Quotes About Refusal

I was asked to go in a banana suit once or eat as many doughnuts as possible. I would not do those things. I don't eat doughnuts so why would I eat 20.

Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.

It is impossible, in my mind, to distinguish between the refusal to receive a petition, or its summary rejection by some general order, and the denial of the right of petition.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of invisibility is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by millions—that it is automatically invoked when we talk about the situation of black Americans and any social group we willingly refuse to see.

And do you think your refusal to believe will convince God to change his nature? He is who he is no matter what you think of him. Despite what Americans believe, the universe is not a democracy. Truth is not determined by the majority. As for hell, if you were as just and holy as God is, you would understand that all men deserve hell. It is no puzzle that men should go to hell. What is a puzzle is that men should go to heaven.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

We can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point of view that takes lesbian sexuality to be a refusal of sexuality per se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual, and the observer, here constructed as the heterosexual male, is clearly being refused.

She wondered if he would try to make love to her and if he did, whether she would let him. It was hard to refuse if someone really wanted to, She tried to remember how she had refused someone in the past and then realized that she couldn't remember because she had never actually done it.

The truth is that it is the refusal to see race—the willful color blindness of the liberal camp—that acquiesces to the racial status quo, and does so by consigning blacks to a twilight zone where they are politically invisible

I tried to give blood the other day. The blood bank refused to take it, though. Because I wouldn't tell them where I got it from.

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.

Il m'a fallu plus d'un demi-siècle pour retrouver cette force de caractère que j'avais au début. La force du non. Faut s'entêter. Se tenir debout derrière son refus. Presque rein qui mérite un oui. Trois ou quatre choses au cours d'une vie. Sinon il faut répondre non sans aucune hésitation.

Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the "dark beauty of violence," and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.

If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman sitting next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life.

The biggest obstacle to making Christ magnificent is the refusal to make yourself small.

So rather than repent of sin and turn for mercy to a God who is altogether sovereign, holy, knowing, and unchangeable, men and women suppress what knowledge they have and refuse to seek out that additional knowledge that could be the salvation of their souls.

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

While he remained "steadfast in refusing to take part in Catholic services during the next four decades," Tobin's "intellectual development showed clear marks of his Jesuit training," Doig suggests, especially in his intense rationalism, appreciation of debate, and devotion to the classics.

There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. "I persistently refused to lose my temper," he recalled. "I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind." Though he steadfastly refused

or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience