Strident Quotes

“I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one's response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.”

— David Bentley Hart

“No man was more sensitive than Zweig to the destructive effects upon individual liberty of the demands of large or strident collectivities. He would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomanias-sexual, racial, social, egalitarian-that marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn't want to win,”

— William J. Bennett

“The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.”

— Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

“Fundamentalism's strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.”

— Alan Aldridge

“Love can sometimes rise up like a desperate cry from a neglected part of oneself which takes a long view but which is submerged by the presence of strident wants.”

— John Armstrong

“More and more I love darkness for itself, it soothes me, makes me feel good, though I don't quite understand why. I also love it because I am trying to imagine language without light, as though I wanted to understand how things were before language, when, deep in the throat, syllables and vowels were not yet organized and it was necessary to tilt one's head back to allow sounds to fly through the open air, terrifying, guttural or strident. In the beginning, I thought the other language would enlighten me, clarify the mysteries of my inner life. I wanted to learn to read inside myself. Reading inside oneself may not be important.”

— Nicole Brossard

“But all progressive movements have to beware their own successes. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, but to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking. It happens in all organizations. It is fatal to those who are never confronted by a reckoning that forces them to face up and get wise.”

— Tony Blair

“A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.”

— Hilary Mantel

“Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle
The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then violins
vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.”

— John Updike

“These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.”

— Godfrey Reggio

“I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets ... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She was grown up; she was twenty-nine! It was only recently that she'd been walking home from the hairdresser's, feeling gorgeous, and a gaggle of teenage girls walked by, and the sound of their strident giggles made her send a message back through time to her fourteen-year-old self: "Don't worry, it all works out. You get a personality, you get a job, you work out what to do with your hair, and you get a boy who thinks you're beautiful." She'd felt so together, as if all the teenage angst and the failed relationships before Nick had all been part of a perfectly acceptable plan that was leading to this moment, when she would be twenty-nine years old and everything would finally be just as it should be.”

— Liane Moriarty

“Instead of further mucking around in the Middle East, Brzezinski is seeking to marshal all remaining US-UK resources for a final onslaught on Moscow, Beijing, and the other countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main focal point of world resistance to London and Washington. This is Brzezinski's new Operation Barbarossa. The financiers who control Brzezinski are now fielding Obama as the plausible public face for a new era of brutal and bellicose imperialist subversion and geopolitics which will be advertised on the basis of multiculturalism and dignity through selfdetermination attained through the subversion, balkanization, partition and subdivision of existing states, instead of the narrow and venomous Islamophobia which has been the constant and strident note of the Bush-Cheney neocons.”

— Anonymous.

“When I was younger, I was very vocal to the point of being strident in my views.”

— Gillian Jacobs

“I won't blame Nick. I don't blame Nick. I refuse - refuse! - to turn into some pert-mouthed, strident angry-girl. I made two promises to myself when I married Nick. One: no dancing-monkey demands. Two: I would never, ever say, Sure, that's fine by me (if you want to stay out later, if you want to do a boys' weekend, if you want to do something you want to do) and then punish him for doing what I said was fine by me. I worry I am coming perilously close to violating both of those promises.”

— Gillian Flynn

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary.”

— Nigel Hamilton

“My father would never have said about any of his children you shouldn't express your opinions. But it's the way in which you express them. And for me to do - to speak at demonstrations and be as strident as I was now I see wasn't right. And it - there was a better way to do it. I could have written articles.”

— Patti Davis

“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter-like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.”

— Toni Morrison

“It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“People say I'm shrill and strident.”

— Richard Dawkins

“I injured myself politically when I took on Jesse Jackson' in the 1988 presidential campaign. I was too strident. I didn't recognize the emotional tie that he had with all black voters.”

— Ed Koch

“Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I've learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman.”

— Willa Cather

“As the months passed, even the strident voices from the newspapers had begun to moderate, and the passion to put Preston's neck in a noose had become subdued. It was a relief to Adams that with the trial now scheduled for October, he had time to work with Josiah Quincy to prepare a case based on law and reason. And it meant he could spend time with his family and enjoy the wonderful peace of the farm.”

— Jeff Shaara

“When you are trying to get a shot, you can't be pleasing everybody. And I tend to be sort of collaborative and a bit of a pleaser. And when I'm directing, people just sort of call me Black Hat Gabriela. Because suddenly they're like, "What happened to you?" Because I stop listening. And I feel strident. I feel rude. And I feel un-collaborative.”

— Liz W. Garcia

“Things it helps me to remember
When in a bad mood, keep quiet or still.
Baggy jumpers don't suit you.
When you're tired you get doubtful.
Difficulties come in spurts.
Listen to the echo of your own voice. Avoid be strident.
All aeroplanes go through clouds during their journeys. So do people during theirs.
Often greater clarity comes out of confusion. You have to be puzzled before you find a solution.
PMS often brings on a crisis of confidence.
Ordinariness is restful.
If someone is explosive in front of you, be silent. If you feel explosive, be silent.”

— Aidan Chambers

“Cold calculation, random spots of color, mathematically exact construction (clearly shown or concealed), drawing that is now silent and now strident ... Is this not form?”

— Giacomo Puccini

“Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.”

— Steve Sailer

“I must follow my Lord. No matter what. I must renew my allegiance every morning. It is His voice I must listen to, not the voices of those around me, however strident, however persuasive. It is His Word that must govern my life, not the words of others. God Himself has written a Book (think of it!) that must be the authority in my life.”

— Stu Weber

“Women of my age in America are at the mercy of two powerful and antagonistic traditions. The first is the ultradomestic fifties with its powerful cult of motherhood; the other is the strident feminism of the seventies with its attempt to clone the male competitive model ... Only in America are these ideologies pushed to extremes.”

— Sylvia Ann Hewlett

“Here is, in truth, the whole secret of Yoga, the science of the soul. The active turnings, the strident vibrations, of selfishness, lust and hate are to be stilled by meditation, by letting heart and mind dwell in spiritual life, by lifting up the heart to the strong, silent life above, which rests in the stillness of eternal love, and needs no harsh vibration to convince it of true being.”

— Patanjali

“I spoke with the crows before leaving for Los Angeles. They were the resident storytellers whose strident and insistent voices added the necessary dissonance for color. They had cousins in California, and gave me their names and addresses, told me to look them up. They warned me, too, what they had heard about attitude there. And they were right. Attitude was thick, hung from the would-be's and has-beens and think-they-ares, so thick that I figured it was the major source of the smog.”

— Joy Harjo

“I personally do not believe in strident activism. I do not believe in moral outrage, because even moral outrage is rage, and rage is rage - it adds to more rage in the collective consciousness, if we understand how consciousness works.”

— Deepak Chopra

“The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident?”

— Jack Kevorkian

“All my friends were girls. Then my mom's strident feminism for years where men were thought of as the enemy, I just didn't know what the right way to be a man was.”

— Michael Ian Black

“When a feminist as strident as Garofalo is defending the Hussein regime, you have to wonder if her newfound sobriety has hit a rough patch.”

— Ann Coulter

“Many good people, being influenced by the bold spirit of the times, are now seeking surgery for the wife or the husband so they may avoid pregnancies and comply with the strident voice demanding a reduction of children. It was never easy to bear and rear children, but easy things do not make for growth and development. But loud, blatant voices today shout 'fewer children' and offer the Pill, drugs, surgery, and even ugly abortion to accomplish that. Strange the proponents of depopulating the world seem never to have thought of continence!”

— Spencer W. Kimball

“Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident - all of those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.”

— Arianna Huffington

“Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.”

— Audre Lorde

“Sometimes strident, often tender, never afraid and seldom without humour, Desmond Tutu's voice will always be the voice of the voiceless.”

— Nelson Mandela

“The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth ... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.”

— Susan Sontag

“I have things that are strident and confrontational, and I have a lot of things that are childlike and innocent and sort of sweet. So, somewhere in between lies the middle of me.”

— George Carlin

“The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art”

— Camille Paglia

“The Rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls Royces;
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices ...
The Poor arrived in Fords,
Whose features they resembled;
They laughed to see so many Lords
And Ladies all assembled.
The People in Between
Looked underdone and harassed,
And our of place and mean,
And Horribly embarrassed.”

— Hilaire Belloc

“The battle for women's rights has largely been won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone forever. I hate those strident tones we hear from some Women's Libbers.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“Had I faltered we would have neither the success nor the international reputation we have. Yet when a woman is strong she is strident. If a man is strong, he's a good guy.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“There is a perverse comfort zone to living a small life. For women, that zone has to do with the fact that we're less likely to be challenged, we're less likely to be criticized, we're less likely to be called angry or strident, if we simply go along and acquiesce to the prevailing patterns of thought and behavior.”

— Marianne Williamson

“A lot of times in cinema today the women are overly sentimental, so I constantly try to do the opposite. I like strident women.”

— Keira Knightley