Sunday, July 26, 2020 – Getting Tough
When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough. ~ Donald Trump
We need intelligence in this country. We need a certain toughness in this country, or we’re going to end up like a lot of the other places, and we’re not going to have a country left. ~ Donald Trump
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest. ~ Orson Welles
Great leaders don’t need to act tough. Their confidence and humility serve to underscore their toughness. ~ Simon Sinek
It’s easy to be a tough guy when no one’s going to come knocking on your door. ~ Pete Hamill
People lose teeth talking like that. If you want to hang around, you’ll be polite. ~ Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon
It’s not necessary to lay a foul tongue on me, my friend. I could get upset. Things could get out of hand. Then in self-defense, I could do something to you that you would not like, right here. ~ Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear
We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy. ~ Winston Churchill
When you are going through hell, keep going. ~ Winston Churchill
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles. ~ Alex Karras
A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money-maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example. ~ Robert Menzies
Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid. ~ John Wayne
The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year. ~ John Foster Dulles
War doesn’t have heroes, it only has the men who lost so many things in their life that they just keep going and do the most unthinkable things, just because they don’t care anymore. ~ Wouter Van Gastel
If you think you have it tough, read history books. ~ Bill Maher
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Maxim 36: When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support. ~ Howard Tayler
When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap. ~ Tom Hodgkinson
Courage, sacrifice, determination, commitment, toughness, heart, talent, guts. That’s what little girls are made of. ~ Bethany Hamilton
I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay. ~ Madonna
Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening. ~ Greta Garbo
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ Anais Nin
My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping. ~ Rita Rudner
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar. ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent. ~ Dave Barry
It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. ~ Frank Perdue
It’s interesting how we often can’t see the ways in which we are being strong – like, you can’t be aware of what you’re doing that’s tough and brave at the time that you’re doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you’d be scared. ~ Lena Dunham
The salient fact about Donald Trump isn’t his cruelty or penchant for aggression and violence. It’s his inability to control urges and drives most people gain control over very early in life. There are plenty of sadists and sociopaths in the world. They’re not remarkable. The scariest have a high degree of impulse control (iciness) which allows them to inflict pain on others when no one is looking or when they will pay no price for doing so. What is true with Trump is what every critic has been saying for a year: the most obvious and contrived provocation can goad this thin-skinned charlatan into a wild outburst. He’s a seventy year old man with children and grandchildren and he has no self-control. ~ Josh Marshall
She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be. ~ Donald Trump
Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. ~ Chief Seattle
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. ~ Bertrand Russell
The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty. The truth has to do with mercy. ~ Ken Kesey
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood – we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we. ~ Jean Rostand
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love, only for their fear. ~ Heinrich Himmler
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens are capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority. ~ Edmund Burke
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. ~ Leo Tolstoy
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. ~ Honore de Balzac
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. ~ Hermann Hesse
People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. ~ Tennessee Williams
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party. What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one’s mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression. ~ Albert Camus, The Fall
I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness. ~ Tom Hiddleston
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Bertrand Russell
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and baseness. ~ Bryant H. McGill
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity. ~ George Eliot
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism. ~ Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Cruelty is a mystery and a waste of pain. ~ Annie Dillard
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt. ~ George Bernard Shaw
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it. ~ Lionel Trilling
Just Above Sunset 