These appropriation quotes will inspire you. Appropriation is the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging appropriation quotes, appropriation sayings, and appropriation proverbs.
Famous Appropriation Quotes
- “But here’s the thing: Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.” ~ Amandla Stenberg
- “Every exploration is an appropriation.” ~ Roland Barthes
- “We all are influenced by things and copy things, but often where there is a certain level of copying, only the surface value ends up being reproduced and that becomes thinner and thinner. I feel like a lot of appropriation suffers from that.” ~ Jason Fulford
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“I will just say, appropriation is an intellectual idea until it happens to you. It’s a philosophy, and it’s got its own intellectual framework. Then there’s what happens when it’s your photograph. Then it’s personal, and that’s all I’ll say.” ~ Sam Abell
- “..Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating – taking something for one’s own use – need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.” ~ Bell Hooks , Cultural appropriation quotes
- “Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?” ~ Amandla Stenberg
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“Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.” ~ Deborah Kass
- “Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone’s eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.” ~ Raoul Vaneigem
- “Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will ‘capture’ something ‘seen.’ The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.” ~ Karl Marx
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“A child’s appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.” ~ Christopher Lasch
- “Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things” ~ Roland Barthes
- “Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Now that judges embrace forcibly starving someone to death, Congress should use its appropriation power to starve the judicial budget.” ~ Phyllis Schlafly
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“That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.” ~ Paul Hawken
- “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting distributes an annual appropriation that we provide in accordance with a statutory formula, the vast majority of which goes directly to public radio and television stations.” ~ Earl Blumenauer
- “A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one’s own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.” ~ Heinz Pagels
- “The brilliance here is appropriation: space, form and interface combine to create a Jetsons sound machine. A dream of music access that just hovers, its floating defines a space. The shape seems so obviously sci-fi, but fresh. The function could follow the form. The shape is beautiful and functional-which hits both of the pillars of American Needs right on the head.” ~ Tucker Viemeister
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“There is not a more important and fundamental principle in legislation, than that the ways and means ought always to face the public engagements; that our appropriations should ever go hand in hand with our promises.” ~ James Madison
- “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Because the bill in reserving a certain parcel of land in the United States for the use of said Baptist Church comprises a principle and a precedent for the appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies, contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.”” ~ James Madison
- “The personal appropriation of cliches is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism.” ~ Serge Daney
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“As chairman of the Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA appropriations, I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy.” ~ William Proxmire
- “We need to give out portrayal of ourselves. Every non-Indian writer writes about 1860 to 1890 pretty much, and there is no non-Indian writer that can write movies about contemporary Indians. Only Indians can. Indians are usually romanticized. Non-Indians are totally irrepsonsible with the appropriation of Indians, because any time tou have an Indian in a movie, it’s political. They’re not used as people, they’re used as points.” ~ Chris Eyre
- “Last year, I twice voted against the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations bill because it did not adequately fund education in general, and Native American programs specifically.” ~ Rick Renzi
- “For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women’s appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn’t Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.” ~ Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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“Every time they have tried to cut appropriations, they get a wakeup call.” ~ Pat Mitchell
- “Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Im the ranking Republican on the foreign aid appropriations subcommittee, so I know Tunisia well.” ~ Lindsey Graham
- “Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India’s richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India’s poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?” ~ Arundhati Roy
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“If you want to learn about the whole government and how it operates, the Appropriations Committee is the best place to learn it.” ~ John J. Rooney
- “But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.” ~ Arthur Balfour
- “Just like families must live within their budgets, the Federal Government must live within its means. We have passed appropriations bills that have been fiscally responsible while recognizing our national priorities.” ~ Dennis Hastert
- “The appropriation of public money always is perfectly lovely until some one is asked to pay the bill. If we are to have a billion dollars of navy, half a billion of farm relief, etc… the people will have to furnish more revenue by paying more taxes. It is for them, through their Congress, to decide how far they wish to go.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
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“The NRA was one of the items that we pointed to when we added money to the labor, health and Education appropriations bill by reducing the size of the tax cut.” ~ Dave Obey
- “Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.” ~ Jerry Saltz
- “No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay the taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil. It is your fellow workers who are ordered to work for the Government, every time an appropriation bill is passed. The people pay the expense of government, often many times over, in the increased cost of living. I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” ~ Bell Hooks
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“After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades – even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu.” ~ Jerry Saltz
- “There is not a more important and fundamental principle in legislation, than that the ways and means ought always to face the public engagements; that our appropriations should ever go hand in hand with our promises. To say that the United States should be answerable for twenty-five millions of dollars without knowing whether the ways and means can be provided, and without knowing whether those who are to succeed us will think with us on the subject, would be rash and unjustifiable. Sir, in my opinion, it would be hazarding the public faith in a manner contrary to every idea of prudence.” ~ James Madison
- “The liberal appropriations made by the legislature of Kentucky for a general system of education cannot be too much applauded . . . . Learned institutions ought to be the favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty . . . . What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?” ~ James Madison
- “Science knows no politics. Are we in this frenzy of [the Depression] economy, brought about by those who control the wealth of this country, seeking to put a barrier on science and research for the paltry sum of $39,113 out of an appropriation of $100,000,000?” ~ Fiorello H. La Guardia
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“I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds … I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.” ~ Grover Cleveland
- “Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.” ~ Michel Foucault
- “To avoid the necessity of a permanent debt and its inevitable consequences, I have advocated and endeavored to carry into effect the policy of confining the appropriations for the public service to such objects only as are clearly with the constitutional authority of the Federal Government.” ~ Martin Van Buren
- “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.” ~ Grover Cleveland
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“I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes.” ~ David Ogilvy
- “It will be the duty of the Executive, with sufficient appropriations for the purpose, to prosecute unsparingly all who have been engaged in depriving citizens of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution.” ~ Rutherford B. Hayes
- “Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.” ~ Robert M. Gates
- “Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace.” ~ John Foster Dulles
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“The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely.” ~ Charles Horton Cooley
- “It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” ~ Mikhail Bakhtin
- “Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, ‘The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place…and it implies relations among differentiated positions.’ I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.” ~ Geoff Nicholson
- “I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the ‘political means’.” ~ Franz Oppenheimer
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“The Appropriations Committee in the Senate is out of control, out of control on spending.” ~ John Ensign
- “The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it’s a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.” ~ Shirley Geok-lin Lim
- “Lincoln was a modernizer, so to speak. He believed in economic development. As a Whig before the war he favored what we would call infrastructure spending, government appropriation for canals, railroads, river and harbor improvements, and a tariff to protect industry. He believed in this market revolution that was sweeping across Northern society. He himself benefited from it in his own life.” ~ Eric Foner
- “What I find is that the taking, the stealing, the appropriation of images has to do with prior availability, and it sets up a degree where things can be shared… It’s like 50% off… You can let something of another emotion or another personality sign on your work, or co-sign it.” ~ Richard Prince
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“Through its appropriation of “texts of terror” and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.” ~ Brian D. McLaren
- “One very difficult decision was deciding to vote against the appropriations bill for the war. I had consistently said that I wanted to make sure our troops got the adequate and training in the war effort, despite the fact that I opposed the war at the point that the president decided to double down and send more troops. I had to vote against funding as a way of bringing it back to the table. That was a difficult decision for me.” ~ Barack Obama
- “In the meantime, what is lost is any sense that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial rule is waged from a situation of occupation or expulsion, that there is a military order that controls the boundaries of what would be a sovereign Palestinian state, that the land on which that state is now thinkable has been radically diminished by an ongoing practice of land confiscation and appropriation.” ~ Judith Butler
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“There’s not an appropriations bill in the last 10 years that the-that Democrats passed in the Congress. We haven’t spent any money of your taxes in the last decade.” ~ Chaka Fattah
- “Electric service providers in Missouri have warned that the EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan will raise energy costs for Missourians, reduce jobs, and hurt our state’s economic competitiveness. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I’ve fought hard to ensure provisions that would defund this harmful power grab were included in the final appropriations bill. I also support legislation to block this harmful rule and protect workers and families from the damaging effects of the Obama Administration’s executive overreach and costly energy regulations.” ~ Roy Blunt
- “The American people are sick and tired of Washington and the people who have been in charge have been passing all these bills and I’ve been voting no all of the time and vote no on these appropriation bills.” ~ Ron Paul
