Malleable Quotes

“Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system ... The central feature of the American constitutional system-the separation of powers-exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.”

— James Q. Wilson

“Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors
malleable entities like ethnicities, for example
are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.”

— Ken Jennings

“Steve has a reality distortion field." When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. "In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

— Walter Isaacson

“The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.”

— Erwin Schrdinger

“And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.”

— Karen Abbott

“She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.”

— Robert Goolrick

“The basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe
as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems.”

— James Redfield

“It is the children who will be most malleable in your hands. Train them up in the way you would have them to go, and the next generation of Mizgalians will be the first of many to reach the state of perfection that I seek.”

— Nicole Sager

“Do you understand, mortal?" Eanrin said. "We Faerie know it's the spirit that counts, and all else is malleable. Beauty or ugliness; brawn or frailty; height or lack thereof
these appearances can be exchanged with scarcely a thought! But the truth ... now, that's another issue. The truth of the thing, the person behind what you perceive with any of your paltry five senses ... Creature of dust, it's the truth that counts! And you'll rarely find more truth than in Faerie tales."
With those words, the golden man dwindled into the golden cat, and try as he might, the Chronicler could perceive him as nothing else. But he was still Eanrin, and he smiled, pleased with himself.
"That wasn't a half-bad monologue. Do you find yourself inspired to new heights of ambition?”

— Anne Elisabeth Stengl

“We are fed lies because believing them makes us weak, vulnerable, malleable. We depend on others for our food, health, sustenance. This cripples us. Creates cowards of our people. Slaves of our children. It's time for us to fight back.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.”

— Mohsin Hamid

“You're a writer, though. Your words are malleable, replaceable, and by definition untrustworthy. they mean nothing to you and that's what I'm afraid I am to you, to Walter, to any man I have ever been with. A worthless word”

— Morgan Parker

“The body is an actor's tool, like the face, malleable. I never thought that being naked was immoral or outrageous.”

— Emmanuelle Beart

“'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.”

— Karl Rove

“Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable.”

— Richard Dreyfuss

“Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.”

— Brian Greene

“I think you have to be crazy not to want to work on the Joker! I can't think of many characters, heroes or villains, that are as malleable as him. He really can be interpreted in so many different ways, and generally, people don't really want to scratch the surface because you can get into some really dark territory real fast.”

— Lee Bermejo

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.”

— Haruki Murakami

“For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression - rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, 'Spiritus,' it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity.”

— Ismail Kadare

“Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.”

— Roger Scruton

“Everybody knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.”

— Stephen King

“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes.”

— Jean Baudrillard

“The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.”

— Pat Metheny

“Weight, sir, is entirely a function of gravity, and is therefore most malleable. Moreover, I am unwilling to concede you the authority to judge my weight over, under, or just right, these being subjective criteria. Aesthetics vary from world to world, as do genotypes and hereditary predisposition. I am quite satisfied with my present mass, sir.”

— George R.R. Martin

“Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable ...”

— Nicholas. Sparks

“Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals.”

— Stephen Kinzer

“A woman's heart and a woman's dreams are malleable and can change at any moment. It is the essence of being a woman.”

— Chloe Thurlow

“The clay or putty-like material stays soft and malleable enough to do so many, many times. In his infinite wisdom, God manufactured the self-image of similar material, so it remains malleable throughout our entire lives. No one is ever too old, too jaded, too frightened, or too traumatized to "wet the clay" and begin remaking it as they imagine and desire.”

— Maxwell Maltz

“She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.”

— Angela Carter

“If I'd had to guess, before, what "being pissed" felt like, I would never have guessed this unusual result: your knees feel warm, and your anxiety alchemizes down into something syrupy, and pleasant, and malleable. Like all medicines, it tastes revolting-but it makes you better. It makes you better.”

— Caitlin Moran

“Conservatives ... may decide to join the game and seek activist judges with conservative views. Should that come to pass, those who have tempted the courts to political judging will have gained nothing for themselves but will have destroyed a great and essential institution ... There are only two sides. Either the Constitution and statutes are law, which means their principles are known and control judges, or they are malleable texts that judges may rewrite to see that particular groups or political causes win.”

— Robert Bork

“We are not infinitely malleable”

— Tim Kreider

“All of history is a malleable instrument in my hands. Ohhh, I have accumulated all of these pasts and I possess every fact-yet the facts are mine to use as I will and, even using them truthfully, I change them.”

— Frank Herbert

“With TV, you don't know, but you can build it as you go and bring some things to life. It's malleable, changeable and flexible.”

— Marc Blucas

“Life is malleable and the hammer is desire.”

— Anya Seton

“You can carry a photograph with you on a thumb drive, and you can make it bigger or smaller - it's a very malleable form of mass production.”

— Mary Mattingly

“In a malleable world where everything from atoms to cells is changing to match our beliefs, we're limited only by the way we think of ourselves in that world.”

— Gregg Braden

“Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them.”

— Mike Harding

“I love the opportunity to shoot digital because you can shoot so many takes, it's really malleable, it's a ton of fun, and it is easy.”

— Brad Furman

“For me, painting is that magical material, that beautiful stuff that was invented, the ground-up pigments in oil which makes it very malleable. It can be manipulated and changed, darkened, lightened, given different hues and colors, so that by manipulating this material somehow I can find that figure I'm looking for, that figure that represents all the issues I'm bringing up and addressing.”

— Nathan Oliveira

“Addiction is more malleable than you know. When people come to me for therapy, they often ask me whether their behavior constitutes a real addiction (or whether they are really alcoholic, etc.). My answer is that this is not the important question. The important questions are how many problems is the involvement causing you, how much do you want to change it, and how can we go about change?”

— Stanton Peele

“What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure. That once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.”

— Charles Duhigg

“There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

“I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.”

— Kevin Smith

“Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.”

— Dean Koontz

“Men and women alike, if you think that altering the tip of your nose with surgery will make you happier, I would suggest you alter something much more malleable than your flesh, like your priorities, or your friends.”

— Nick Offerman

“An actor who's a control freak, that doesn't work. We have to be malleable. We cannot come in and try to control or dominate.”

— Nicole Kidman

“One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable.”

— Georges Braque

“Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”

— Margaret Mead