containing much misery would not be an all-powerful god. A world containing a god who was both all-powerful and all-benevolent would contain no misery.Here, then, we have a mathematical proof bearing on a common religious doctrine. Anyone who is confident that he frequently comes across misery in the world may conclude with equal confidence that there is no such thing as an all-powerful and all-benevolent god. And this mathematically disposes of official Christianity, as has long been known."
Author: Richard Robinson

39. "I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?"
Author: Richard Russo

40. "If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship."
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

41. "The Broad research center represents the highest quality model of what Proposition 71 should be funding."
Author: Robert Klein

42. "Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain."
Author: Russell Means

43. "What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition – you will not die – once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable."
Author: Sam Harris

44. "Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere."
Author: Sam Harris

45. "There was a beat of silence before Sin said blandly, "I have occasional nightmares about us having a threesome with that meat-head. I'm far from being easily shocked.""What?" Boyd looked completely taken aback, his eyebrows shooting up. "That's the last thing I thought I'd ever hear from you.""It isn't exactly a voluntary thing. It's quite horrifying. I usually wake up before he can put his dick in me though." Sin made a revolted expression, his lips twisting in a scowl of disgust."So I shouldn't expect to be propositioned for this threesome too in the near future?" Boyd asked jokingly.Sin stared at Boyd and didn't bother to reply."
Author: Santino Hassell

46. "From the Left comes the proposition that, given the slow economy, we should defer attending to the problem of mounting obligations - and the truly delusional idea that growing federal debt doesn't matter because we owe most of it to ourselves."
Author: Steven Rattner

47. "Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love."
Author: Terry Eagleton

48. "Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
Author: Thomas B. Macaulay

49. "Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition."
Author: Tom Turner

50. "Now (obviously) a sentence's truth—even when we hold the sentence's meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. "Brown is Prime Minister" is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there are countless worlds in which "Brown is Prime Minister" is false: in those worlds, Brown did not succeed Tony Blair, or never went into politics, or never even existed. And in some other worlds, someone else is Prime Minister — David Cameron, P. F. Strawson, me, Madonna, or Daffy Duck. In still others, there is no such office as Prime Minister, or not even a Britain; and so on and so forth. So a given sentence or proposition varies its truth-value from world to world."
Author: William G. Lycan

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