Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above - which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade - as small potatoes.

Joe Conason

Too often, farmers and producers are left out of the national conversation on the climate crisis - or even dismissed altogether. But in reality, their expertise is a big part of the solution.

Abigail Spanberger

Art Too Together

You can so easily be dismissed as a thug or hysterical if you're a woman if you don't keep your rage in check.

Adina Porter

Age Your You

Ineffective substitute teaching is a problem that means thousands of hours of lost learning for America's students. It cannot be dismissed with a sigh and 'Just wait for the teacher to come back on Monday.'

Adora Svitak

Teacher Learning Wit

Contemporary culture is like the weather - we have to be open to it. I don't like the way it is dismissed or closed down.

Amanda Harlech

Weather Way Temporary

'Almost' is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. 'Almost' is about revelation to come but not entirely promised.

Andre Aciman

Uncertainty Uncertain UN

Anything or anyone that limits the dream you have for yourself and for your career is just to be dismissed. Do not keep that company, and do not hear those words.

Ann Dowd

Car Yourself Yours

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

Anne Rice

Wonderful Wonder Won

In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.

Archie Shepp

Time Music Wrong

Strangely, charity sometimes gets dismissed, as if it is ineffective, inappropriate or even somehow demeaning to the recipient. 'This isn't charity,' some donors take pains to claim, 'This is an investment.' Let us recognize charity for what it is at heart: a noble enterprise aimed at bettering the human condition.

Ban Ki-moon

Time Men Art

The possibility that terrorist groups could obtain weapons of mass destruction should not be dismissed as a fiction. This is a horrific threat the international community should take seriously. As long as these weapons exist, so, too, does the risk of their use - by accident or design.

Ban Ki-moon

Design Weapons Weapon

I didn't do anything for two years but work on 'Gone Baby Gone,' and it was miserable and hard, but at the end? It is a good movie. I liked it very much. If it had been dismissed and deemed worthless, it would been definitely devastating. But that didn't happen.

Ben Affleck

Work Good Years

Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface, but it's not. It's the language we all speak, and it's the connection point between people all over the world.

Bozoma Saint John

Men Age World

When I was in the middle of the 'Scott Pilgrim' series, and it was slowly becoming more popular, though still not financially solvent, I had this real bratty instinct to turn around and do something super arty and dark. I felt dismissed by comics culture, stuck in between the artcomix world and the nerdcomix world, and I was cranky about it.

Bryan Lee O'Malley

Art World Vent

As black Americans continue to be insulted and dismissed by protected white liberals, the Black Talented Tenth will continue to benefit from political donations, speaking engagements, national media presence, accolades as the official black leaders, and perpetual gigs on MSNBC and CNN.

Burgess Owens

Pet Men Age

My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.

Christopher Fowler

Love Home Age

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens

Without Wit Thou

The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.

Christopher Lasch

T Revival Missed

Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

Chuck Palahniuk

Religion Worse Way

I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.

Chuck Palahniuk

Art Writer Write

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

Cynthia Ozick

Time Relationship Politics

But the courts have dismissed the lawsuits against me and Lee Brown.

David Dinkins

The world in general has meaning, deep meaning at times. This cannot be dismissed as a delusion, an artifact of chemicals.

Deepak Chopra

The whole of the situation of the Conservative Party today springs from that night when they dismissed the best prime minister the country had had since Churchill.

Denis Thatcher

The bow tie started off with one of my friends, Kunta Littlejohn. He said if you want to be anybody, you've got to rock the bow tie. I dismissed it at first, but later he told me he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, so I decided to wear the bow tie to support him. And as he got better, I came to learn the power of the bow tie.

Dhani Jones

Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.

Dorothy Day

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

Dwight Yoakam

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

Edmund White

Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.

Ellen Ullman

For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.

Elvis Mitchell

The Lusitania is important, of course, because this is where Germany began its maritime campaign using this brand-new weapon. We have to appreciate how the submarine, as a weapon against civilian shipping, was a particularly novel thing - so novel that many people at the time dismissed its potential power, its potential relevance.

Erik Larson

I was once again looking for a book idea, and I remembered Holmes, but I specifically remembered that there was this World's Fair thing in the background. I thought, 'I'll read about the fair.' I had nothing better to do. I'd dismissed about a dozen ideas, and I was getting sort of antsy. I started reading, and that's where I got hooked.

Erik Larson

I hear a lot of 'Top Model' girls say they are dismissed by clients because they recognize them, but it never happened to me.

Fatima Siad

If a superior give any order to one who is under him which is against that man's conscience, although he do not obey it yet he shall not be dismissed.

Francis of Assisi

Our parents all experimented with raising us in a fairly loose, unorthodox way. A huge emphasis was placed on creativity, and our artistic efforts were never dismissed as childish. There was a sense that we - kids and grown-ups - all had the potential to make something of value. Our drawings were not simply destined for the refrigerator.

Gaby Hoffmann

History is weirdly dismissed as not having anything to do with the present moment.

Gaby Hoffmann

President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt - including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.

Glenn Hubbard

Why is playing football in Europe considered the pinnacle of our game, yet in other spheres of life, that same phrase - 'being in Europe' - is dismissed with suspicion?

Gordon Brown

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.

Henry Mintzberg

In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.

Howard Schultz

I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

Iain Banks

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

J. Maarten Troost

I felt that needed to be addressed: the idea that anything a man tries to do properly or thoroughly is dismissed as either metrosexual or OCD. But why can't you be practical and artistic at the same time, which was considered perfectly normal in the Renaissance?

James May

Our culture often demeans and devalues the work, the pleasures, and the contributions of women and feminine people. This is, in part, why beauty culture is dismissed as unimportant and frivolous.

Janet Mock

But a true diva has dismissed that drama. A true diva's heart is open, and she's ready to play by her own rules - rules that are gentle and kind.

Jenifer Lewis

Misconceptions about Young Adult fiction aren't new to fans of the genre. From being dismissed as mindless fluff for 'Twilight'-obsessed tweens, to constant warnings that the genre is dying, kerfuffles between the media and readers occur with alarming regularity.

Jennifer Armintrout

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Jerry Saltz

Regardless of how people love to deride politicians, democracy is not an easy gig. My decisions, views and heartfelt principles are dismissed by so many as careerist, opportunist or attention-seeking.

Jess Phillips

Between the two dream coasts, we're just called flyover country... If you aren't known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you're dismissed as a regional author.

Jim Harrison

Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above - which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade - as small potatoes.

Joe Conason

The 'One Belt, One Road' initiative has been dismissed by some as not working. But America could be becoming weaker by ignoring what is going on right under our noses.

John Layfield