Desperate Quotes
More Desperate Quotes
So bent he seems On desperate revenge, that shall redound Upon his own rebellious head.
john milton— 1665 Of Satan. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.3, l.84-6.
There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough.
Ken Livingstone— As quoted in Socialist Organiser, the newspaper of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory (March 1979)
The Brothers Grimm came along and I was so desperate for work … Actually I've got to say that I like the movie, I won't apologize for it.
terry gilliam— Interview at the NY Museum of the Moving Image in October 2006.
Notwithstanding his desperate effort to realize Poe’s idea, he [Baudelaire] only proved Poe correct, who had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions.
Charles Baudelaire— James Huneker, Introduction to The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire (1919), p. xi
When you're as hollow as Enoch Kane, the emptiness aches. He's desperate to fill it, but he doesn't have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile… So a man like Kane obsesses on one thing after another sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice.
dean r. koontz— Chapter 64; words of former policeman Thomas Vanadium
It is the will of God, and we must submit; but I call my God to witness that I have done all that in me lay to save the city, utterly desperate as I knew the attempt to be. When I took in hand the defence of these oppressed Christians, I made an alliance with the mightiest of all Potentates the God of Hosts, who is able to save us, if He choose.
william the silent— William to his brother Louis at the Siege of Harlem, 1573, as quoted in William the Silent (1902) by Frederic Harrison, p. 68
There does seem to be among some members of our profession a rather desperate search for a "fundamental theory of information", which leads them to attempt to derive our practice from disciplines such as epistemology, or hermeneutics, or discourse analysis, or semiotics, or even "cybersemiotics". Their derivations rarely make adequate contact with the realities of information practice … The theory of a science should spring from deep immersion in its practice.
— Brian Campbell Vickery A Long Search for Information (2004) p. 29
People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.
George carlin
My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.
— 1984 Speech at the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco,17 Jul.
'Fore heaven, I wonder at the desperate valour Of the bold English, that they dare let loose Their wives to all encounters!
Ben Jonson— 1609 Volpone, act1, sc.5.
'Tis true, I'm broke! Vows, oaths, and all I had Of credit lost. And I am now run mad, Or do upon my self some desperate ill; This sadness makes no approaches, but to kill.
Ben Jonson— The Underwood,'An Elegy', no.40 (published1640).
Your defeat is not only a reality, which has been historically proven time and again. It can also be seen in your helplessness and your inability to suppress the movement, in your desperate conduct when faced with our guerrillas and the vanguard of the people.
ashraf dehghani— Torture and Resistance in Iran, 1971
— This quote was about the regime of the Shah, who was forced to flee Iran in 1979
With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.
delia ephron— Funny Sauce (1986), Delia Ephron
As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.
frank pittman— Ch. 5 (Man Enough (1993))
Marriage is a desperate thing.
john selden— Marriage.
desperate times call for desperate measures. (Speake, 2009)Footprints on the sands of time are not made by sitting down.
— "People who idle their lives away will not make a lasting impression on history or be remembered for their great achievements."
— Source for meaning: Manser, Martin H (2007). The Facts on File dictionary of proverbs. Infobase Publishing. 0816066736.
The troubles of the 20th century are not unlike those of adolescence -- rapid growth beyond the ability of organizations to manage, uncontrollable emotion, and a desperate search for identity. Out of adolescence, however, comes maturity in which physical growth with all its attendant difficulties comes to an end, but in which growth continues in knowledge, in spirit, in community, and in love; it is to this that we look forward as a human race. This goal, once seen with our eyes, will draw our faltering feet toward it.
kenneth boulding— Boulding, 1973, p. 21 as cited in: Donald W. Cole (1983) Conflict resolution technology. p.5
Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.
Federico Fellini— "Hype"
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
— Act III, sc. iii.
Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilizing their theoretical and empirical knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to them. ... Furthermore, many modern agents would like it to be the case that the form of orientation which their life has is, if not true, at least compatible with the best available knowledge.
raymond geuss— Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)
We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.
— As quoted in Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Collected Works, Vol. 11, page 174
The Seventies theory explosion [i.e., Literary theory, deconstruction , etc.] was a panic reaction by headlocked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma.
camille paglia— p. 218 (Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf)
Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.
edgar allan poe— "To Helen", st. 1-2 (1831).
The Prince very nobly hath travailed, both night and day, to keep this town from manslaughter and from despoil, which doubtless had taken place, if he had not been, to the loss of 20,000 men; for that I never saw men so desperate willing to fight.
— Sir Thomas Gresham to Cecil, as quoted in William the Silent (1902) by Frederic Harrison, p. 37
When desperate ills demand a speedy cure, Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.
samuel johnson— Irene, Act IV, scene 1, line 87.
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
— Act III, sc. iii.
'Tis true no lover has that pow'r T' enforce a desperate amour, As he that has two strings t' his bow, And burns for love and money too.
— Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I, line 1. Churchill, The Ghost, Book IV.
desperate courage makes One a majority.
andrew jackson— As quoted by James Parton in the Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), vol. III, ch. XXXVI, "War Upon the Bank Renewed"However, see also the mis-attributed quote "one man with courage makes a majority."
The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pocket to pay for it, would make of our country one of the happiest upon earth. Experience during the war proved this; as I think every man will remember that under all the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period he slept sounder, and awaked happier than he can do now. desperate of finding relief from a free course of justice, I look forward to the abolition of all credit as the only other remedy which can take place.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Alexander Donald, July 28, 1787. — The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 11, p. 633 (1955).
