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1 " It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!" " So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. " But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death. "
2 " That deep longing that you keep dismissing as impractical, may be the very thing your soul is calling you to do. "
3 " When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them " terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word " terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word " terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "
4 " When it comes to current attitudes about surgery, the practice of dismissing the cultural context and rationalizing it as individual betterment " flattens the terrain of power relations." In other words, we can talk about doing it for us until our high-end lipstick flakes off, but we should also keep in mind that we probably wouldn't even be thinking about what life would be like with a new nose or perkier breasts or shapelier inner thighs if it weren't for a long-standing cultural ideal that rewards those who adhere to it with power that often doesn't speak its name, but is instantly recognizable to those who don't have it. "
5 " Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all. "
― Natalie Haynes , The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
6 " Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing. That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran. Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it? I take it that the answer is obviously yes. Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem. If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. 'We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.' Or, 'The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.'Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t make internal sense. A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows. And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe. "
― Matthew S. McCormick
7 " Back when he had first come to the monastery, they had given him a very simple ritual called Forgiving the Day. Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day’s pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight. As initiates grew in the ways of Sa, it was expected they would grow more sophisticated in this exercise, learning to balance the day, taking responsibility for their own actions and learning from them without indulging in either guilt or regrets." p. 240 "
8 " When we arrive on our floor we head to our rooms, politely bidding each other goodnight. Just as I am about to enter mine, I remember I have his jacket. I can use this to have just one more moment with him tonight. I knock on his door, his lips slightly open when he sees me on the other side.“You forgot your jacket.” It is still on my shoulders. I turn around to offer it up to him.“Thank you Shy,” As he says this he takes both of his hands, grabbing each shoulder of the jacket and oh so slowly pulls it off of me, grazing my bare arms and back as he pulls it off. I close my eyes taking in his touch. Each caress of his fingertips feels like one thousand little sparks. How can just the faintest touch from this man set me off like this? Please kiss me. Kiss my neck. I won’t say no. I hold my position for a second more than I should, but it feels so tortuously long. There is nothing, not another touch, not a kiss. I turn to face him again and bid him goodnight. His face looks sad, almost guilty. Every word, every touch, every action tonight was an implication. This keeps us safe from one another. It keeps me safe from him.“Goodnight Shy,” he says as if dismissing me from his presence.“Goodnight Taylor. "
― Nina G. Jones , Strapped (Strapped, #1)
9 " I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of. "
― Nick Hornby
10 " Allan praised Herbert for a job well done and for acting the part well. Herbert blushed, while dismissing the praise, saying it wasn't hard to play stupid when you are stupid. Allan said that he didn't know how hard it was, because the idiots Allan had met so far in his life had all tried to do the opposite. "
― Jonas Jonasson
11 " Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly " inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. "
12 " A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal. "
13 " Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible. "
14 " Just because we are capable of art didn't what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous. The same hands committed both. Brains don't undermine the savagery. They made us better at it. "
― Michael Marshall
15 " God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication. "
― John C. Lennox , God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
16 " Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh. "
― Richard Rohr , Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation
17 " ...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself. "
― Immanuel Kant , Critique of Pure Reason
18 " New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word " France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, " What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: " France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples.Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him " liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill some "
19 " Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed. "
― DaShanne Stokes
20 " Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands. "
― Peter Singer , Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics
