Quotes About Hard-nosed

The country has moved off track. The people in Washington don't have the hard-nosed business experience needed to get the economy up and running.

I'm a hard-nosed businessman, that if a company is paying its way, increasing profits for thirty-odd consecutive years, you don't put it into receivership.

The third factor is research, the big difference between the hard-nosed criminal and the super con man.

I have to chuckle sometimes when I am painted as "hard-nosed." In truth, our Justice Department wasn't nearly as aggressive as Roosevelt's. And our respect for civil liberties was far more extensive than the response following Pearl Harbor. Yes, we were tough, but we always operated within the law; it was never our policy or practice to detain any noncombatant without charges. In our conduct, we never approached the limits of the law as closely as Roosevelt did.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.

I'm hard-nosed about luck...If you're persistent in trying and doing and working, you almost always make your own fortune.

The life of a farmer is increasingly Hobbesian—poor, nasty, and brutish, even if not always short. It has been my own experience that many who still rise to that challenge today are themselves hard-nosed, peculiar, dogmatic, and distasteful characters, better appreciated at a distance, myself perhaps included. My purposes in deviating somewhat from a 'professional' stance are threefold.

I'm an old-fashioned player, an old-school player who will foul you and foul you hard.