Contrived Quotes

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon.

The Devil is perfectly willing that the church should multiply its organizations and its deftly contrived machinery for the conquest of the world for Christ, if it will only give up praying...The Devil is not afraid of machinery; he is only afraid of God. And machinery without prayer is machinery without God.

Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginnings.

The (Academy Award) ceremonies are a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.

Poverty is often concealed in splendor, and often in extravagance.

It is the task of many people to conceal their neediness from others. Consequently they support themselves by temporary means, and everyday is lost in contriving for tomorrow.

When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.

At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged.

Some issues lend themselves to grassroots campaigns - homeschooling works well - but others require contrivance and connivance to whip up support. Often, lobbyists will hire vendors to dispatch blast emails and robocalls in the hopes of bombarding Congressional offices with citizen fury.

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom - in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve - or could contrive - anything better.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine-that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.

I have loved you in every manner that my imagination could contrive.

I have wanted you so deeply that my body sang with pain and pleasure. You have been my obsession, my passion, my philosophers' stone of fantasy. You are my desire, my longing, my spirit. I love you unconditionally. - Sabine Strohem

It's a no win situation. It's a mug's game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.

It [the depression] was not accidental.

It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.

O fools, awake! The rites ye sacred hold Are but a cheat contrived by men of old Who lusted after wealth and gained their lust And died in baseness-and their law is dust.

We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.

regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

Above all, it behooves us to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.

Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.

But as some muskets so contrive it As oft to miss the mark they drive at, And though well aimed at dock or plover Bear wide, and kick their owners over.

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail;

for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.