Quotes about stump (42 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I'd like to find whoever taught the Stump that extra work builds character and push him down the stairs," Neal told Kel at lunch.”

Tamora Pierce book First Test

Source: First Test

“Upon his return from Congress he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before. …In 1854 his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before.
In the autumn of that year he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reëlection of Hon. Richard Yates to Congress. His speeches at once attracted a more marked attention than they had ever before done. …
In the canvass of 1856 Mr. Lincoln made over fifty speeches, no one of which, so far as he remembers, was put in print. One of them was made at Galena, but Mr. Lincoln has no recollection of any part of it being printed… he thinks he could not have expressed himself as represented.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)

Law , Autumn , Thinking , Parting

“I like to stump Google. The other day I Google'd "how many Mexicans live in North Korea"…. Google didn't know. I also Google'd "how many candles does Dave Navarro own?"…14,000.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Saturday Night Live (May 4, 2013)

“In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life. I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present. I speak of the men of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the future.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)

Life , Men , Lie , Past

“They can't be worse than vampires. And you did all right with them."
"Did all right with them? By which I take it you mean we survived?"
"Well..."
"Faeries," Jace went on, as if Simon hadn't spoken, "are the offspring of demons and angels, with the beauty of angels and the viciousness of demons. A vampire might attack you, if you enter its domain, but a faerie could make you dance until you died with your legs ground into stumps, trick you into a midnight swim and drag you screaming underwater until your lungs burst, fill your eyes with faerie dust until you gouged them out at the roots-"
"Jace!”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary snapped.
Simon, Jace, and Clary, pg. 146-147
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Beauty , Angels , Dance

“Always with Beckett there is a technical reduction to the extreme. … But this reduction is really what the world makes out of us …that is the world has made out of us these stumps of men … these men who have actually lost their I, who are really the products of the world in which we live.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum äußersten. … Aber diese Reduktion ist ja wirklich das was die Welt aus uns macht … das heißt die Welt aus uns gemacht diese Stümpfe von Menschen also diese Menschen die eigentlich ihr ich ihr verloren haben die sind wirklich die Produkte der Welt in der wir leben.
"Beckett and the Deformed Subject" (Lecture)

Men , World

“One day, during one of their sessions, Gurdjieff tells Peters to look out the window and describe what he sees. 'An oak tree' the child answers. 'And what do you see on the oak tree?' 'Acorns' Peters replies. 'How many of these acorns do you suppose will become trees?' Fritz Peters is stumped, [-] 'Maybe five or six?'
'No' retorts Gurdjieff. 'Only one will become a tree, perhaps, none! Nature is always very giving, but it only gives possibility. It takes hard work and great effort to become a tree or a genuine man.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Nature , Effort , Tree

“Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.”

Norman Douglas (1868–1952) British writer

Cooking

“Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him.

Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Pain , Tree , Madness

“Check your spam folder
The prophecies might be there
No? Well, I'm stumped. Bye”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Sula (1973)

World , Color , Country

“A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life , Death , Tree

“My business is too difficult. My business is trying to arouse human pity. There are few things that'll move people to pity, a few, but the trouble is when they've been used several times, they no longer work. So it happens, for instance, that a man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time that he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll hand him over cold-bloodedly to the police.”

Bertolt Brecht The Threepenny Opera

Peachum in Act 1, scene 1, pp. 5-6
The Threepenny Opera (1928)

People , Business , Time

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

Pain , War , Feeling , Idea

“He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

496.34 - 497.3
Finnegans Wake (1939)

Quotes , Past , Future

“The Party which dares to attack the foundations of our State, which sets itself against religion and does not stop at attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the very last stump.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech (26 February 1897), quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 159
1890s

Religion , Personality

“In a tribal nation, he’s just one more partisan mobilizing his troops…. Mr. Shapiro has always been deeply conservative and does not pretend to be objective. But he says his market niche is giving cleareyed reads of current events, not purely partisan rants. He is often compared to his former colleague at, Milo Yiannopoulos. On the surface, they seem the same. Both speak on college campuses. Both draw protests. Both used to work for Mr. Bannon at Breitbart. Both are young. In fact, they are very different. Mr. Yiannopoulos, a protégé of Mr. Bannon, was good at shocking audiences, saying things like “feminism is cancer.” But critics say that he was empty of ideas, a kind of nihilistic rodeo clown who was not even conservative. Mr. Shapiro broke with Mr. Bannon last year, saying Breitbart had become a propaganda tool for Mr. Trump. Mr. Yiannopoulos’s act collapsed this year. But the fact that it lasted so long says a lot about the right’s fury against mainstream liberalism, Mr. Shapiro said…. But Mr. Shapiro does it too. He thinks it’s easy to provoke the left, which he says has become intellectually flabby after decades of cultural dominance. It’s not good at arguing and relies instead on taboos and punishing people who violate them. That is the essence of his stump speech…. Critics say that is great red meat for his audience, but it’s nonsense. Even if straight white males are low on the left’s pecking order, they have most of the power in Washington, in statehouses, in every corporate boardroom. They run America. Mr. Shapiro says he’s about more than tribal polemics.”

Sabrina Tavernise (1971) American journalist

Ben Shapiro, a Provocative ‘Gladiator,’ Battles to Win Young Conservatives https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/ben-shapiro-conservative.html (November 23, 2017), '.

People , Idea , Thinking , Reading

“Transhumanism can offer new insights and unorthodox solutions to insurmountable problems that have stumped politicians for years, decades, and centuries.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Problem

“Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Quoted in The Fine Art of Political Wit by Leon Harris (1964)

Tree

“No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Letter to his wife (31 May 1942)

Disappointment , Mathematics , Tree , Silence

“Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country’s return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people.The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid. (p. 6).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Money , History , Fashion , Appearance

“I think Joe's underappreciated, I think Andy's underappreciated, I think Pete's underappreciated, I don't think people know how good he is. I think Neal [Avron]'s underappreciated, but if anything, I feel overappreciated. I think Patrick Stump gets enough attention.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 2 - 10.13.08

People , Feeling , Thinking

“Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit… right to life liberty and… A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. "By Jesus I admit I'm stumped," he says aloud. All these April nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky. Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears.”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 365

Life , Night , Happiness

“Baine, what do you think of this?” Tossie said, indicating the bishop’s bird stump. “Don’t you agree it’s the most beautiful piece of art you’ve ever seen?”
Baine straightened and looked at it, blinking water out of his eyes.
There was a considerable pause while Baine wrung out his sleeve. “No.”
“No?” Tossie said, making it into a screamlet.
“No.”…
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean the sculpture is a hideous atrocity, vulgarly conceived, badly designed, and shoddily executed,” he said, folding the shawl carefully and bending to lay it back in the bundle.
“How dare you say that,” Tossie said, her cheeks very pink.
Baine straightened. “I beg you pardon, miss. I thought you were asking my opinion.”
“I was, but I expected you to tell me you thought it was beautiful.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

He bowed slightly. “As you wish, miss.” He looked at it, his face impassive. “It is very beautiful.”
Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 19 (p. 333; the ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Beauty , Art , Bird , Thinking

“Many of my Hamptstead friends may remember this 'young lady' [an ash tree] at the entrance to the village. Her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing [Study of Trees, pencil on paper, circa 1821] when she was in full health and beauty; on passing some times afterwards, I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters: 'All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.' The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spike nails had been driven far into her side. In another year one half became paralysed, and not long after the other shared the same fate, and this beautiful creature was cut down to a stump, just high enough to hold the board.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's Lecture, given at Hamptstead (July 1836), as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable, Tate Gallery Publications, London 1993, p. 391
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Fate , Health , Law , Beauty

“I have very strongly of late the wish that others may be as sensitive as myself and the fear that they will not be. Colleague Sir Frank Adcock stumped by the sunset-portent unheeding. And I can't arge that I gain, or that others would gain, anything for humanity by observing and recording what went on for a few moments in the sky on Boar Race evening. I sometimes pretend to myself that I am public-spirited. I am not. I am an hedonist who wants pleasant sensations. On the other hand I am not the usual type of hedonist, for I want sensations to be had”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

if not by myself, then by someone else. The show shouldn't end with my death, which becomes a minor boo-hoo.

p. 211 (1959)
Commonplace Book (1985)

Death , Fear

“On those rare occasions when a great motion picture reaches multiplexes, the film critic must add another aspect to his or her job description: that of cheerleader. It is incumbent upon those of us who routinely dissect movies to applaud the arrival of something like Minority Report. Writing a review isn't enough — we have to get out there and actively stump for the movie. The underlying reason is sound: if Minority Report makes a lot of money, the studios will be encouraged to fashion more films of this sort. And that is a good thing — not just for science fiction lovers but for fans of intelligent, thought-provoking pictures of all genres.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/m/minority_report.html of Minority Report (2002).
Four star reviews

Money , Intelligence , Lovers , Fashion

“Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

p279
Wild Talents (1932)

Way , Feeling , Science

“I poured on a rainstorm of fire and brimstone as hot as I could, and you know something of what that is. I believe that I never said anything more savage in the pulpit or on the stump.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

Letter to Eunice Lovejoy https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA192#v=onepage&q&f=false
1860s

“On John Edwards, U. S. Senator from North Carolina: "The stump speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything, including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.'”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line.
" It's the war, stupid http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0304/steyn030104.asp", 1 March 2004

Hope , Girl , Boy , Laughter

“We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love , Life , Youth , World

“What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)

Women , Men , Children , Thinking

“We were brought up watching opening batsmen score nine before lunch. If Geoffrey Boycott flashed at a ball outside off stump in the first over of a Test match, questions were asked in Parliament. If he flashed at two, the ravens abandoned the Tower of London.”

Geoff Boycott (1940) cricket player of England

Brian Viner in the Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/cricket/its-cricket-geoff-but-not-as-we-know-it-503579.html, 2005.

Question

“If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones. I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Life , Men , War , Youth

“I live in Scotland, have you been to Scotland? [a few of the audience whoop and cheer] See that's the exact same number of people, as answered that question in the affirmative when I asked it in England… and erm, people… English people, don't go up there, it's nearly half the country, and you say "Why don't you go?" and they go "Ahh, well, you know, it's very dark and dreary"… 'cos they get so used to the crocodiles and the tropical storms down there in England. "Dark and dreary, you can't understand the accents, the food's disgusting, and a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, people injecting temazepam into each other's stumps… other wise I'd go, you know?"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

What It Is (2009)

People , Food , Understanding , Question

“Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Big Sur (1962)

Men , Drink , Thinking , Sister

“The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried?... That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

People , Feeling , Idea , Question