Volatile Quotes

“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.
Best friends are formed by time.
Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.
If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.
However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.
Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”

— Vera Nazarian

“This may come as a shock to some of you, but I have a slightly volatile personality. I don't suffer fools well.”

— Tucker Max

“Grief and passion make a volatile mix.”

— Marianne Curley

“I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate
and volatile
I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.”

— Joanne Harris

“Volatile expressions of anger and hostility combined with a tendency to blame others often result from feeling shame ... If you are shame-prone, any accusation directed at you, regardless of how mildly it may be delivered, has the potential to make you feel that you have failed or that you are inadequate. Rather than simply admit wrongdoing, you get angry and accusatory in order to hold yourself blameless. Using anger or hostility for self-protection hides your vulnerability and needs. Unfortunately, since most people are repelled by an angry response, this method may be effective.
Your anger may drive away the very people who should know your real feelings, and it may deprive you of the opportunity to allow others to be aware of your needs. Behaving in an offensive or frightening way toward others can cause them to retreat out of fear. But, actually, the fear is your own, which you have turned against someone else in the form of anger.”

— Mary C. Lamia

“[on camp:]
There were ten of us, living in a three-hundred-square-foot bunk, going through puberty as lightning speed. It was too much hormonal action for any one room, and the result was a frenzied, emotionally volatile space that smelled like a Bath and Body Works.”

— Lena Dunham

“I need to hear you say it."
"I love you," she said. She touched her lips to mine, and then pulled a few inches away. "Now quit being such a baby."
Once she kissed me, my heart slowed, and every muscle in my body relaxed. How much I needed her terrified me. I couldn't imagine love was like this for everyone, or men would all be walking around like lunatics the second they were old enough to notice girls.
Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was just me and her. Maybe together we were this volatile entity that would either implode or meld together. Either way, it seemed the moment I met her, my life had been turned upside down. And I didn't want it any other way.”

— Jamie McGuire

“When I look at the chaotic and volatile debate right now, both in Germany and around the world, my impression and concern is that the daily barrage of proposals and political statements is making markets and consumers even more nervous. Still, Brussels is pressing for a joint European approach.”

— Peer Steinbruck

“Photography can be a volatile situation. It can be very potent.”

— Platon

“Because they had been an emotional, volatile couple, and had fought as passionately as they'd loved.”

— Gena Showalter

“My father worked for the Foreign Office, so he was away a lot of the time. We were a very volatile family. There was a lot of love and a lot of conflict. The conflict kicked in mostly during my adolescence.”

— Amanda Donohoe

“It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead.”

— Georgette Heyer

“My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.”

— Felicity Kendal

“I was kind of a volatile personality, very intense. Because of that, I drew some criticism and people would say things about me, and my parents had tried to defend me. I would just tell them don't worry about it. Our day will come.”

— Kirk Gibson

“You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did.”

— Robert Creeley

“Immigration is a volatile issue, but we're in the middle of it now, and probably the worst thing to do is to not do anything. Everybody recognizes the current system is not working the way we want it to work. It has huge flaws to it; need to do something.”

— Sam Brownback

“White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.”

— Tom Robbins

“A lot of people celebrate their past, but I don't look at it all. I don't Google myself; I focus on the future. This is a volatile profession, and the moment you start thinking you've got something, that's when the floor beneath you falls through, so I hope to make more movies and TV shows.”

— Sean Maguire

“I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going to disappear off the scene pretty quickly.”

— Tom Hanks

“Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“When traders were able to earn a million dollars, of which base pay was $150,000 to $200,000 and the rest was bonus, they would go for it. Now if you're sitting there earning $600,000, you become less risk-seeking. And if you have less risk-seeking, the ability of the market to be incredibly volatile is increased.”

— Michael Hintze

“Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets
as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her
and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.”

— Anne Rice

“In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile - upward and downward - at the peak of a crisis.”

— Nouriel Roubini

“The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived.”

— Dennis C. Blair

“But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I'm probably less volatile and tempestuous than a lot of Aries, but I think I'm probably quite loud and outgoing and passionate. Maybe a bit difficult or stubborn.”

— Mackenzie Davis

“The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn't even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

“I hope,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'that our volatile friend is committing no absurdities in that dickey behind.”

— Charles Dickens

“Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.”

— Ben Horowitz

“Lavender and rosemary should be cut in the morning, though, when the volatile oils had risen with the sun; it wasn't as potent if taken later in the day.”

— Diana Gabaldon

“I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.”

— Salman Rushdie

“To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.”

— Jose Antonio Vargas

“You can't invest in natural gas on a daily basis. It's too volatile. But if you think of natural gas as a long-term holding, then you push your profit horizon out. A long-term time horizon would be at least two years.”

— T. Boone Pickens

“Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“We know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers -
One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
Two: When the populace recognises its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible!”

— Frank Herbert

“Insofar as one can talk of a Vionnet school, it comes mostly from my having been an enemy of fashion. There is something superficial and volatile about the seasonal and elusive whims of fashion which offends my sense of beauty.”

— Madeleine Vionnet

“Besides, the sense of safety offered by bottled water is a mirage. It turns out that breathing, not drinking, constitutes our main route of exposure to volatile pollutants in tap water, such as solvents, pesticides, and byproducts of water chlorination. As soon as the toilet is flushed or the faucet turned on-or the bathtub, the shower, the humidifier, the washing machine-these contaminants leave the water and enter the air. A recent study shows that the most efficient way of exposing yourself to chemical contaminants in tap water is to turn on a dishwasher.”

— Sandra Steingraber

“It's a beautiful thing to be that committed to something that you get so much joy from, but it is like a sick addiction, because sometimes it's incredibly volatile, incredibly painful, and very frustrating. A man shouldn't be defined by his work, but I am.”

— Scott Weiland

“I just desperately wanted to be happy again in a way that wasn't forced. I wanted to feel like I accomplished something. I did this. I finished this record. I'm doing all the promo. I'm doing everything that I said I was going to do. I really wanted to be happy and normalized and I was tired of people saying I was volatile. I'm not. I'm a pretty normal person. I have problems like anyone else but I've worked so hard to be OK and I don't think that I gave myself enough credit for that.”

— Michael Angelakos

“In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.”

— Mickey Rourke

“Investment is not only volatile, it is the key motor of the economy's prosperity because it has a snowball effect.”

— Will Hutton

“For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”

— J.G. Ballard

“Up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical.”

— Sarah Palin

“In olden times gold was manufactured by science; nowadays science must be renewed by gold. We have fixed the volatile and we must now volatilize the fixed-in other words, we have materialized spirit, and we must now spiritualize matter.”

— Eliphas Levi

“Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“I think that to believe is to acknowledge that it's a choice in that present tense and that doubt is always an option. You're not dealing with a fact like one plus one equals two-I'm gonna choose to believe that. It's kind of one of those things where you are choosing to believe that someone loves you. That is always going to be your choice. So for me, I think that's what makes the faith that I have volatile and explosive and dangerous and troubling. That's what most of my songs are about.”

— Jon Foreman

“People who feel the need to push and control tend to keep their feelings bottled up. As a result, they get shut down or remote, and their feelings come out in twisted, unhealthy ways. They become irritable, passive-aggressive, or volatile, for example.”

— Judith Orloff

“Using [a stock's] volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return. Some great businesses have very volatile returns - for example, See's [a candy company owned by Berkshire] usually loses money in two quarters of each year - and some terrible businesses can have steady results.”

— Charlie Munger

“That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.”

— Christopher Hitchens