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Quotes About Distinctions

ociety is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happinesspositively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
~ Thomas Paine
Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice.
~ Thomas Paine
Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happinesspositively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
~ Thomas Paine
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.
~ Thomas Paine
Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority, perfect equality affords no temptation.
~ Thomas Paine
Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the CONSEQUENCE, but seldom or never the MEANS of riches; and though avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.
~ Thomas Paine
All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man, on the unity of man, as being all of one degree. whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions.
~ Thomas Paine
SOME WRITERS HAVE SO CONFOUNDED society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.
~ Thomas Paine
Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
~ Thomas Stephen Szasz
I am" is but a deception; "I want" is but an appeasement [of ego]; "The other" is but an enemy's word; "I do not want" is a hindrance. 39 "Self and others" are terms of division; "Attachment and aversion" words of conflict; He who makes such distinctions Has become deficient in profound Dharma.
~ Thupten Jinpa
The darkness of the world made no distinctions; it entered its palaces as it did its huts.
~ Cornelia Funke
The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in synchronistic or archetypal events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear.
~ Craig Nelson
But one truth does not displace another. Even apparently contradictory truths do not displace one another. Logic is far too coarse to make the subtle distinctions life demands.
~ D.H. Lawrence
One cannot help wondering if the day will ever arrive when tailoring clothes for people in accordance with their height and girth will ever be considered discriminatory and therefore prohibited; such a practice must of necessity make (invidious) distinctions between individuals, and this is what the equalitarian philosophy would appear to deem improper.
~ Walter Block
The adjectives and derivatives based on woman's distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; "effeminate"--too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas "emasculate"--not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. 'Virile'--manly, we oppose to 'puerile'--childish, and the very world 'virtue' is derived from 'vir'--a man.
~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Theology has suffered - among evangelicals as well as elsewhere - from an undue desire for clarity and control, something to which the often abstract and rarefied distinctions of Scholastic theology have contributed.
~ Hans Boersma
Another problem is that it's not always easy to distinguish between a killer's MO and his signature. Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges—"whatever he gets his rocks off on," as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it—whereas the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it's often hard to make such hard-and-fast distinctions.
~ Harold Schechter
In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.
~ Haruki Murakami
The more primitive a language is the less it abstracts. [...] As the language with its people advances in civilization it classifies, i.e. abstracts and simplifies more and more; it sees common qualities and drops out those distinctions that do not subserve life. A similar process may be observed in the formation of what we call Parts of Speech.
~ Jane Ellen Harrison
This type of gathering is unprecedented. The time has come for Christians to publicly affirm our Jewish roots, distinctions and oneness in Jesus Christ.
~ Bill McCartney
Oily started, and a hot flush suffused his forehead. His professional pride was piqued. In no section of the community are class distinctions more rigid than among those who make a dishonest living by crime. The burglar looks down on the stick-up man, the stick-up man on the humbler practitioner who steals milk cans. Accuse a high-up confidence artist of petty larceny, and you bring out all the snob in him.
~ P.G. Wodehouse
Not by the hairsplitting distinctions of scholars but by the sure logic of faith, the childlike saint has solved the only problem in human life—establishment of unity with God.
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father . . . it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing.
~ Patricia A. McKillip
The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice - that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion.
~ Chol-Hwan Kang