Sorting Out Quotes:

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

source: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2015). “Stories and Prose Poems”, p.185, Macmillan

topic: War, Trying, Sorting Out, Sorting

Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.

- Terry Pratchett

topic: People, Trying, Sorting Out, Sorting, Good Omens

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

- Thomas Pynchon

source: Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.140, Penguin

topic: Dream, Past, Sorting Out, Shabby

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

- C. S. Lewis

source: C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, p.10, Cambridge University Press

topic: People, Sorting Out, Cards, Tidying Up

There's another way we are getting behind business - by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it's time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain's small businesses.

- David Cameron

topic: Business, Way, Favour, Sorting Out, Lending

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.

- John Lennon

source: Source: www.counterpunch.org

topic: Order, Should Have, Views, Sorting Out, Dialectics

In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

topic: Country, Block, Fall, Sorting Out, Languish

A judge said that all his experience, both as counsel and judge, had been spent sorting out the difficulties of people who, upon the recommendation of people they did not know, signed documents which they did not read, to buy goods they did not need, with money they had not got.

- Gilbert Harding

topic: People, Judging, Needs, Sorting Out, Sorting

What does it mean to a successful woman today? Does it mean you have to be a mother? If you are a mother, does it mean you have to be a mother with a husband? If you don't have a husband, what is the role that the man plays? I think there are a lot of confusing things that we're all really still sorting out.

- Lisa Edelstein

topic: Mother, Husband, Mean, Sorting Out

One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics.

- Edward de Bono

source: Edward De Bono (2010). “Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step”, p.14, Harper Collins

topic: Memories, Book, Thinking, Sorting Out

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future....

- Simon Schama

topic: Stories, Truthful, Affair, Sorting Out, Winding Up

The only way you will ever awaken is through silence, not through analyzation of facts. Not by sorting out good and bad, but through simple silence, letting go. Letting go of all thoughts, all the hurts, all the dogmas and concepts. Letting go of these things daily.

- Robert Adams

topic: Letting Go, Hurt, Simple, Sorting Out, Sorting

Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.

- Michel de Montaigne

topic: Educational, Ideas, Words Of Wisdom, Sorting Out

In sorting out my feelings and beliefs, there is, however, one piece of moral ground of which I am absolutely certain: if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government--which can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.

- Helen Prejean

source: Helen Prejean (2011). “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States”, p.21, Vintage

topic: Government, Feelings, Want, Sorting Out, Sorting

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e. that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

- Douglas Adams

source: "Last Chance to See". Book by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine (Chapter 2 "Here Be Chickens"), 1990.

topic: Beautiful, Couple, People, Sorting Out, Bali

But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.

- Bruce Springsteen

topic: Thinking, Messages, Life Is, Sorting Out, Sorting

We cannot treat people with a right to asylum the same way as people from a safe country. They need to be sent back. That is, from our perspective, completely clear. On the other hand, we should scrutinize the now completely outdated principle that only the migrants' first country of arrival should be burdened with their registration as well as with the process of sorting out who has the right to asylum and who needs to be deported.

- Paolo Gentiloni

topic: Country, Hands, Perspective, Registration, Sorting Out