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
'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).
How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.
Christopher Marlowe— c.1592 Doctor Faustus (published1604), act1, sc.1.
Es gibt keine verzweifelten Lagen, es gibt nur verzweifelte Menschen. (There are no desperate situations, there are only desperate people.)
heinz guderian— Quoted in "Die Deutschen gepanzerten Truppen bis 1945" by Oskar Munzel - Tanks (Military science) - 1965
I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,—The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife….The hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and desperate part.
william wetmore story— Io Victis (1886). Compare: "Now it seems to me, when it can not be helped that defeat is great", Walt Whitman, To a Foiled European Revolutionaire.
When you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.
Edward Teller— As quoted by Robert C. Martin in Software Development magazine (September 2005), p. 60
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
On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they looked just like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid...as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.
david brin— Part VIII (p. 480)
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
Raymond Chandler— letter, 22 April 1949, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)
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)
Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.
stephen jay gould— "Chance Riches", p. 342
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.
Eric Hoffer— Section 13 (The True Believer (1951))
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.
james russell lowell— St. 18. (The Present Crisis (1844))
Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children.
catharine mackinnon— p. 20 (Only Words (1993))
He was hanging on, looking for a life preserver. He was a desperate man clutching at straws.
Ferdinand Edralin Marcos— U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, after his telephone conversation with Marcos, March 1986
The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.
jack vance— Chapter XI, section 1
Reformers desperate to resuscitate taxpayer funding [of elections] cite the supposedly scandalous fact that each party's 2008 presidential campaign may spend $500 million. If so, Americans volunteering to fund the dissemination of speech about candidates for the nation's most consequential office will contribute $1 billion, which is about half the sum they spend annually on Easter candy. Some scandal.
George Will— Column, September 28, 2006, "Checkout for an Undemocratic Checkoff" at jewishworldreview.com.
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.
Marriage is a desperate thing.
john selden— John Selden, Table Talk, Marriage.
Diseases desperate grown, By desperate appliance are reliev'd, Or not at all.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act IV, scene 3, line 9.
