Dictates

Famous quotes containing the word dictates:

    Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.
    William Gibson (b. 1948)

    The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    If answerable style I can obtaine
    Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
    Her nightly visitation unimplor’d,
    And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires
    Easie my unpremeditated Verse:
    John Milton (1608–1674)