Licence Quotes

Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below.

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

You kissed me once and now you feel as if you’ve got some special kind of licence to do it whenever you want?

Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.

...If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed...

For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

What use is a god with boundless mercy, sir? You mock me as a pagan, yet the gods of my ancestors pronounce clearly their ways and punish severely when we break their laws. Your Christian god of mercy gives men licence to pursue their greed, their lust for land and blood, knowing a few prayers and a little penance will bring forgiveness and blessing.

L'Age Licence. As in: License to experience, mess up, license to fail, license to do... whatever, before you're settled.

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for not playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and doing noting for his livelihood. In the next cell, was another man, who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without a licence; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the Stamp-office.

In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time.

but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third

The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said, ‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’

History is dramatic license, covertly-financed with a sprinkling of gold dust from the newly-enthroned.

Weak men given licence are always more dangerous than the strong.

My late friend Graham Chapman, an idiosyncratic driver at the best of times, used to exploit the mutual incomprehension of British and U.S. driving habits by always carrying both British and California driver’s licences. Whenever he was stopped in the States, he would flash his British licence, and vice versa. He would also mention that he was just on his way to the airport to leave the country, which he always found to be such welcome news that the police would breathe a sigh of relief and wave him on.

The system we have built refuses to recognize people. Only credit cards are recognized. Drivers' licenses are recognized. But not people. People haven't any use for faces anymore, it seems. They are busy looking at your credit card, your driver's licence, your social security number. If a driver's licence is more reliable than the face I wear, then why do I have a face?

Being my mother doesn’t give her a licence to abuse me.

Miss Nodder leaned forward, then glanced round at Stephen. "Are you in this conversation, of just skulking?" "Mostly skulking." Stephen had a particular knack for making himself unobtrusive. He was mildly impressed that he'd been noticed. "But I have a licence to skulk.

He would be atleast sixteen-old enough to have a driver's licence- and he would have crinkles around his eyes that showed he had a sense of humor and he would be tall, the kind of boy all the other girls would like to date

I did not elope,” Darcy replied, as icily as he could. “I had her father’s permission and blessing and was married by licence in my own parish. How is that an elopement?” “Because I did not get cake,” Saye replied blithely.

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable ; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it.

Rolliver's inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for consumers was strictly limited to a little board

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn—for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion's moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world's religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?

J’établissais confusément un lien entre ma classe sociale d’origine et ce qui m’arrivait. Première à faire des études supérieures dans une famille d’ouvriers et de petits commerçants, j’avais échappé à l’usine et au comptoir. Mais ni le bac ni la licence de lettres n’avaient réussi à détourner la fatalité de la transmission d’une pauvreté dont la fille enceinte était, au même titre que l’alcoolique, l’emblème. J’étais rattrapée par le cul et ce qui poussait en moi c’était, d’une certaine manière, l’échec social.

General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state.

The cases are different,' he replied. 'It is a woman's nature to be constant - to love one and one only, blindly, tenderly, and for ever - bless them, dear creatures! and you above them all; but you must have some commiseration for us, Helen; you must give us a little more licence, for, as Shakespeare has it - However we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won Than women's are.

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

(...) I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr Wilkinson's driving licence to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.

This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

Sometimes it seemed like I was the one expected to soldier on while everyone else had a licence to fall apart.

Your Christian god of mercy gives men licence to pursue their greed, their lust for land and blood, knowing a few prayers and a little penance will bring forgiveness and blessing.

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.*

Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house.

Keeping pigeons without a licence is illegal as well, but we can’t have people going round shooting pigeon-keepers, can we? It is the job of the RUC to enforce the law in Northern Ireland, not paramilitary groups, not vigilantes, not ‘concerned citizens’, it’s our responsibility and ours alone,” McCallister said which made me proud of him. Not quite tears-in-eyes but maybe warm-glow-in-tummy.

The items on the counter in the shop had been pawned by a man who had used an American driving licence as his ID, issued in the state of New Mexico in the name Jack Bauer. He had received 16,430 kronor in total. “Is this some sort of fucking joke?” Jacob asked. “How the hell can someone get away with calling himself Jack Bauer? Jack Bauer! The TV show? Twenty-four?

Tell me, ' he continued, 'would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?' 'It would not, ' I replied. 'On a patent tandem?' 'No.' [...] 'Then maybe you are no ...dentist at all, ' he said, 'but only a man after a dog licence or papers for a bull?' 'I did not say I was a dentist, ' I said sharply, 'and I did not say anything about a bull.

Philip Marlowe, 38, a private licence operator of shady reputation, was apprehended by police last night while crawling through the Ballona Storm Drain with a grand piano on his back. Questioned at the University Heights Police Station, Marlowe declared he was taking the piano to the Maharajah of Coot-Berar. Asked why he was wearing spurs, Marlowe declared that a client's confidence was sacred. Marlowe is being held for investigation. Chief Hornside said police were not yet ready to say more. Asked if the piano was in tune, Chief Hornside declared that he had played the Minute Waltz on it in thirty-five seconds and so far as he could tell there were no strings in the piano. He intimated that someting else was. A complete statement to the press will be made within twelve hours, Chief Hornside said abruptly. Speculation is rife that Marlowe was attempting to dispose of a body.

You are not wrong," Laurence said. He had assumed as much himself, after all, in his Navy days: had thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, disregarding law and authority as far as they dared, barely kept in check-- to be used for their control over the beasts, and not respected. "But if we have more liberty than we ought," Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, "it is because they have not enough: the dragons. They have no stake in victory but our happiness; their daily bread and nation would give them just to have peace and quiet. We are given licence so long as we do what we ought not; so long as we use their affections to keep them obedient and quiet, to ends which serve them not at all-- or which harm." "How else do you make them care?" Granby said. "If we left off, the French would only run right over us, and take our eggs themselves." "They care in China," Laurence said, "and in Africa, and they care all the more, that their rational sense is not imposed on, and their hearts put into opposition with their minds. If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault, and not theirs.

Driving and sex are both privileges granted at certain ages, both can do irreparable damage when done recklessly, but only driving requires tests, checkpoints and licences. I don’t understand why the government—at schools and through public education programs—doesn’t teach people about consent the way we teach them about drink-driving. After all, overconsumption of alcohol often leads to horrific consequences in both activities. Why can a man be charged with negligent, reckless driving after getting himself drunk, but he can argue that the same level of voluntary intoxication led him to honestly and mistakenly believe a woman consented to intercourse, and be acquitted of a rape charge accordingly?

Do what's right,' Dassem told us. Gods, even after all this time he still remembered the First Sword's words. 'That's a higher law than the command of any officer. Higher even than the Emperor's own words. You are in a damned uniform but that's not a licence to deliver terror to everyone – just the enemy soldier you happen to be facing. Do what is right, for that armour you wear doesn't just protect your flesh and bone. It defends honour. It defends integrity. It defends justice. Soldiers, heed me well. That armour defends humanity. And when I look upon my soldiers, when I see these uniforms, I see compassion and truth. The moment those virtues fail, then the gods help you, for no armour is strong enough to save you.

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.

A good joke, that!" returned Don Quixote. "Books that have been printed with the king's licence, and with the approbation of those to whom they have been submitted, and read with universal delight, and extolled by great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, gentle and simple, in a word by people of every sort, of whatever rank or condition they may be—that these should be lies!

Parmi ceux « qui ne lisent pas », les mieux avisés sauront apprendre, comme nous, à parler autour : ils excelleront dans l’art inflationniste du commentaire (je lis dix lignes, je ponds dix pages), la pratique jivaro de la fiche (je parcours 400 pages, je les réduis à cinq), la pêche à la citation judicieuse (dans ces précis de culture congelée disponibles chez tous les marchands de réussite), ils sauront manier le scalpel de l’analyse linéaire et deviendront experts dans le savant cabotage entre les « morceaux choisis », qui mène sûrement au baccalauréat, à la licence, voire à la l’agrégation… mais pas nécessairement à l’amour du livre.

Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.

The BBC seems to repay the financial support it receives from the EU (which it receives in addition to the licence fee payments British citizens are forced to pay) by opposing Brexit, by defending unpopular EU policies (such as those on immigration), by insisting that all measurements referred to in its programmes are in EU friendly metric units rather than proper British imperial measurements and by taking every opportunity to disparage England and the English.

Poétise, poétise, fais-toi le grand cinéma de la liberté passée. Vrai que j'aimais ma vie, que je voyais l'avenir sans désespoir. Et je ne m'ennuyais pas. J'en ai réellement prononcé des propos désabusés sur le mariage, le soir dans ma chambre, avec les copines étudiantes, une connerie, la mort, rien qu'à voir la trombine des couples mariés au restau, ils bouffent l'un en face de l'autre sans parler, momifiés. Quand Hélène, licence de philo, concluait que c'était tout de même un mal nécessaire, pour avoir des enfants, je pensais qu'elle avait de drôles d'idées, des arguments saugrenus. Moi je n'imaginais jamais la maternité avec ou sans mariage. Je m'irritais aussi quand presque toutes se vantaient de savoir bien coudre, repasser sans faux plis, heureuses de ne pas être seulement intellectuelles, ma fierté devant une mousse au chocolat réussie avait disparu en même temps que Brigitte, la leur m'horripilait. Oui, je vivais de la même manière qu'un garçon de mon âge, étudiant qui se débrouille avec l'argent de l'État, l'aide modeste des parents, le baby-sitting et les enquêtes, va au cinéma, lit, danse, et bosse pour avoir ses examens, juge le mariage une idée bouffonne.

A wide humanitarian sympathy in a nation easily degenerates into hysteria. A military spirit tends towards brutality. Liberty leads to licence, restraint to tyranny. The pride of race is distended to blustering arrogance. The fear of God produces bigotry and superstition. There appears no exception to the mournful rule, and the best efforts of men, however glorious their early results, have dismal endings, like plants which shoot and bud and put forth beautiful flowers, and then grow rank and coarse and are withered by the winter.

I understand so far,’ said Miller. ‘But why a passport? Why not a driving licence, or an ID card?’ ‘Because shortly after the founding of the republic the German authorities realised there must be hundreds or thousands wandering about under false names. There was a need for one document that was so well researched that it could act as the yardstick for all the others. They hit on the passport. Before you get a passport in Germany, you have to produce the birth certificate, several references and a host of other documentation. These are thoroughly checked before the passport is issued. ‘By contrast, once you have a passport, you can get anything else on the strength of it. Such is bureaucracy. The production of the passport convinces the civil servant that, since previous bureaucrats must have checked out the passport holder thoroughly, no further checking is necessary. With a new passport, Roschmann could quickly build up the rest of the identity – driving licence, bank accounts, credit cards. The passport is the open sesame to every other piece of necessary documentation in present-day Germany.

Because street harassment is perhaps the clearest manifestation of the spectrum of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault that exists within our society. Yes, it starts out small; but allowing those ‘minor’ transgressions gives licence to the more serious ones, and eventually to all-out abuse. We’ve heard the same words and phrases crossing over and echoing and repeating, from women who are shouted at in the street to women who are assaulted and women who are victims of domestic violence in their own homes. The language is the same. And if we say it’s acceptable for men to assume power and ownership over women they don’t know verbally in public, then, like it or not, we’re also saying something much wider about gender relations – something that carries over into our personal relationships and our sexual exchanges. Because this is a line that doesn’t need to be blurred. It should be clear and simple. Take it from the women whose experiences started out with just a little ‘harmless’ street harassment – a sexual ‘compliment’ or a wolf whistle, or a ‘Hey baby’ – but then turned nasty, became full-blown attacks. Ask them what the problem is with a harmless bit of fun.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence.

Instead of codes, articles and peevish platitudes about justice, your idea creates lawlessness, anarchy, the licence and self-serving of princelings and mandarins, the officiousness of careerists wanting to endear themselves to their superiors, the blind vindictiveness of fanatics, the cruelty of assassins, retribution and sadistic vengeance. Your vision is a world where people are afraid to venture out after dark; not for fear of cut-throats, but of the guardians of public order. For, after all, the result of all great crackdowns on miscreants is always that the miscreants enter the ranks of the guardians of public order en masse. Your vision is a world of bribery, blackmail and entrapment, a world of turning imperial evidence and false witnesses. A world of snoopers and coerced confessions. Informing and the fear of being informed upon. And inevitably the day will come in your world when the flesh of the wrong person will be torn with pincers, when an innocent person is hanged or impaled. And then it will be a world of crime.

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination - the zone of unquestioning certitude - sped by a common impetus that licences each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one that creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.

And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that ‘going away’ was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly ‘Vancouver’ that I had glibly rolled from off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies of water or with the boundaries of borders. And because my father told me I was ‘free’ I had foolishly felt that it was really so. Just like that. And I realize now that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. And that there are distinctions between my sentimental, romantic grandfather and his love for coal, and my stern and practical grandmother her hatred of it; and my quietly strong but passive mother and the souring extremes of my father’s passionate violence and the quiet power of his love. They are all so different. Perhaps it is possible I think now to be both and yet to see only one. For the man in whose glassed-in car I now sit sees only similarity. For him the people of this multi-scarred little town are reduced to but a few phrases and the act of sexual intercourse. They are only so many identical goldfish leading identical, incomprehensible lives within the glass prison of their bowl. And the people on the street view me from behind my own glass in much the same way and it is the way that I have looked at others in their ‘foreign licence’ cars and it is the kind of judgment that I myself have made. And yet it seems that neither these people nor this man are in any way unkind and not to understand does not necessarily mean that one is cruel. But one should at least be honest. And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am. I do not know. I am not sure. But I do know that I cannot follow this man into a house that is so much like the one I have left this morning and go down into the sexual embrace of a woman who might well be my mother. And I do not know what she, my mother, may be like in the years to come when she is deprived of the lighting movement of my father’s body and the hammered pounding of his heart. For I do not know when he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.

Come to the bit about soft silk shirts for evening wear?" I asked carelessly. "Yes, sir," said Jeeves, in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend. "And if I may be pardoned for saying so - " "You don't like it?" "No, sir. I do not. Soft silk shirts with evening costume are not worn, sir." "Jeeves," I said, looking the blighter diametrically in the centre of the eyeball, "they're dashed well going to be. I may as well tell you now that I have ordered a dozen of those shirtings from Peabody and Simms, and it's no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant." "If I might - " "No, Jeeves," I said, raising my hand, "argument is useless. Nobody has a greater respect than I have for your judgment in socks, in ties, and - I will go farther - in spats; but when it comes to evening shirts your nerve seems to fail you. You have no vision. You are prejudiced and reactionary. Hidebound is the word that suggests itself. It may interest you to learn that when I was at Le Touquet the Prince of Wales buzzed into the Casino one night with soft silk shirt complete." "His Royal Highness, sir, may permit himself a certain licence which in your own case - " "No, Jeeves," I said, firmly, "it's no use. When we Woosters are adamant, we are - well, adamant, if you know what I mean." "Very good, sir." I could see the man was wounded, and, of course, the whole episode had been extremely jarring and unpleasant; but these things have to be gone through. Is one a serf or isn't one? That's what it all boils down to.