Suspect Quotes
More Suspect Quotes
If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark.
syd barrett— Bob Klose, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (2003)
Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.
fernando pessoa— Original: O tédio é a falta de uma mitologia. A quem não tem crenças, até a dúvida é impossível, até o cepticismo não tem força para desconfiar.
— Ibid.
suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
john updike— A Month of Sundays (1975)
I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.
jacob m. appel— "Rational Rationing vs. Irrational Rationing", The Huffington Post (2010-06-23)
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very.
edsger w. dijkstra— Dijkstra (1994) "The strengths of the academic enterprise" (EWD 1175)
I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.
stephanie zacharek— Review of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
And to some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it.
george henry lewes— George Henry Lewes, The Spanish Drama (1846), Chapter III.
Turn up the TV. No one listening will suspect, even your mother won't detect it, no your father won't know. they think that I've got no respect but everything means less than zero.
elvis costello— Less Than Zero
The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases. It includes passion but does not survive by passion; it has its whiffs of the agreeable vertigo of young love, but it is stable more often than dizzy; it is a growing, changing thing, and it is tactful enough to give the addicted parties occasional rests from strong and exhausting feeling of any kind.
Robertson Davies— The Pleasures of Love (1961)
In the popular political imagination we're familiar with the neocons as conniving militarists, masters of intrigue and cabals, graspers for the oil supplies of the world, and all the rest. But here we have them in what I suspect is the truest light: as college kid rubes who head out for a weekend in Vegas, get scammed out of their money by a two-bit hustler on the first night and then get played for fools by a couple hookers who leave them naked and handcuffed to their hotel beds.
joshua micah marshall— Talking Points Memo (2004-05-04) [1]
If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when, peradventure, thou wert accused by the ass...
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, scene iii.
I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquityand its Renaissance.But, for myself, I cannot find anyartistic connection with ourown times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect.
Paul Klee— 1901-2 The Diaries of Paul Klee1898-1918, entry 294.
I hate a manwho swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.
Charles Lamb— 1823 Essays of Elia,'Grace Before Meat'.
To speak a bold truth, I am, after much mature deliberation, inclined to suspect that the public voice hath, in all ages, done much injustice to Fortune, and hath convicted her of many facts in which she had not the least concern.
Henry Fielding— Book I, Ch. 1
Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.
helen garner— In the title story Postcards from Surfers.
— Garner describing her mother.
As the World Trade Center massacre was happening, all New Yorkers probably formed ideas about who was responsible. But I suspect John Reed was the only one who blamed George Orwell.
john reed— John Strausbaugh, "Return to Animal Farm", New York Press, 8 October 2002
Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.
russell baker— "Introduction to 'We're Losing Contact, Captain'" (p.353)
When you're leaving your teenage kids alone, probably a good idea to let them know you're going to be checking in on them occasionally. I suspect Greenspan missed that part.
ian bremmer— "Revenge of the Tweets," Foreign Policy (May 10, 2010)
When the politicians claim that the public isn’t interested any longer in environmental conservation, they’re half right. People are actually afraid to be interested, because they suspect I think rightly that we’ll find if we dig deep enough that we’ve gone so far beyond the limits of what the planet will tolerate that only a major catastrophe which cuts back both our population and our ability to interfere with the natural biocycle would offer a chance of survival.
john brunner— August “CHECK AND BALANCE”
Anna’s reaction is more complex than you might imagine, and it’s at such a moment you appreciate the woman in the writer-director’s chair. Women, I suspect, are more likely than men to view sex from the over-all perspective of what we may call their lives. In a country like Saudi Arabia, whose citizens express discomfort about men and women even attending movies together, I have little doubt which gender is more concerned.
roger ebert— Review of Humpday (22 July 2009)
...I suspect people would be in for a real shock if they knew the depths of [Obama's] historical ignorance.
charles foster johnson— May 25, 2008 [34]
...but who can know the heart of a man? Not even he himself, I suspect. A man is the easiest animal to put on a leash, and the hardest to keep leashed. Even when he chooses it himself.
robert jordan— Siuan Sanche
There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.
karl popper— "The Importance of Critical Discussion" in On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict (1989) by Robert Basil
It is hardly possible not to suspect the truth of this doctrine of atonement, when we consider that the general maxims to which it may be reduced, are nowhere laid down, or asserted, in the Scriptures, but others quite contrary to them.
joseph priestley— Part II : Opinions Relating to the Doctrine of Atonement, § I : That Christ did not die to make satisfaction for the sins of men.
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
gore vidal— "Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again" (1987)
The eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse.
richard weaver— “The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 22
Men lend their money to traders upon mortgages or consignments of goods, because they suspect their circumstances, and will not run the risque of their general credit.
— Lord Mansfield, Foxcroft v. Devonshire (1759), 2 Burr. PartrV., p 942.
We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words , the definitions , the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God .
— Jorge Luis Borges, in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" in Other Inquisitions (1952), as translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
— Ellen Willis, "Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" (1977), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981).
