Impediment Quotes

“One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore.”

— Marilyn French

“Whenever we doubt our own ability to achieve, it is worthwile pondering the obstacles that others have overcome. To name a few ...
*Napoleon overcame his considerable handicap, his tiny stature, to lead his conquering armies across Europe.
*Abraham Lincon failed in business aged 31, lost a legislative race and 32, again failed in business at 34, had his sweetheart die when he was 35, had a nervous breakdown at 36, lost congressional races aged 43, 46 and 48, lost a senatorial race at 55, failed in his efforts to become vice president of the U.S.A aged 56 and lost a further senatorial contest at 58. At 60 years of age he was elected president of the U.S.A and is now remembered as one of the great leaders in world history.
*Winston Churchill was a poor student with a speech impediment. Not only did he win a Nobel Prize at 24, but he became one of the most inspiring speakers of recent times.
It is not where you start that counts, but where you choose to finish.”

— Andrew Matthews

“Being hated by the right people was no impediment to success. The unpolished were everywhere the majority.”

— Rick Perlstein

“Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

“Being about spiritual growth, this book is inevitably about the other side of the same coin: the impediments to spiritual growth. Ultimately there is only the one impediment, and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome laziness, none of the others will be hurdled.”

— M. Scott Peck

“My speech impediment had been absent for some time now-four months and six days. I'd almost imagined myself cured. So when Mother swept into the room all of a sudden-me, in a paroxysm of adjustment to my surroundings, and Binah, tucking my possessions here and there-and asked if my new quarters were to my liking, I was stunned by my inability to answer her. The door slammed in my throat, and the silence hung there. Mother looked at me and sighed. When she left, I willed my eyes to remain dry and turned away from Binah. I couldn't bear to hear one more Poor Miss Sarah.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“The attack did not succeed as well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg.”

— Peter Stuyvesant

“From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.”

— Patrick Campbell

“The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I thought Daredevil was kind of cool because he couldn't do anything. I mean, he's blind. It wasn't that he could fly. His major power was an impediment. So I was intrigued. When I took over he was kind of like Spider-Man-lite, but I was able to project a lot of my Catholic imagery onto it. And I'd always wanted to do a crime comic.”

— Frank Miller

“I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.”

— Francisco Goya

“Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.”

— Seneca

“I suffered from a quite severe speech impediment when I was young, and keeping a journal was part of the therapy.”

— George Fetherling

“The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

“I was a fat little kid with a speech impediment. I used to get beat up, not just picked on.”

— Herschel Walker

“There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.”

— Constance Baker Motley

“I'm probably a little more like my dad. But because of my mom, I never saw being a woman as being an impediment to being able to do something. She had her Ph.D. before I was born.”

— Mary Cheney

“Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius.”

— John Philip Sousa

“I always wanted to be an actor, but with a speech impediment it's kind of tough. I decided to roll the dice and take an acting class, which was very, very nerve-wracking ... my stomach would just be in knots.”

— Nicholas Brendon

“I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.”

— Walter Dean Myers

“I like to mumble when I act, 'cause I think it's more realistic. For some reason, the impediment has given me the accent of a Mexican gangster.”

— David Arquette

“Hey dawg, wassup? he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.”

— Craig Ferguson

“When he talked, there was a sort of mushy sound to his pronunciation that was charming because one sensed that it betrayed not so much an impediment in his speech as a quality of his soul, a sort of vestige of early childhood innocence that he had never lost. Each consonant he could not pronounce appeared to be another instance of a hardness of which he was incapable.”

— Marcel Proust

“P.E. was my life in school. Without it, I wouldn't be standing here. It gave me confidence when I was an overweight kid with a speech impediment.”

— Herschel Walker

“There cannot be any impediment to science that will ultimately be good to the general public.”

— Anthony Fauci

“My thing is, I'm just way too harsh. It's an enormous impediment, and that's just the truth of it. It doesn't make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn't more valorous. I have a character defect, man.”

— Junot Diaz

“Disease is an impediment to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself chooses. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself. X”

— Epictetus

“No treaty is ever an impediment to a cheat.”

— Sophocles

“Achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth:”

— Earl Nightingale

“Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic; there's been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn't make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.”

— Adrian Tomine

“I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.”

— Zelda Fitzgerald

“I paid every effort to seek deregulation throughout FEDEX's start-up and expansion periods, because the biggest impediment to our growth was the government regulations that restricted new entry into the air cargo market.”

— Frederick W. Smith

“We will put no impediment in your way and we will be at dockside bidding you a farewell as you set off into the sunset.”

— Charles Lichenstein

“But I also want kids who suffer from bullying to know that you can be whoever you want to be in life, including a professional boxer, that anything is possible and that who you are or whom you love should not be impediment to achieving anything in life.”

— Orlando Cruz

“Fasting is not bodily hunger but bodily elevation and purity. It is not a body that hungers and longs for food, but a body that rids itself of the desire to eat. Fasting is a time when the soul flourishes and lifts the body up with it. It rids the body of its loads and burdens and lifts it up so that God may work with it without impediment to the happiness of the spiritual entity.”

— Pope Shenouda III Of Alexandria

“That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.”

— Sam Harris

“An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.”

— Allan Bloom

“PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.".”

— Ambrose Bierce

“Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of a senate, is the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence first of a majority of the people, and then of a majority of the states.”

— James Madison

“This is the bud of being, the dim dawn, The twilight of our day, the vestibule; Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death, Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar, This gross impediment of clay remove, And make us embryos of existence free.”

— Edward Young

“The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Whoever we are, wherever we are, however we are, whatever our condition is, there is no impediment to attaining the perfection of life-if we are humble & sincere.”

— Radhanath Swami

“He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The character and the actor in a long-running series slowly become one. I think there must be funny stories about actors who, in the pilot for a TV series, did some weird thing with their eyes, or some speech impediment or something, and the next thing you know, it's eight years later, and they're still doing that freaking gag.”

— William H. Macy

“Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it
turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself, so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“In a discussion of this kind our interest should be centered not on the weight of the authority but on the weight of the argument. Indeed the authority of those who set out to teach is often an impediment to those who wish to learn. They cease to use their own judgment and regard as gospel whatever is put forward by their chosen teacher.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero