Dubious Quotes

• No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Government
  • Survive
  • Civil Rights

• My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Time
  • Me
  • Question

• I’m saying language is a passport. A dubious, dangerous passport too.

  

  Xiaolu Guo
  • Language
  • Dangerous
  • Dubious

• All obvious moves look dubious in analysis after the game.

  

  Viktor Korchnoi
  • Game
  • Moving
  • Chess

• I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.

  

  Sherman Alexie
  • War
  • Reason
  • Might

• The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

  

  Max Lerner
  • Way
  • Preparing
  • Preventing

• My back swing off the first tee had put him in mond of an eldery woman of dubious morals trying to struggle out of a dress too tight around the shoulders.

  

  Patrick Campbell
  • Trying
  • Moral
  • Struggle

• Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.

  

  E. B. White
  • Life
  • Cold
  • Weather

• I am dubious as to how far we can move toward global community-which is the only way to achieve international peace-until we learn the basic principles of community in our own individual lives and personal spheres of influence.

  

  M. Scott Peck
  • Community
  • Peace
  • Moving

• Expediency has marked the road down which I have walked to dubious success, and always the pirate, the rebel, has shouted his advice over my shoulder while the faintest of lights pointed out a dim way.

  

  R. M. Williams
  • Success
  • Expediency
  • Road down

• The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Ideas
  • Poverty
  • Punishment

• The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.

  

  Scott Ritter
  • Giving
  • motivation
  • Clear

• Despite the dubious statistics … democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting.

  

  Rory Stewart
  • Fighting
  • Democracy
  • Should

• For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

  

  Seth Lloyd
  • World
  • Moving
  • Information

• Most of India's 300 odd news channels are making losses and are dependent on dubious cross holding, black money and dodgy private equity investors, both foreign and Indian.

  

  Mohammad Hamid Ansari
  • Dependent
  • Foreign
  • Holding

• Man on the dubious waves of error toss'd.

  

  William Cowper
  • Men
  • Errors
  • Wave