Quotes about cutting
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“There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Literary Fashions.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

Fashion

“I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone... Whitehall envelops me.”

Richard Crossman (1907–1974) British Member of Parliament

Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume 1

“It wouldn’t be the first time his sharp tongue had cut his own throat.”

Brent Weeks book The Way of Shadows

Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 9 (p. 64)

Time

“Alone I am a kind of Bukowski cutting the self.”

Valter Bitencourt Júnior (1994) Brazilian poet and writer

Self-confidence

“Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Problem

“A life cut tragically short, but with more colour perhaps than one may find in her work.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Life

“You might be surprised to find this out, but sweets were a big problem for me when I was younger. It didn't matter what it was, I couldn't walk past it without buying it. Now I've cut sweets out. It actually took me several years to get to this point. Now I don't really like sweets anymore.”

Robert Lewandowski (1988) Polish association football player

"Lewandowski exclusive, pt II: 'We're stronger now'" https://www.bundesliga.com/en/news/Bundesliga/noblmd09-fc-bayern-muenchen-robert-lewandowski-exclusive-interview.jsp (2016)

Past, Problem

“I aim to find time in my schedule for a decent night's sleep without cutting into my drinking time.”

Steve Dillon (1962–2016) British comic artist

Vertigo Interview (1998)

Sleep, Drink, Night, Time

“I am not easily roused to anger but I must say that this latest cry to cut back the spending of worse off people to cure a crisis mostly caused by too much spending by better off people is intolerable.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

The Daily Herald (7 October 1955), quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (1979), p. 360
Opposition MP

Anger, People, Cry

“When I was growing up, the pain was so sharp, it was like I’d been cut by a knife. As I get older, the pain is different, it is deep in there and stays there.”

Phan Thi Kim Phuc (1963) Child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972

"Kim Phuc, the napalm girl: 'Love is more powerful than any weapon'" in Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/kim-phuc-the-napalm-girl-love-is-more-powerful-than-any-weapon-1.2661740 (28 May 1996)

Pain

“Cut away all of those feelings that showcase your weakness and develop the strong character that you have always been dreaming since birth.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Strong, Dreams, Birth, Feeling

“Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Song lyrics, In Utero (1993)

Baby, Angels

“What would you cut out of government expenditures?”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

I cannot answer that question. Ask me what I would leave in. <br class="br">Leonard Read Journals, October 17, 1951 https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1951/leonard-e-read-journal-october-1951/

“I have never met a single European who had a clean, clear-cut understanding of the principles of strictly limited government.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Source: Leonard Read Journals, July 1, 1949 https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1949/leonard-e-read-journal-july-1949/

Understanding

“If I were a metaphor I'd be a truth. I am invincible, I am never defeated. I am immortal, I never die, I'm invisible, nobody can cut me, I am for eternity, I have no end, I am a stone's line, no one can erase me, the time can change, but i never change, I'm the truth, no one can deny me.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Truth, Change, Time

“I don’t believe in cuts, I believe in rational restructuring. Massive layoffs also lead to a contraction in consumption and that’s something you don’t need.”

Zoran Milanović (1966) Croatian politician

Source: "Croatia Premier Touts Mild Keynesian Policy Amid EU Entry" in Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-26/croatia-premier-touts-mild-keynesian-policy-amid-eu-entry (27 June 2013)

“My nails are my rhythm section, when I'm writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.”

Dolly Parton (1946) American singer-songwriter and actress

As quoted in "Dolly Parton: Gee, She’s So Nice" https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/dolly-parton-gee-shes-really-nice (7 December 1980), by Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert <br class="br">1980s

“I very much lament for what has happened to the groves in Madhura. The coconut trees have all been cut and in their place are to be seen rows of iron spikes with human skulls dangling at the points.”

Gangadevi Indian princess and Sanskrit poetess

Source: Gangadevi. On the condition of Madurai under the Muslim rule. Chattopadhyaya, Brajadulal (2006), Studying Early India: Archaeology, Texts and Historical Issues, Anthem Press, ISBN 978-1-84331-132-4

Tree

“America may not be the country of your faculty lounge and Twitter dreams, but no one here tries to escape by hanging on to an airplane. No, we wait ‘til we get inside the plane to fight — and only because they cut off the beverage service.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: The Lesson of Afghanistan', (2021)

Waiting, Country, Dreams, Fight

“I see blood in here every day, every day someone's getting shot, someone's getting cut, someone's getting beat ... i've lived in that all my life woman, that don't wrinkle up my forehead ... you can pile 100 dead bodies up in front of my cell and it don't set me to do nothing ...”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Source: Diane Sawyer interview (ABC, 1993)

Dead, Life

“During filming, it never occurred to me that I was going to be a part of either film. I was always trying to cut my voice out by having subjects include my question in their answers.”

Nanfu Wang (1985) director and filmmaker

Source: "Hot Docs 2017 Interview: Nanfu Wang on “I Am Another You”" in Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/hot-docs-2017-interview-nanfu-wang-on-i-am-another-you (3 May 2017)

Question, Parting

“Whenever one tree is cut, two trees should be planted in return.”

Mirza Masroor Ahmad (1950) spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Virtual Meetings <br class="br">Source: Virtual Meeting with Waqf-e-Nau From Indonesia https://www.alislam.org/press-release/members-of-waqf-e-nau-from-indonesia-have-honour-of-virtual-meeting-with-head-of-ahmadiyya-muslim-community/, 23rd January 2021

Tree

“[T]he risk of these sports, and the supposed manliness of facing that risk, is generally put forth as one of their merits. Now I may be very blind and mean-spirited, but the manly sport of foxhunting seems to me not to be manly at all, but to be at once cowardly and fool hardy. It is cowardly as regards the cruelty practised on a victim which cannot defend himself by tormentors who, as far as the victim is concerned, are perfectly safe. It is foolhardy as risking men's lives for no adequate cause. It is manly, it is something much better than manly, when a man sacrifices or risks his life in a good cause. But I can see nothing manly, nothing in any way praiseworthy, in a man risking his life in a bad cause or in no cause at all. When a fox-hunter is suddenly cut off in the midst of his cruelties, I can see nothing in his end at all resembling the end of the martyr who dies for his religion or of the hero who dies for his country. I believe I am unfashionable in thinking so, but I cannot help it.”

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) English historian (1823-1892)

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 24

Country, Thinking, Life, Men

“He was a cut flower in a vase; fair to see, yet bound to die, and to die very soon if the water was not constantly renewed.”

Winston S. Churchill book The World Crisis

Concerning Admiral von Spee’s East Asia Squadron
The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter XIII (On The Oceans), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), p. 295
The World Crisis (1923–1931)

Flowers, Water

“There is great damage to biodiversity (caused by the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami), and it could even impact human health. And so it has been ordered that the area is cut off for all kinds of activity.”

Rubén Ramírez Mateo (1965) Peruvian lawyer

Source: Rubén Ramírez Mateo (2022) cited in: " Scientists warn Tonga eruption may damage environment for years https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/18/scientists-warn-tonga-eruption-may-harm-environment-for-years" in Aljazeera, 18 January 2022.

Health

“The tool that is so dull that you cannot cut yourself on it is not likely to be sharp enough to be either useful or helpful.”

John Tukey The Technical Tools of Statistics

The Technical Tools of Statistics. The American Statistician 34 (1). Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2682374

Help

“The world's biggest problem is not sexism, racism, political polarization, war, or income inequality. The key never-ending crisis is that most people can’t or won’t think. Poor thinking skills cut cross all the usual lines to drag down societies like nothing else. Thinking well could alleviate or solve virtually all our problems.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

War, People, World, Problem

“If graphene can cut cells like a sharp knife, then Fullerene must bounce off cells like a basket ball”

boghos

“Sickness, jail, poverty, getting drunk—I had to experience all that myself. Sinning makes the world go round. You can't be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That's sacred too.”

John Fire Lame Deer (1903–1976) American activist

Source: Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions (1972), p. 76

Soul, Life, God, World

“It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 24

People, Way, Age, Past

“[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment.”

Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) Anglo-Australian scholar

1920s, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929)
Source: "Peace and Strife as Elements in Life: The Ideal of “Unhindered Activity”", pp. 37-38

Search, Fraud, Life, Men

“Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Source: [Lorde, Audre, A Burst of Light : Living with Cancer, A burst of light : essays, 125, Firebrand Books, 1988, 0932379400]

“I intend to pass one of the biggest middle class tax cuts ever — paid for by making those at the top pay their fair share.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Democrats look to tax people earning more than $400K, no one else for $3.5 trillion bill (September 14, 2021) https://whdh.com/news/democrats-look-to-tax-people-earning-more-than-400k-no-one-else-for-3-5-trillion-bill/ <br class="br">2021, September 2021

“I don’t think that the word leader has to do with a particular talent or a particular field.A leader is a leader, and this cuts across in different ways.”

Ezinne Akudo (1990) Nigerian lawyer and pageant titleholder

https://thenationonlineng.net/ezinne-akudo-anyaoha-dont-think-world-owes-anything/amp/ Ezinne Akudo speaking at an interview

Thinking, Way