What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
Albert Camus
Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.
Alex Berenson
A soft refusal is not always taken, but a rude one is immediately believed.
Alexander Chase
Contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII did not divorce any of his wives. He had sought an annulment from Catherine of Aragon - which he finally awarded to himself after the pope's continued refusal. When it came to Anne's turn, Henry took the easy route by having her found guilty of treason.
Amanda Foreman
The only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
Annie Besant
When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.
Anthony Marra
When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
Bayard Rustin
Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?
bell hooks
Death Cab always gets right of first refusal on everything I write, but I tend to know early on. There's a song that has yet to be released - it might come to light at some point in the near future - that when I was writing it, I was really proud of it lyrically.
Ben Gibbard
The failure of the system to deal quickly was attributable to Nixon's lying, stonewalling and refusal to come clean. So it took 26 months for the final truth to be known.
Bob Woodward
In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.
Boris Pasternak
Among the events of John McCain's five-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, probably the most heroic, and surely the most celebrated, was his refusal to accept an early release from his captors.
Bret Stephens
It is impossible, in my mind, to distinguish between the refusal to receive a petition, or its summary rejection by some general order, and the denial of the right of petition.
Caleb Cushing
Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
Carrie Snow
Thousands of people may have been killed by hurricane Katrina and many more could die in its aftermath because of the President's refusal to heed the calls of governors for help in repairing the infrastructure in their states.
Charles B. Rangel
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Chinua Achebe
Gary Johnson's refusal or inability to name a single foreign leader, current or former, whom he admired, showed that he is not ready for the presidency.
Christine Todd Whitman
Elegance is refusal.
Coco Chanel
The crucial thing is to arouse the awareness that as a matter of human conscience we can never permit the people of any country to fall victim to nuclear weapons, and for each individual to express their refusal to continue living in the shadow of the threat they pose.
Daisaku Ikeda
Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.
The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.
The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences.
Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.
Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone's human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left.
There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.
Like so many of you, I am deeply distressed both by the hateful violence in Charlottesville and by President Trump's refusal to clearly denounce it. Nobody with any empathy for the plight of people of color in this country could respond the way he did.
What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that.
The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.
Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.
There is a vast difference - a constitutional difference-between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar.
If anything has cheapened or trivialized the process by which Trump was impeached, it was House Republicans' refusal to treat the proceedings with the seriousness the Constitution demands.
America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.
The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.
Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans' seeming refusal to believe in a person's ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.
My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.
In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
Now, what produces a want of demand? A refusal to take from other countries the commodities which they produce.
I grew up in the Boston suburbs and inherited a stubborn New England refusal to acknowledge frigid temperatures.
The Department of Education's refusal to oversee and hold for-profit schools accountable is a government-made disaster, and American students and taxpayers should not have to pay for it.
I see 'Grace' as an affectionate refusal of things that just aren't true. With all our power and money and influence, we still can't raise up high over people's consciousness.
The refusal to acknowledge the scientific value of embryonic stem cell research is one more tragic misstep.
I have encountered those who feel that libraries have served their purpose and are no longer needed. There are those who consider them a soft target when it comes to local authority budget cuts. In certain political quarters, there is a refusal to see that our public library service needs active protection.
In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.
Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.
