Quotes About Intervene

“People can talk tough without having to do the primitive math of violence, because they believe that law enforcement will either intervene and stop or punish an attacker.”

— Jack Donovan

“How we live our lives does not,unfortunately depend on us alone.Circumstances,good or bad,constantly intervene.A person close to us die.A person not so close to us carries on living.All these things affect how we live.”

— Tariq Ali

“So many problems we will get to the bottom of later, but whose spatial aspect we must grasp right away. If the space of the industrial economy dominates the social space in which the Parisian worker or intellectual develops, to what extent could residential space, cultural space, or political space be planned without it being necessary to first intervene in economic structures? ... In short ... : to what extent can we freely build the framework for a social life in which we might be guided by our aspirations and not by our instincts?”

— Tom McDonough

“A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine's limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and never yet quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene
a bullet, a heart attack, a cry from shore that dinner's ready, or company has come, or junior's run away
the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.”

— Renata Adler

“It is vital that parents have the courage to speak up and intervene before Satan succeeds. President Boyd K. Packer has taught that when morality is involved, we have both the right and the obligation to raise a warning voice.”

— Larry R. Lawrence

“When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it's easy to be at war - not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don't have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay.”

— Rachel Maddow

“Grievances are not in themselves sufficient to radicalize somebody. They are half the truth. My meaning is best summarized this way: when we in the West failed to intervene in the Bosnian genocide, some Muslims became radicalized; when we did intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq, more Muslims became radicalized; when we failed to intervene in Syria, many more Muslims became radicalized. The grievance narrative that pins the blame on foreign policy is only half the story. It is insufficient as an explanation for radicalization.”

— Sam Harris

“Patriarchal hip-hop ushered in a world where black males could declare that they were "keeping it real" when what they were really doing was taking the dead patriarchal protest of the black power movement and rearticulating it in forms that, though entertaining, had for the most part no transformative power, no ability to intervene on the politics of domination, and turn the real lives of black men around.”

— Bell Hooks

“If you've got kids who aren't being looked after by their parents, there's only so many times you can try and intervene to get that right.”

— Adam Giles

“The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.”

— Henry Charles Carey

“I think it's appropriate for the international community in situations like this to intervene in Kosovo. I am in favor of an intervention. On some level, you have to say that at least somebody is doing something.”

— Mike Farrell

“Fate decides our future if we don't intervene.”

— Steven Redhead

“As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.”

— Jose Saramago

“But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.”

— Anne Rice

“Ranulf's heart did a strange stutter at the way she defended him. He longed to intervene, to stop the questioning.”

— Melanie Dickerson

“His bowels, far greater alchemist than he had ever been, regularly performed the transmutation of corpses, those of beasts and of plants, into living matter, separating the useful from the dross without help from him. Ignis inferioris Naturae: those spirals of brown mud, precisely coiled and still steaming from the decocting process which they have undergone in their mold, this ammoniac and nitric fluid passed into a clay pot, were the visible and fetid proof of work completed in laboratories where we do not intervene. It seemed to Zeno that the disgust of fastidious persons at this refuse, and the obscene laughter of the ignorant, were due less to the fact that these objects offend our senses than to our horror in the presence of the mysterious and ineluctable routines of our bodies.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing).”

— Slavoj Žižek

“Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.”

— Alice Hoffman

“The NHS should be proactively using substantial resources across government to intervene and try to deliver positive improvements in people's standards of living.”

— Andrew Lansley

“There are certain people I am allergic to. I even intervene when I don't like a customer; I rush in and check all the names. If I don't like them, I don't take them.”

— Azzedine Alaia

“Even when we're with someone we love, we're foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self.”

— Yukio Mishima

“Alaric grunted. Someone should tell her
that. I'm telling you, Ewan, she said nothing.
She stared at me like I was some kind of
toad. Worse, she had Crispen acting like I
was the enemy. The two whispered like
104/756
conspirators and glared at me when I dared
intervene.”

— Maya Banks

“When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.”

— Charles Kennedy

“Just as ceremonial fasting was a legitimate means for getting God's attention (Mt 6:16-18; Ac 13:2-3; 14:23), the casting of lots was a legitimate means for inviting God to intercede on a matter. (Pr 18:18) It was not expected that God should intervene every time (1Sam 28:6), but the ceremonial casting of lots was an invitation for God to participate in the final decision. (page 21)”

— Michael Ben Zehabe

“On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.'”

— Mikhail Gorbachev

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“I support the state, but not the state-run economy. The state should intervene only to create the conditions necessary for the private sector to thrive.”

— Abdoulaye Wade

“We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.”

— Adolf Von Harnack

“Why would you do that?" The loyalty argument was rising to my lips as he answered.
"Because I love you. And when you see someone you care about making bad decisions, when they need you, you intervene, even when it means you can get hurt in the process and they might even hate you for it."
Katy and Bobby”

— Elle Casey

“The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?
No. But yeah.
The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.”

— Louise Erdrich

“Wars are bound to occur from time to time. In them is manifested that determination of nature to intervene directly in the evolution of the greatest organisms of the earth, though they strive to withdraw themselves from her influence, and to break it forcibly upon their one-sided and purely economic aims.”

— Ernst Jünger

“On the brink alone he stands with quick and eager feet. Jump across and run, boy, don't worry what you'll meet. For in the days before you, life will intervene With all the things you yearn to see and all that you have seen ... . Don't close your eyes and wonder what lies across the gap; There is no road before you; you cannot find the map. For with your heart you forge a way that angels fear to tread, And gather up your troubles for the day when you are dead, And gather up your troubles for the day when you are dead ... . Run, boy, run. Run with all your might. The sunrise burns before you, and on your heels the night. And if the darkness lingers long, you'll lose your soul's own song; Yes, if the darkness lingers, you'll lose your own soul's song.”

— Kristen Heitzmann

“The dreams of "leaving it up to the market" or of returning to a politically neutral gold standard cannot succeed because the nature of the monetary system has a profound impact on the interests of powerful groups and states. Affected groups and states will always try to intervene in the operation of the system to make it serve their interests.”

— Robert Gilpin

“The fate of the soil system depends on society's willingness to intervene in the market place, and to forego some of the short-term benefits that accrue from 'mining' the soil so that soil quality and fertility can be maintained over the longer term.”

— Eugene Odum

“The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties”

— Fernand Braudel

“Japan should not intervene in other countries' conflicts by using military power. And I don't think Japan is capable of doing such things. For starters, I don't believe our country has sufficient human resources to make that type of international contribution.”

— Sadako Ogata

“The fundamental assumption that the United States retains the right and obligation to intervene in the Third World in any way it ultimately deems necessary, including military, remains an article of faith among the people who guide both political parties.”

— Gabriel Kolko

“Easy to keep faith. God is good. Only one mistake he made. Free will, therefore can't intervene unless we ask, but gospels show, when we ask we must believe we will be answered. Then all manner of things will be well.”

— Sinead O'Connor

“A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.”

— E. M. Forster

“Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.”

— B.F. Skinner

“[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.”

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

“I'm often quite gloomy about the prospects for the human future. But, although I have no competence to intervene directly in a political movement, I hope that what I write may, in combination with the suggestions of others, cause a shift in perspective that will inspire a world-wide movement to accept the only solution to climate change. And before it's too late.”

— Philip Kitcher

“Thanks to the scientific method, most people in "developed" countries have an outlook of mild deism. We assume things like weather and disease operate according to fixed natural laws. Every so often, though, problems impinge on us so directly that we stretch beyond that mildly deistic stance and ask God to intervene. When a drought drags on too long, we pray for rain. When a young mother gets a diagnosis of cervical cancer, we solicit prayers for her healing. We beseech God as if trying to talk God into something God otherwise might not want to do.”

— Philip Yancey

“Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.”

— Chinua Achebe

“We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever. Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won't make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging process in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene.”

— Ray Kurzweil

“I'm quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that [the need to intervene in Iraq] was a more immediate one than some believed - were I'm sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don't think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don't think it has been established that any lies were told.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.”

— William James

“If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.”

— Henri Matisse

“Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a very large country, a very old country, a very disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons and in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.”

— Winston Churchill