Top 94 Deference Quotes & Sayings

The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ?

Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.

The president's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.

Near the centre of that State of New York lies an extensive district of country, whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys.

Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.

There is great power in deference. Deference works with everybody.

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

If you're a Supreme Court justice, the American people have elevated you to one of the highest offices in the land out of the goodness of their heart and out of deference to your legal wisdom. You get a lifetime appointment, limitless prestige, a great office, and what I have to assume is a very comfortable chair.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.

Countries are effectively paid deference in direct and indirect ways if they're huge oil suppliers.

For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.

There's great power in deference. You ask somebody 'what' or 'how' questions. People love to be asked how to do something. They feel powerful, and from a deferential position, you've actually granted that power, and you're the one that now actually has the upper hand in the conversation.

It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

We show deference to the civil authorities when they respect the divine origin of their power and when they serve the people with objective reference to the law of God.

I'm not the first to have raised these democratic concerns. Many have faulted the court for its lack of clarity in certain cases and many have criticized its recent lack of deference to decisions made by state legislatures and Congress.

Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.

Washington society has always demanded less and given more than any society in this country--demanded less of applause, deference,etiquette, and has accepted as current coin quick wit, appreciative tact, and a talent for talking.

I take sporting criticism on board very keenly and with deference, and I also try to make decisions based on it.

Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.

I just think that we show an awful lot of deference to chefs in our culture and maybe not enough deference to customers.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

A rich dress adds but little to the beauty of a person. It may possibly create a deference, but that is rather an enemy to love.

A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.

Democrats, myself included, tend to respect and value expertise and find that people who have established a record of accuracy and developed a model that's proven to be beneficial over time should be people accorded great deference when they opine on a topic that they have demonstrated past mastery over.

A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.

... it would be impossible for women to stand in higher estimation than they do here. The deference that is paid to them at all times and in all places has often occasioned me as much surprise as pleasure.

For Trump, there's always a dark conspiracy arrayed against him. Someone is always doing him an injustice by not treating him with the required deference.

The death of deference seems to be general at the moment, so everybody has to earn their reputation and trust all over again. You don't just get it by virtue of being a professor or a politician or anybody else.

Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.

Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.

Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.

In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.

Suits are malevolent magicians' sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.

With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.

The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.

Deference and intimacy live far apart.

People who expect deference resent mere civility.

[ Donald Trump] deference to the president [Barack Obama] whose legitimacy he questioned.

Most of our fellow-subjects are guided either by the prejudice of education or by a deference to the judgment of those who perhaps in their own hearts disapprove the opinions which they industriously spread among the multitude.

Gentlemen, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color.

One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint - that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid 'legislating from the bench.'

Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.

The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all others, charity.

In Singapore, drivers generally obey the rules, but the attitude around pedestrians is actually quite different. It's culturally different. People drive safely, but it's not the same deference shown to pedestrians.

The Superior Man has nothing to compete for. But if he must compete, he does it in an archery match, wherein he ascends to his position, bowing in deference. Descending, he drinks the ritual cup.

Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference

There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.

What I find is with all due deference to - deference to our male colleagues, that women's styles tend to be more collaborative.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

[F]riends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own.

Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.

I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.