Recalcitrant quotes:

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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning. -- Reinhold Niebuhr
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain. -- Gerald Brenan
The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself. -- Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens. -- Robert Bork
Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked. -- Abdus Salam
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator. -- David Foster Wallace
The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows. -- Emily Oster
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images ... -- Susan Sontag
The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way. -- Niles Eldredge
... until both employers' and workers' groups assume responsibility for chastising their own recalcitrant children, they can vainly bay the moon about "ignorant" and "unfair" public criticism. Moreover, their failure to impose voluntarily upon their own groups codes of decency and honor will result in more and more necessity for government control. -- Mary Barnett Gilson
Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning. -- Reinhold Niebuhr
Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer. -- Stephen Jay Gould
I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities. -- Aldous Huxley
A scientist sets out to conquer nature through knowledge - external nature, external knowledge. By these means he may split the atom and achieve external power. A yogi sets out to explore his own internal nature, to penetrate the atom (atma) of being. He does not gain dominion over wide lands and restless seas, but over his own recalcitrant flesh and febrile mind. -- B.K.S. Iyengar
Advising Mrs. Harris was the least I could do," David said smoothly. "After all, she was the one who brought me and my late wife together." That was stretching it a bit, since all Charlotte had done was give Sarah lessons in how to avoid fortune hunters, thus ensuring that the recalcitrant girl went right out and married the first one who approached her. -- Sabrina Jeffries
It's amazing how much time one can spend in a garden doing nothing at all. I sometimes think, in fact, that the nicest part of gardening is walking around in a daze, idly deadheading the odd dahlia, wondering where on earth to squeeze in yet another impulse buy, debating whether to move the recalcitrant artemisia one more time, or daydreaming about where to put the pergola. -- Jane Garmey
So I sent Halt to straighten matters out. Thought it might be a good idea to give him something to keep him busy." So what's Digby got to complain about?" Rodney asked. It was obvious from his tone that he felt no sympathy for the recalcitrant commander of Barga Hold. The Baron gestured for Lady Pauline to explain. Apparently," she said,"Halt threw him into the moat. -- John Flanagan
Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long as the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society. -- Mary Blakely
That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer. -- Susan Sontag
In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual. -- John Berger
Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked." -- Abdus Salam

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