Quotes about grip
page 2

“My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone. It is also a listening hand. It listens for basic weaknesses or flaws in the stone; for the possibility or imminence of fractures.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

"Barbara Hepworth: A Pictorial Autobiography, Bath, 1971, (extended edition published 1978 and subsequently reprinted in 1985 and 1993) p. 79
1961 - 1975

Thinking

“The novels and poems which proceed from writers in the grip of this barren pessimism are of the kind which make narrow moralists fume, and use words like "decadence"; the writers rejoice, because making narrow moralists (who are usually frightened people) hop with rage is a sign that they have hit a mark, and they do not understand how poor and easy a mark it is.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, Understanding, Rage

“I will achieve it only [being an artist] by perseverance, and by openly asserting my determination to emancipate myself, [but].... I both lament and envy your [Edma's] fate. Bichette [her niece] helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly.... life gets more complicated by the day here now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that' all I need.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in an unpublished extract from a letter of Berthe to Edma, written in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 31 (private collection)
1860 - 1870

Love, Life, Fate, Children

“.. there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft. That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 67

Feeling, Hell, Thinking, Time

“When the train of history makes a sharp turn, said Lenin, the passengers who do not have a good grip on their seats are thrown off. Last week the Communist Limited had just about completed the dizzy turn from the Communazi Pact to the Battle of Britain, and U. S. literary liberals were spattered all over the right of way.”

Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) Defected Communist spy

"Revolt of the Intellectuals," January 6, 1941
TIME magazine (1939-1948)

Way, History, Training

“The prevailing attitude (which is gradually losing its grip) may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments… One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

Water

“Officers Liu and Ramos swore the same oath all in law enforcement do, and they answered the call to serve the people, all people. Like all good police officers, they moved toward danger, without regard for the politics or passions or race of those who needed their help—knowing the risks inherent in their work. They were minority police officers, killed while standing watch in a minority neighborhood—Bedford-Stuyvesant—one they and their fellow officers had rescued from the grip of violent crime.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

People, Law, Passion, Help

“With the Constitution, the law, and the politics on the side of doing his duty and securing our broken border, why does President Bush not act? What is paralyzing the White House? Answer: Political correctness, political cowardice, political opportunism, a sense of guilt for America's sins, and twin ideologies that have a grip on our elites not unlike a religious cult. The proud old boast, "Here, sir, the people rule!"”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

no longer applies. We no longer live in a truly democratic republic.
2010s, State of Emergency (2006)

People, Law, Sense, Housing

“If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

"Trefusis on Any Questions" in Paperweight (1993) p. 61.
Originally broadcast on Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4, circa 1987.
1990s

Money, World

“Mammonism is the heavy, all-encompassing and overwhelming sickness from which our contemporary cultural sphere, and indeed all mankind, suffers. It is like a devastating illness, like a devouring poison that has gripped the peoples of the world.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

People, World, Suffering

“Faith is the grip that clergy have over you. It's the invisible rope around your neck that pulls you along the road they want you to travel, for their benefit, not yours. It's a dead-end word. It's a word of bondage. It's a word that lets you believe what you've been told to believe, without feeling that you've been told what to believe, but you have, and you can stop pretending any time you like. It's not a virtue, that's the last thing it is. It's an abdication from reality. It's a dumb act of self-hypnosis. It's a cowardly cop-out. It's gullibility with a halo, and hiding behind it is like pretending to be an invalid.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Your faith is a joke" (16 December 2010)
2010

Faith, Travel, Feeling, Reality

“Although he had his faults as a writer, Howard was a natural storyteller, whose narratives are unmatched for vivid, gripping, headlong action. His heroes – King Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane are larger than life: men of mighty thews., hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. In fiction, the difference between a writer who is a natural storyteller and one who is not is like the difference between a boat that will float and one that will not. If the writer has this quality, we can forgive many other faults; if not, no other virtue can make up for the lack, any more than gleaming paint and sparkling brass on a boat make up for the fact that it will not float.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

~ L. Sprague de Camp, Conan of the Isles, "Introduction", 1968
About

Life, Men, Forgiveness, Nature

“The fact that the regime of separation appears to be reaching new heights, the fact that the whole globe is falling into the grip of the monetization of life and the commodification of relationship, the fact that the numbering, labeling, and controlling of the world and everything in it is approaching unprecedented extremes, does not mean that prospects for a more beautiful world are receding into the distance. Rather, like a wave rolling toward shore, the Age of Separation rears up to its maximum height even as it hollows out in the moment before it crashes. This crash, inevitable eons ago, is upon us today. As for the world that we can build thereafter, we can see glimpses of it in all the ‘alternatives’ presented today with so little effect…
Deep deep down, we all know that a much better world is possible, and more than possible, certain, someday.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The Ascent of Humanity http://charleseisenstein.net/project/ascent-of-humanity/ Ch 7 The Ascent of Humanity (2007)

Life, Age, World, Beauty

“She may have been right. Looking back, I suppose I was expecting, as a young actor, to discuss Stanislavski or 'Acting as an art.' Instead, I palled around with the crew—the grips, the stagehands—and the conversation centered around the two B's—broads and booze.”

Robert Mitchum (1917–1997) American film actor, author, composer and singer

Recalling Katharine Hepburn's assertion that he couldn't act and owed his success solely to his good looks; as quoted in "Kate and Deborah Disagree" https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SBS19821031.1.97&srpos=1&e=31-10-1982-31-10-1982--en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22she+may+have+been+right%22+%22looking+back%22-------1, in The San Bernardino Sun (October 31, 1982)

Art

“All religious leaders have the ability to help both the perpetrators—those who trap their fellow human beings in the net of human enslavement—as well as the victims who get caught in this net. They both need to be guided to the right path. Religious leaders should be prepared to fight this battle and uphold righteousness. This is not a war meant to kill. We need to be ready to fight a war to save the helpless from the grip of demonic minds. We don’t want a response born out of revenge due to perceived differences in caste, creed, religion, etc. Instead, we need to develop empathy, realizing the divinity within each person.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Speech Against Human Trafficking and Slavery at the Vatican (2014)

War, Religion, Revenge, Help

“The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race…”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" (1953)

Death, God, Silence, Sun

“[Television] may teach self-interest rather than philanthropy, violence rather than gentleness, a disregard for human dignity rather than a respect for it. It may not always teach the truth but teach it does, and it is more than time that responsible people both within and outside the broadcasting professions said boldly what is so obvious in commonsense terms — we cannot understand what is happening in international, cultural, economic, political and social affairs without coming to grips with the way in which television influences virtually all our behavioural and thought processes.”

Mary Whitehouse (1910–2001) British activist

Television: Controlling the Explosive Influence http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/28th-december-1974/14/television, The Spectator archive (28 December, 1974).

People, Truth, Way, Understanding

“The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worthwhile, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 37, Ch.6 Misfits
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

Hunger, Feeling, Decision, Passion

“What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”

Bobby Robson (1933–2009) English association football player and manager

Source: " It's the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging": What does NUFC mean to you? http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/sir-bobby-robson-quote-tell-6260751" at Evening Chronicle, November 1, 2013.

Love, People, Feeling, Boy

“The future cannot be won with the weapons of the past,” insisted Dakkar. “To rise up like Spartacus will only lead to millions of ordinary people being crucified, and the Caesars—and Czars—retaining an even tighter grip on power. No, no, the future must be won for justice and equality with the weapons of the future.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 24, “Dakkar” (p. 229)

People, Justice, Past, Future

“[question: How do you interpret your role as a painter in our society? ] As a role that everyone has. I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote from the interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1970's

People, World, Art, Way

“We are in the grip of the second managerial revolution, one that's very different from the first. The first was about a transfer of power. This one is about an access of freedom.”

James A. Champy (1942) American businessman

Source: Reengineering management, 1995, p. 205

Freedom

“Here one cries sudden on a sobbing breath,
Gripped in the clutch of some incarnate fear
What terror through the darkness draweth near?
What memory of carnage and ofdeath
What vanished scenes of dread to his closed eyes appear?”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, Night Duty

Fear, Appearance, Memory

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Books, Education, School

“Charity is an attempt wherein I try to expand and bring into the ambit of my life, all others around me and grow to consider the other man's needs and requirements as important as my own personal needs. To live seeking an identity thus, with at least those who are immediately around me, is to live away from the suffocating selfishness and the throttling grip of my body-consciousness.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Life, Personality, Selfishness

“I hasten to add that I had already concluded that the ‘bad apple’ theory was a comforting self-delusion. Police forces throughout Australia only started to come to grips with systemic corruption when they came to the same realisation. Cultural problems are just that; they are systemic and ingrained, not the work of a few rogues.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Problem

“The first thing you see will be the two Cyanean Rocks, at the end of the straits. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever made his way between them, for not being fixed to the bottom of the sea they frequently collide, flinging up the water in a seething mass which falls on the rocky flanks of the straits with a resounding roar. Now if, as I take it, you are god-fearing travellers and men of sense, you will be advised by me: you will not rashly throw away your lives or rush into danger with the recklessness of youth. Make an experiment first. Send out a dove from Argo to explore the way. If she succeeds in flying in between the Rocks and out across the sea, do not hesitate to follow in her path, but get a firm grip on your oars and cleave the water of the straits. For that is the time when salvation will depend, not on your prayers, but on your strength of arm. So think of nothing else, be firm, and spend your energies on what will pay you best. By all means pray to the gods, but choose an earlier moment. And if the dove flies on, but comes to grief midway, turn back. It is always better to submit to heaven; and you could not possibly escape a dreadful end. The Rocks would crush you, even if Argo were an iron ship.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 317–340

Men, God, Youth, Fear

“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Cue the Green God, Ted" (1991).
1990s, A View from the Diner's Club (1991)

World, Country

“America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.”

William Pfaff (1928–2015) American journalist

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 1, Dead Stars, p. 11.

Idea, Problem

“Anti-intellectualism … first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 22-23

Education, Religion, Way, Thinking

“And though our bones, they may break
And our souls separate,
why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Sawdust & Diamonds
Ys (2006)

Soul

“Showing poverty is such a large part of my work because another thing that I am finding is that for me personally, doing this work helps me in trying to come to grips with my own upbringing and all that occurred during that time. Basically, this work to me is a sort of time for reflection, a pseudo inventory of "this is your life," a way to try to accept the concept of what was so inevitable.”

Manuel Rivera-Ortiz (1968) American photographer

Buffalo Rising interview (2007)

Life, Way, Time, Help

“Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 410.

“When it is storming and raining, thundering and lightening I am in my element; nature must be seen in action. Then outside, I put on my jacket, put my feet in clogs, put on a hat and start on a march. When the showers settle down, with charcoal or black chalk [I] make a scribble, to keep a firm grip on what one sees. When working out, hue and color come smoothly back into the memory.”

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (1824–1903) Dutch painter of the Hague School (1824-1903)

version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: Als het stormt en regent, als het dondert en bliksemt ben ik in mijn element; de natuur moet men in werking zien. Dan buiten, trek ik mijn jekker aan, steek mijn voeten in klompen, zet een soort hoed op en ga op marsch. Als de buien bedaren, met houtskool of zwart krijt een krabbel gemaakt om vast te houden wat je ziet. Bij het uitwerken komen toon en kleur vanzelf in de herinnering.
Source: J. H. Weissenbruch', (n.d.), pp. 29-30

Color, Nature, Memory

“The terminally cute sea otter is a marine weasel into rough sex. The male otter's arms (legs, whatever) are effective for grooming their fine pelts or cracking shells on the rocks they place on their bellies, but they are too short for getting a good grip on a mate. So the male gets firm purchase by biting down on the female's nose before going for a little splendor in the kelp. Afterward you can often spot the females hauled up on rocks along the shore, their fur matted and their noses bloody. It's not hard to imagine that a female with a heavily scarred nose might get a reputation as an easy otter.”

David Helvarg (1951) American journalist

Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2005.

Sex, Imagination, Sea

“On the seat opposite him was an American tourist. The pattern of his clothes, of his overcoat, the grip he carried, down to his hopeful friendliness and his naïve absorption in the scenery, even the guidebook in his hand, all gave him away and proclaimed him a small town American seeing Europe for the first time. In another minute or so, Poirot judged, he would break into speech. His wistful dog-like expression could not be mistaken.”

Agatha Christie book The Labours of Hercules

The Labours of Hercules (1967)

Dogs, Hope, Time, Clothes

“Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder. But this will pass. Christianity will survive Christianism. Some true followers of Jesus will recover their faith from Caesar's grip at some point.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Christians and Torture" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/03/christians_and_.html, The Daily Dish (23 March 2006)

Age, Faith

“The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to grips with them, and most intellectuals do not understand them …. Here are the three laws:”

Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate

The First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
The Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
The Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Kindle locations 8005, 8010.
The Blank Slate (2002)

Law, Behavior, History, Understanding

“And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house… he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: https://theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/Annie%20Besant-In-The-Outer-Court.pdf In the Outer Court, 1895, p. 60

Thinking, Learning, Housing, Training

“… so as long as you do The Right Thing and forget how you would do it in C, you should be able to get a good grip on this.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Allegro CL foreign function interface http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/2ec281a4f469bb35 (Usenet article). Usenet articles

Forgetting

“Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones, I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, I

Love, Age, Family, Way

“"Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse." […]
"It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down."”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

President Snow and Katniss, p. 21
The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Problem, Time

“The nation is in the grip of a crisis. It is in essence a crisis of character. The obstructions and failures in other fields – economic, social and political – are just a reflection of our decline in the moral scale.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

MSN News in: Past Prime Ministers: Those who came before Gulzarilal Nanda http://news.in.msn.com/elections-2014/past-prime-ministers-those-who-came-before?page=2, MSN News, 26 May 2014.

Failure

“India fell mainly because her people were at the critical hour divided and disorganised. Her influence waned when the forces of disintegration, political and social, were at work. If we left our neighbours alone, we revelled in internal strife which ceased for a time when great kings like Asoka and Akbar ruled over the destinies of India – mighty men, who sought to unite the teeming millions of this vast sub-continent by the bond of a common aspiration and a passionate longing for the eternal code of righteous conduct, charity and understanding. A strong and united India fearing no one and loving all, brought messages of peace and goodwill to distracted world. But as soon as the sceptre dropped from their hands, when the grip over the country was loosened through weak and short-sighted successors, when narrow selfishness and mutual jealousy and distrust overpowered our souls, when local feuds and religious strife raised their ugly heads giving rise to social exclusiveness and moral decadence, unity was lost; freedom, man’s priceless treasure, disappeared; the country broke into fragments and relapsed into a state of conflict and struggle.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Patna University Convocation on 27th November 1937.

Love, Men, People, World

“I don't believe that the average fellow has anything like a true line on the value of wrist action in hitting anything—a baseball, a golf ball, a tennis ball or a polo ball. If you watch most of them, you will see they are trying to hit with their bodies, with their shoulders, with their arms—with almost everything except their wrists. I think it comes because most of them are overanxious, all tied up, too tense. They start by gripping too tightly. That kills off the hands and wrists. Their wrists get locked and then they have to swing their shoulders and bodies in. You'd be surprised how far a fellow can hit a ball, using only his wrists. I know I've been caught off guard or out of position on a sharp breaking curve, have had to slap at the ball, using only my wrists and have now and then watched it sail over the fence. The wrist is the mainspring—both wrists in baseball and golf. If you get them to work the rest is fairly easy. If you don't get them to work you are not going to do any good hitting. You can't get any speed in closing a door if the hinges are rusty and won't work. Hack Wilson must have great wrist action, for no short, stocky guy is going to hit that many home runs without a lot of it.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "The Sportlight" by Grantland Rice, in The Baltimore Sun (August 22, 1930), p. 13

Guy, Home, Thinking, Speed

“Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life, Birth, Universe

“If you hold a wooden staff with a tight grip and try to raise it overhead, it feels quite heavy. If you hold it lightly it feels light. In the same way you should not approach things with too serious an attitude. Take a lighter point of view. In other words, think positively.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

53
Ki Sayings (2003)

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Light

“It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism.”

Ian Buruma (1951) Dutch writer and academic

Battling the Information Barbarians China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900.html#video%3DA8F64C9A-F513-4C06-8E68-CCB96C2ED70D%26articleTabs%3Darticle

Death

“As a fresh wave of Ebola fear grips the American public, the Internet is rife with conspiracy theories, supposed miracle cures and Twitter posts of dread. But amid the fear mongering are several influential sites that are sticking to the facts about Ebola. Millions have come to rely on these sites, including those run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and Wikipedia.”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

[Noam, Cohen, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/business/media/wikipedia-is-emerging-as-trusted-internet-source-for-information-on-ebola-.html, The New York Times, October 26, 2014, Wikipedia Emerges as Trusted Internet Source for Ebola Information, October 29, 2014]

Health, World, Fear, Disease

“If I tried to imagine the public as a particular person (for although some better individuals momentarily belong to the public they nevertheless have something concrete about them, which holds them in its grip even if they have not attained the supreme religious attitude), I should perhaps think of one of the Roman emperors, a large well-fed figure, suffering from boredom, looking only for the sensual intoxication of laughter, since the divine gift of wit is not earthly enough. And so for a change he wanders about, indolent rather than bad, but with a negative desire to dominate. Every one who has read the classical authors knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time. In the same way the public keeps a dog to amuse it. That dog is the sum of the literary world. If there is some one superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coat-tails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity – until the public tires, and says it may stop. That is an example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled – and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises. The leveling is therefore done by a third party; a non-existent public leveling with the help of a third party which in its significance is less than nothing, being already more than leveled.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

The Present Age 1846 by Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Alexander Dru 1962, p. 65-66
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

World, Dogs, Way, Imagination

“I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Ich glaube an Gott. Wenn alles stürzt, fassen wir die letzte Planke und schauen vom sicheren Port, wie die entgötterte Gesellschaft des alten, heiligen Europa zusammenstürzt. Möge das Spiel beginnen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

God, Game

“On the ice flow they grip,
cut, twist, break open seeds
throwing out the white salt,
revive volcanic dreams:
unable to satisfy
their diminuated lust
the allegoric flesh
learns the thrill of return.”

John Carder Bush (1944) British artist; brother of Kate Bush

The Creation Edda (1970)

Dreams, Learning

“The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign press provides the negationists with a strategic cover. Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they keep on believing this even in domains where the West is completely ignorant and incompetent. So the negationists feel supported in the back by an outside world which they can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's political configuration, it would have blown this cover away by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media, and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the Indian establishment.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Truth, World, Education, Feeling

“Hands in his pockets he began to walk aimlessly down the sidewalk runnel. And, each minute, feeling more and more scared and desperate. Everything was falling apart around him. And he seemed helpless to halt the collapse; he could only witness it, completely impotent, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand.”

Philip K. Dick book Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 9 (p. 139)

Feeling, Understanding

“George W. Bush - "King George the 2nd", "Cowboy 'Peabrain' Cornholio" - In the Grip of Official Treason”

Jello Biafra (1958) singer and activist

Biafra's Nicknames for Various Political Figures

“This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the "evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Men, Religion, Reality, Freedom

“Joseph was correct when he spoke of entities creating stages upon which to act out their problems. The point is that once the play begins, the actors are so completely engrossed in their roles that they forget that they themselves wrote the play, constructed the sets or are even acting. The reason is rather apparent: If you know that a situation is 'imaginary,' you are not going to come to grips with it.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 184, quoting from Seth Session 31

Problem, Forgetting

“…the Buddha whose near-materialist philosophy gripped the mass of suppressed humanity…those belonging to the materialist school had to fight an unequal fight and were therefore defeated…the defeat of the materialists in this unequal battle was the beginning of a millennium-long age of intellectual and socio-political backwardness which culminated in the establishment of British rule in our land.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

Above two quotes written in his book “History, Society and Land Relations” after paying a tribute to Shankara he points to the non-idealist streams of ancient Indian philosophy, above two quotes are in A Socialist who became a Communist, 20 April 2010, 13 December 2013, The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/books/a-socialist-who-became-a-communist/article406031.ece,

Age, School, Fight

“Novelty is density of connection. … We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny”, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster—that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example—we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC http://www.abrupt.org/abruptlog/logos/terence-mckenna-at-saint-johns-2785/ 25 April 1996

People, Dreams, History, Thinking

“We must take the thing in the grip of our hands.”

Charles Bowen (1835–1894) English judge

The Queen v. Justices of County of London, &c. (1893), L. R. 2 Q. B. 494.

“If an emerging system is born complex, there is neither leeway to abandon it when it fails, nor the means to join another, successful one. Such a system would be caught in an immovable grip, congested at the top, and prevented, by a set of confusing but locked–in precepts, from changing.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 191

Change, Success

“The safety of our country demands an end to the doctrinaire, ineffective policies that currently grip Washington. Enough is enough! A safe America — a just America — that's what we want, that's what we need.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Democratic Convention (19 July 2004)

Country

“Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 11

Reality, Help

“One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 2, Physicists Losing Their Grip, p. 15

Secret, Reality, Science

“Do you know how to unite the people behind you, Child Carridin? The quickest way? Loose a lion - a rabid lion - in the streets. And when panic grips the people, once it has turned their bowels to water, calmly tell them you will deal with it. Then you kill it, and order them to hang the carcass up where everyone can see. Before they have time to think, you give another order, and it will be obeyed. And if you continue to give orders, they will continue to obey, for you will be the one who saved them, and who better to lead?”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Pedron Niall
(15 October 1991)

People, Way, Thinking, Water

“Grip eloquence by the throat and squeeze
It to death. And while you're about it
You might corral that runaway, Rhyme,
Or you'll get Rhyme Without End, Amen.
Who will denounce that criminal, Rhyme?
Tone-deaf children or crazed foreigners
No doubt fashioned its paste jewellery,
Tinplate on top, hollow underneath.”

Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) French poet

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie,
Du rendre un peu la Rime assagie.
Si l'on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où?
Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime!
Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou
Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou
Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?
Source: "Art poétique", from Jadis et naguère (1884), Line 21; Sorrell p. 125

Death, Children, Fashion, Past

“I will keep for you the small drawings that I usually make beforehand. They don't have any artistic value. I just make them to have some grip for the composition of the print..”

Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945) Dutch artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Hendrik Werkman, in het Nederlands): De kleine teekeningen die ik vooraf meestal maak, zal ik voor je reserveren. Artistieke waarde hebben ze niet, ik maak ze alleen om eenig houvast te hebben voor de opbouw van de druk.. In a letter (nr. 356) to August Henkels, 11 July 1941; as cited in H. N. Werkman - Leven & Werk - 1882-1945, ed. A. de Vries, J. van der Spek, D. Sijens, M. Jansen; WBooks, Groninger Museum / Stichting Werkman, 2015 (transl: Fons Heijnsbroek), p. 177 In February 1941 it was his friend and leader of the nl:De Blauwe Schuit (uitgeverij) August Henkels who borrowed Werkman the book of Martin Buber: 'Legends of the Baal Shem'. Werkman promised his friend the preliminary drawings he would make for creating the series of 20 prints of the 'Chassidic Legends' https://www.kb.nl/de-chassidische-legenden 1940's

Drawing

“It's very stressful becoming a parent. You know what was hard for me? Coming up with names for our children. I panic when I have to name a new document on my computer…. I got so desperate toward the end of my wife's third pregnancy that I found myself reading the credits at the end of movies, looking for names. Which means at some point, I'll have to explain to my little boy that he was named after the key grip on "Dude, Where's my Car?"”

Jeff Stilson American comedian

Comedy Central Presents Jeff Stilson (2003)

Children, Cars, Boy, Parent

“It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

Remarks in the Senate, June 29, 1961, Congressional Record, vol. 107, p. 11703.

Peace, Law, Imagination, Freedom

“You should not expect politicians to promote freedom of information. Why should they? They have a vested interest in controlling the public's access to information and thereby maintaining their grip on power.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 285.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

Freedom

“Watch the grown ups all twirling with the clock throughout the day. Watch them spinning through the hours while the time hands tick away. They talk and grip the world, as they would catch a falling knife. Reality deceives them ’neath amusing games of life.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Rhythm of Surrender"
A Different Drum (2004)

Life, World, Game, Reality

“Almost all governments and known figures strongly condemned this incident [the September 11 attacks]. But then a propaganda machine came into full force; it was implied that the whole world was exposed to a huge danger, namely terrorism, and that the only way to save the world would be to deploy forces into Afghanistan. Eventually Afghanistan, and, shortly thereafter, Iraq were occupied.… In identifying those responsible for the attack, there were three viewpoints: (1) That a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack. This is the main viewpoint advocated by American statesmen. (2) That some segments within the U. S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view. (3) It was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation. Apparently, this viewpoint has fewer proponents.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/09/transcript-of-president-mahmoud-ahmadinejads-un-speech/ (22 September 2010). CNN and other American news agencies reported the emphasized remark as Ahmadinejad's expression of a personal belief. 2010

People, World, Way, Intelligence

“A mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights. The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others the officer has locked up. Two white men on the other side of the street—even in the same clothes—do not. The officer does not make the same association about the two white guys, whether that officer is white or black. And that drives different behavior. The officer turns toward one side of the street and not the other. We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Men, Guy, Behavior, Communication

“This trendy, new crowd, which likes to do everything with committees, really believes that all it takes to make anything legal and OK is a majority. I guess they call that democracy. When the majority is what it has become in the United States today, a better name is mobocracy. But really, it's much worse than mob rule. It is rule by a self-appointed elite of utterly evil and destructive people who have in their hands the tools for controlling and guiding the mob. They're pretty cocky now -- so cocky, in fact, that they're making statements of the sort I've quoted today. They're cocky because they believe that no one can take away from them their tools for controlling the mob, and that as time passes and America becomes darker and more degenerate, their grip on the mob will only become firmer. Our job is to prove them wrong. It's a big job, and we'd better get started.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

The New World Order, 1999.
1990s, 1990

People, Quotes, Democracy, Evil

“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

Women, People, Cars, Feeling

“Mother Teresa is a true daughter of the Church in having her mind and heart closed to the religions of the countries of her labour, even adoption. Sometime back, some European Vedantists learning that she was at the Vatican went there to pay their respects. She rebuked them for "betraying Christ". Let me clarify the point a little further by bringing in Sister Nivedita. She is a lady Hindus are proud of. She helped India by helping it to rediscover itself. No higher service could be rendered to a nation in the grip of self-forgetfulness. She stood for national justice for India and she helped us by giving us national pride. This explains why Sister Nivedita is Hindu India's hero. This also explains why Western nations shower praise and money on Mother Teresa while Sister Nivedita remained unsung in the West and there were no contributions from that quarter even for her purely humanitarian work, like education and child care and relief work which she did with no less dedication, sympathy and loving care.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from Catholic Ashrams by S.R. Goel, Appendix V.

Love, Money, Education, Religion

“Perhaps some little boys consumed with curiosity to watch their maiden aunts in the bathroom later become inveterate sociologists. This is quite uninteresting. What interests us is the curiosity that grips any sociologist in front of a closed door behind which there are human voices.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), Chapter 1

Boy

“This is what fascinates Shaw: this enormous force that ignores our human preferences, our logic and intellect. It fascinates him because to be suddenly gripped by it is to see that human beings are not the accidental products of a mechanical universe — that they are not 'alone'. As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe. And in fact, if we judge this 'rational universe' by its own laws, we see that it is not self-complete and self-explanatory; space must end somewhere, time must have a stop; but the alternative propositions sound equally 'logical': space is infinite; time has neither beginning nor end. The answer to these paradoxes must be that the outer universe is not self-complete; it is only half a universe. The inner world is the other half. But at present we know very little about this inner world. It is only within the present century that its existence has been clearly recognized by psychology.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167

World, Law, Star, Universe

“We speak of a person being “under the influence” of alcohol, or heroin, or amphetamine, and believe that these substances affect him so profoundly as to render him utterly helpless in their grip. We thus consider it scientifically justified to take the most stringent precautions against these things and often prohibit their nonmedical, or even their medical, use. But a person may be under the influence not only of material substances but also of spiritual ideas and sentiments, such as patriotism, Catholicism, or Communism. But we are not afraid of these influences, and believe that each person is, or ought to be, capable of fending for himself.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), pp. 65-66.

Alcohol, Communication, Idea, Personality

“[T]he Islamic world is a source of danger and destruction is all too conceivable. Indeed, it’s been on display, in plain sight, for years… The jihadist threat is real, and it must, obviously, be fought and defeated. But that raises another problem—not a problem with Islam, but a problem with the West. We have lost our nerve. In recent years, the attitude of Barack Obama has prevailed over the spirit of Charlie Hebdo. The claims of sensitivity have trumped the attachment to freedom. Appeasement of jihad has supplanted the war on terror. Most fundamentally—let’s be honest—fear has overwhelmed courage. And so the American president has been happy to proclaim, as he did at the United Nations in September 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” He has been less willing to say that the future must not belong to those who kill in the name of the prophet of Islam… We face a crisis of Islam. We need to be clear-eyed about that. But we also face a crisis of the West. Only if we come to grips with that second crisis will this period of consequences turn out to be an occasion for renewal rather than another marker on the path to decadence.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, The Two Crises (2017)

War, Happiness, World, Fear

“I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences. And then you’re on the road and you’re doing it again.” The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac’s work, encapsulated how I wanted to live. I found a way to do it by being a musician, which is what I always wanted to be. The traveling and the being on tour and being away from home set a precedent for me where I thought, “Oh yeah, this is how it works.”
But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, I

Life, People, Alcohol, Cars

“I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Preface, p. xix
The Denial of Death (1973)

Way, Science, Time

“I saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly,
When my hand
Touched her cold and long fingers
Which was from the family of the wailing reed
It gripped an eternal grief in its fist
The pen broke
And pain
Like black drops of ink
dropped on our papery hearts.
I saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly;”

Farrokh Tamimi (1934–2003) Iranian poet and translator

Poet, Fare welling Hands

Pain, Family, Heart

“Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realization that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant—at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 212

Confidence

“In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy……”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Unknown date

Age, Sadness, Understanding, Parting

“I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

Reading

“Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old God who had lost His grip.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 12, “Raven’s Dance” (pp. 392-393).

Love, Men, God, World

“Punk: [after hearing John Laurinaitis propose a WWE Championship match at Survivor Series against Alberto Del Rio] Okay, pardon me for not being all smiles, that's exactly what I want, but… what's the catch? You gonna make it a handicap match, or is Ricardo Rodriguez the special guest referee? No, are you gonna be the special guest ring announcer with your majestic voice?
Laurinaitis: Punk, there's only one thing you have to do.
Punk: There's one thing I have to do… for you. I have to do something for you to get a title shot? Let me guess—I gotta re-grip your skateboard, you need new ball bearings?
Laurinaitis: You know what, Punk? I know you don't like me, okay? And that's okay. I'm not playing the part of Executive Vice President of Talent Relations, I am the Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and the General Manager of Raw. So in order for me to make it official, you need to tell me in front of the WWE Universe that you respect me. Tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Are you Aretha Franklin? You want me to tell these people I respect you when I know clearly that you don't respect me 'cause I don't wear a bourgeois suit and I don't tow the company line? You wanna talk about respect? Respect, Johnny, is earned, it isn't just given. And you're gonna come out here and say that when you're in charge, this place… this place is just oh so run like a tight ship. Have you watched the product? We've got rings collapsing, you got Kevin Nash interfering in every other match of mine; this place isn't any better with you in charge. How's that for respect?
Laurinaitis: Punk, you're about to make a big mistake. Okay, swallow your pride, stand up like a man, and tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Okay. All right. Don't get hot. [Imitating Laurinaitis] I respect you, Funk-man. That all right? Was that good enough?
Laurinaitis: I tell you what, Punk. You've got one more chance to show me and tell me you respect me, and I mean it.
Punk: Okay, Mr. Laurinaitis, sir, Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and interim Raw General Manager. I respect you. I respect the fact that each week, you come out here in front of the millions of fans in the WWE Universe, live on the USA Network, with this awesome, completely lost deer-in-the-headlights look on your face; I respect the fact that you don't know how close to hold the microphone to your mouth when you speak; I respect the fact that you used to compete in this ring with your awesome Kentucky waterfall mullet, and you were never any good, but you somehow still ascended to the top of the WWE corporate structure, showing the world new-found levels of brown-nosery; but above all, I respect the fact that never before in this business has somebody with so little done so much! I respect you! How's that sound?! Does that sound good enough for you?!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

October 24, 2011
WWE Raw

People, World, Smile, Business

“He finds it many times pleasanter,
And I think no worse of him,
To grip in his placid way
The crooked plough and the goad
Than if he were wrecking a tower.”

Iolo Goch (1320–1398) Welsh bard

Gwn mai digrifach ganwaith
Gantho, modd digyffro maith,
Gaffel, ni'm dawr heb fawr fai,
Yr aradr crwm a'r irai,
No phed fai, pan dorrai dwr.
Source: Y Llafurwr (The Labourer), Line 25.

Way, Thinking, Time

“In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Murderer (1953)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Hell

“Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution. The mental aspects of hitting were especially important to me. I was strictly a guess hitter, which meant I had to have a thorough knowledge of every pitcher I came up against and develop a strategy for hitting him. My method was to identify the pitches a certain pitcher had and eliminate all but one or two and then wait for them. One advantage I had was quick wrists. Another advantage—and one that all good hitters have—was my eyesight. Sometimes I could read the pitcher's grip on the ball before he ever released it and be able to tell what pitch he was throwing. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.”

Hank Aaron (1934) Retired American baseball player

From I Had a Hammer (1990) by Aaron, with Lonnie Wheeler; as reproduced in Hank Aaron https://books.google.com/books?id=tcPC-qgM8McC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22Guessing+what+the+pitcher+is+going+to+throw+is+80+percent+of+being+a+successful+hitter.+The+other+20+percent+is+just+execution.%22&source=bl&ots=QZ81enT7WV&sig=NL9G0fGgcTJGfc6oVOYvuzBV2sI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQu9DFxcjVAhUEwYMKHdamDmsQ6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=%22Guessing%20what%20the%20pitcher%20is%20going%20to%20throw%20is%2080%20percent%20of%20being%20a%20successful%20hitter.%20The%20other%2020%20percent%20is%20just%20execution.%22&f=false (2007) by Jamie Poolos, p. 48

Knowledge, Waiting, Reading, Success

“Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

World, Past

“"You guys are really something else, aren't you?" Archie said, pulling away from Carter's grip. "I can walk up there alone, Carter. And I'll walk back again, too." Archie's fury was a cold hard ball in his chest but he played it cool. As usual. He had a feeling nothing could go wrong. I am Archie.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 244

Guy, Feeling

“There's more grip on the black than on the green.”

Martin Brundle (1959) British racecar driver

“the United States and Saudi Arabia…have instead used their influence to ensure that members of the old regime remain in power and the status quo is maintained. American counterterrorism agencies and the Saudi government have a firm grip on Yemen at the moment. It is they…that control the country.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution, 2011

Country

“The lake-beings about him drew daggers and moved upon Kull. Then the king laughed and set his back against a column, gripping his sword hilt until the muscles stood out on his right arm in great ridges.
"This is a game I understand, ghosts," he laughed.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Delcardes' Cat" (1967)

Game, Understanding

“Where was her bloom! These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity. Alas! These were the traces of agony; the grip of the assassin had been here!”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Love

“He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do — he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest.”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

Metropolis (1908)

World, Fools, Sense, Effort

“I thought… that the fact that in characterizing truth for a language it is necessary to put words into relations with objects was enough to give some grip for the idea of correspondence; but this now seems to me a mistake. The mistake is in a way only a misnomer, but terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion, and so it is here. Correspondence theories have always been conceived as providing an explanation or analysis of truth, and this, a Tarski-style theory of truth, certainly does not do.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Donald Davidson (1990, p. 135), as cited in: Simon Evnine (1991) Donald Davidson. p. 137

Truth, Way, Idea

“We should remember that the last time global temperature was 5C different from today, the Earth was gripped by an ice age. So the risks are immense and can only be sensibly managed by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which will require a new low-carbon industrial revolution.”

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford (1946) British economist and academic

"Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict" http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/storms-floods-climate-change-upon-us-lord-stern, The Guardian (14 February 2014).

Age, Time

Quotes about grip page 2

Quotes about grip
page 2