Quotes about turn
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“I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:
: By the known rules of ancient liberty.
The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison

War, Books, Freedom, Evil

“Do not turn away a poor man…even if all you can give is half a date. If you love the poor and bring them near you…God will bring you near Him on the Day of Resurrection.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 1376
Sunni Hadith

Love, God

“My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

A Trip with Paul Kassner 
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Context: My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

People

“If Satan can turn God's Word upside down and pervert the Scriptures, what will he do with my words -- or the words of others?”

Martin Luther book Confession Concerning Christ's Supper

Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, Part 3. Robert E. Smith, tr.<cite>Dr. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtsusgabe</cite>. (Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1909), pp.499-500. http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-quoting.txt <br class="br">Context: By God's grace, I know Satan very well. If Satan can turn God's Word upside down and pervert the Scriptures, what will he do with my words -- or the words of others?

God

“I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves. Beasts should not be able to have any rights in a civilized society. If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence. If women had the freedom to choose which men to mate with, like they do today, they would breed with stupid, degenerate men, which would only produce stupid, degenerate offspring. This in turn would hinder the advancement of humanity. Not only hinder it, but devolve humanity completely. Women are like a plague that must be quarantined. When I came to this brilliant, pefect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way. I am one of the few people on this world who has the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence

Women, Men, God, People

“The male has a negative Midas Touch - everything he touches turns to shit.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 5 (hyphen (not en- or em-dash) so in original).

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow — no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life — for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section IX
The Waves (1931)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“Remain grounded and entrenched for your end will be the feather that gets tossed and turned at the mercy of the wind.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1992

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Bad luck, People, Age, Knowledge

“We also know that populism can take dangerous turns -– from the extremism of those who would use democracy to deny minority rights, to the nationalism that left so many scars on this continent in the 20th century.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom (May 2011)

Democracy

“The aim of science was not meant to turn against every religious belief, but to illuminate the minds of the people.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

People, Science

“The darkness isn't afraid of coming close to me, my fear of loneliness draws him towards me. Darkness surrounds me and despair takes hold of me. I start to torment my loneliness, and my silence begins to take my life. When I call my happiness darkness always turns happiness way. Darkness is not afraid of me coming close to me, my fear pulls it to me.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Life, Happiness, Fear, Way

“And I still won't grow up, I'm a grown-ass kid
Swear I should be locked up for stupid shit that I did
But I'm a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph
Make music that's fire, spit my soul through the wire.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Through the Wire
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

Stupidity, Music, Soul

“The journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Context: PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.
GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?
GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.
GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.

Death, World

“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

World

“It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Source: Truth and Method

Way, Nature, Sense, Universe

“The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

Women, Men, Age, Travel

“It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.”

Christopher Morley book The Haunted Bookshop

The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

Way

“Stark looked strong and healthy and totally gorgeous. I was distracting myself by wondering what exactly Scottish guys did, or didn't, wear under those kilts when he turned to face me.
His smile lit up his eyes. "I can practically hear you thinking.”

Kristin Cast book Awakened

Source: Awakened

Smile, Guy, Thinking, Strong

“I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

World, Feeling, Thinking, Suffering

“Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Freedom

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

Books, Search, Housing

“And once again I believe that nothing that's important really becomes lost. We just delude ourselves, thinking that we own the things, the moments and the others. Still with me are all the dead persons who I loved, all the friends who turned away, all the happy days that faded. I lost nothing but the illusion that everything could be mine forever.”

Miguel Sousa Tavares (1952) Portuguese writer

Love, Happiness, Thinking, Personality

“The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.”

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

Speech before the Colorado Live Stock Association, Denver, Colorado (August 29, 1910); in The New Nationalism (1910), p. 52; also inscribed on Cox Corridor II, a first floor House corridor, U.S. Capitol.
1910s

Nature

“Can I help you with something?"
Clary turned instant traitor against her gender. "Those girls on the other side of the car are staring at you."
Jace assumed an air of mellow gratification. "Of course they are," he said, "I am stunningly attractive.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Cars, Girl, Help

“Ford… you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Truth, World

“My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Books, World, Understanding

“Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Sun

“How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Scouting

“Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience…. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are, and Who You Truly Want To Be.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Love, Passion, Change

“Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Music, Water, Singing

“The dwarfs can turn lead into gold…
It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.
-Can we?
-Damned if I know. I can't.
-Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.
-Can you?
-No!
-Ah-ha!”

Terry Pratchett book The Truth

Source: The Truth

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Fear

“How can you pull down strongholds of Satan if you don't even have the strength to turn off your TV?”

Leonard Ravenhill (1907–1994) British writer

“A little girl robbed you?" Tessa said.
"Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress with a penchant for violence, who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel."
"Easy mistake to make," Jem said.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Girl

“You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Fools

“I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Thinking

“Love is like a faucet: it turns on and off.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

Love

“To lead the orchestra, you have to turn your back on the crowd.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

“But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.”

Terry Pratchett book Maskerade

Source: Maskerade

Love, Hate

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, the women together ought to be able to turn back and get it right side up again! and now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist

Ain't I a Woman? Speech (1851)

Women, Men, God, World

“Come back!" the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something important to say."
This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again.
"Keep your temper," said the Caterpillar.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“Girls you've gotta know when it's time to turn the page.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Source: Tori Amos: From the Choirgirl Hotel

Girl, Time, Moving On

“If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

Universe, Change

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Motivation, Question

“It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Peace, Light

“Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrifies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Variant: Just as iron rusts from disuse... even so does inaction spoil the intellect.

Water