Reversal Quotes:

[Ted] Cruz may have been hoping his reversal would fly under the radar.

- Chris Hayes

source: Source: www.msnbc.com

topic: May, Reversal, Radar

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

- Alan Greenspan

topic: Optimism, Reversal, Seeds

Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.

- Mason Cooley

topic: Substitution, Depends, Reversal, Perversity

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

- Tony Gilroy

source: "Twister" by D. T. Max, www.newyorker.com. March 16, 2009.

topic: Way, Surprise, Audience, Reversal

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

- George Eliot

topic: Believe, Storm, Half, Reversal

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

- Doris Lessing

topic: Song, Joy, Shapes, Reversal

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.

- Carolyn Heilbrun

topic: Simple, Men, Choices, Androgyny, Identical

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you?

- Eckhart Tolle

topic: Past, Ego, Mind, Power Of Now, Power Of Now Book

The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you have given up.. if we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be.. a prudent insurance policy.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

topic: Destiny, Order, Swim, Insurance Policy, Reversal

Jesus announced a great reversal of values in His Sermon on the Mount, elevating not the rich or attractive, but rather the poor, the persecuted, and those who mourn.

- Philip Yancey

topic: Jesus, Rich, Poor, Reversal, Sermon On The Mount

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.

- Sophia Loren

source: Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

topic: Inspiring, Graduation, Self Esteem, Sophia, Faith In Yourself

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

- Theodore Dalrymple

topic: Taken, People, Moral, Reversal

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

- Gary Zukav

source: Source: www.douglasgillies.com

topic: Eye, Important, World, Reversal

Those in the community who defy authority and 'break the law' seem to enjoy the good life and have everything in the way of material possessions. On the other hand, people who work hard and struggle and suffer much are the victims of greed and indifference, losers. This insane reversal of values presses heavily on the Black community. The causes originate from outside and are imposed by a system that ruthlessly seeks its own rewards, no matter what the cost in wrecked human lives.

- Huey Newton

topic: Good Life, Struggle, Hard Work, Reversal, Black Community

A market does not culminate in one grand blaze of glory. Neither does it end with a sudden reversal of form. A market can and does often cease to be a bull market long before prices generally begin to break.

- Jesse Lauriston Livermore

topic: Long, Doe, Bulls, Reversal, Bull Markets

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next--and on and on.

- Kurt Vonnegut

source: Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Galapagos: A Novel”, Dial Press

topic: Islands, People, Heaven, Paper Money, Reversal

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.

- Jo Nesbo

topic: Reading, Transition, Culture, Reversal, Youth Culture

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

- Alan Greenspan

topic: Optimism, Imbalance, Financial, Reversal, Financial Markets

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

- Albert Camus

topic: Challenges, Age, Taste, Massacres, Apparel

I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people's standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself. So failure or reversal does not bring out resentment in me because I cannot blame others for any misfortune that befalls me.

- Sophia Loren

topic: Life, Blessed, Destiny, Reversal

Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.

- Hans Rookmaaker

topic: Spiritual, Art, Two, Reversal, Age Of Reason

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

- Mary Ruefle

source: Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.206, Wave Books

topic: Mean, Years, Two, Wreckage, Old Trees

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur, so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire, and all the beautiful expanse around it as dangerous and swarming with snakes.

- Rumi

source: Rumi (2014). “'Another city'. a selectionf of poems from the Persian”, p.51, Lulu.com

topic: Beautiful, Spiritual, Snakes, Objects Of Desire, Expanse

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

- Matt Gonzalez

source: "Restore Hetch Hetchy Valley, Vote Yes! on Proposition F" by Matt Gonzalez, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 5, 2012.

topic: Past, Men, Space, Past Decisions, Reversal

The reversal of a Supreme Court opinion is possible.

- Mike Rounds

source: "South Dakota bans most abortions". www.cnn.com. March 6, 2006.

topic: Opinion, Court, Supreme Court, Reversal

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

- Hari Kunzru

topic: Thinking, Play, Interesting, Reversal

Happily, there's a reversal of the brain drain occurring in Ghana now. We're seeing a lot of - actually in Africa - we're seeing a lot of African professionals, you know, returning to the continent to contribute their quota.

- John Dramani Mahama

source: "Ghana's New President Shaped By A Violent Past". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. July 25, 2012.

topic: Ghana, Brain, Quota, African Continent, Reversal

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

- Roland Barthes

topic: Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire, Reversal, Illustrating

No one supposed that dinoflagellates might actively kill fish as an evolved response for their own specific advantage, including a potential nutritional benefit for the algal cells. And yet the dinoflagellates do seem to be killing and eating fishes in a manner suggesting active evolution for this most peculiar reversal.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay Gould (1998). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Harmony

topic: Cells, Peculiar, Benefits, Reversal

I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history... The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

- Jimmy Carter

source: "Carter blasts Bush, Blair on Iraq". www.reuters.com. May 20, 2007.

topic: Thinking, Impact, America, George H W Bush, Reversal

Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

topic: Christian, Jesus, Reality, Reversal

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

topic: Real, Men, Yellow, Exposing, Reversal

Almost every sin is committed for the sake of sensual pleasure; and sensual pleasure is overcome by hardship and distress arising either voluntarily from repentance, or else involuntarily as a result of some salutary and providential reversal. 'For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged; but when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, so that we should not be condemned with the world.' (1 Cor. 11:31-32).

- Gregory of Nazianzus

topic: Judging, Sensual, Overcoming, Reversal, Sensual Pleasure

...good technique includes quick changes, great variety and speed. It may be a system of reversals much like a concept of God and the Devil. In the speed of events, which one is really in charge?...to put the heart of martial arts inyour own heart and have it be a part of you means total comprehension and the use of a free style. When you have that you will know that there are no limits.

- Bruce Lee

topic: Art, Mean, Warrior, Quick Change, Reversal

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest

- Elias Canetti

topic: Men, Opposites, Feelings, Reversal

So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away--

- Ahdaf Soueif

topic: Heart, Nowhere To Go, Germs, Blown Away, Reversal

Reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done. There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.

- Robert H. Jackson

source: Brown v. Allen (concurring opinion) (1953)

topic: Justice, Doubt, Done, Reversal, No Doubt

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

- Howard Nemerov

topic: Party, Stories, Gadgets, Reversal

To every reversal of people's soveregnity, to every disappearance of the Republic corresponds a frank or disguised restitution in force of the regal justice. ''Tell me, according to what you judge and I'll tell you who you are." [...] No axiom in politics is more certain than this.

- Francois Mitterrand

source: "Le Coup d'État permanent". Book by François Mitterrand, Part III, 1964.

topic: People, Justice, Judging, Restitution, Reversal

power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

- Elizabeth Janeway

topic: Change, Powerful, Fear, Reversal, Polarization

nothing happens in August - except when something really happens in August. World War I began in August, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait began in August, al Qaida was preparing to bring down the World Trade Center in August. August, in other words, is the time when all of us should prepare our backup plans, chart our reversals of course, [and] think through possible paradigm changes.

- Anne Applebaum

topic: War, Thinking, August, Backup Plan, Backup

An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.

- William Butler Yeats

topic: Men, What Matters, Age, Reversal

In Burma, under the present Constitution, the Army can always take over all parts of government if they think this is necessary. so until the Army comes out clearly and consistently in support of the democratic process we cannot say that it's irreversible. But I don't think we need fear a reversal too much either.

- Aung San Suu Kyi

source: Source: www.voanews.com

topic: Army, Thinking, Government, Reversal

Women under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal.

- Mary Daly

source: "Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (New Intergalactic Introduction)". Book by Mary Daly, revised edition (p. 26), 1990.

topic: Men, Crafts, Roles, Reversal

Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole.

- Elbert Hubbard

source: Elbert Hubbard (1922). “Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard ...”

topic: Jealousy, Cold, Sunny, Frigid, Equator

Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.

- Jean Liedloff

topic: Selfish, Real, Dirty, Reversal, Anti Social

History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks.

- Noam Chomsky

source: Source: www.publicanthropology.org

topic: Struggle, Records, Painful, Reversal

What happened in Kosovo was the exact reversal of what happened in 'Fortress Europe' in 1943-45. Let me explain. Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris used to say that 'Fortress Europe' was a fortress without a roof, since the Allies had air supremacy. Now, if we look at the Kosovo War, what do we see? We see a fortress without walls  but with a roof! Isn't that disappearance extraordinary?!

- Paul Virilio

source: Source: ctheory.net

topic: Wall, War, Air, Kosovo, Reversal

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

- Matt de la Pena

source: Source: therumpus.net

topic: Writing, Character, Men, Reversal

[Trade] was clearly a factor.That was a complete reversal of where things are normally at. Usually Republicans are all for free trade.

- Collin Peterson

source: Source: www.washingtonpost.com

topic: Reversal

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that.

- Marilynne Robinson

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Yield, Order, People, Excursions, Reversal