These unruly quotes will inspire you. Unruly, disorderly, and disruptive, and not amenable to discipline or control.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unruly quotes, unruly sayings, and unruly proverbs.
Best Unruly Quotes
- “When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.” ~ Erma Bombeck
- “No man can rule the unruly until he first rules himself.” ~ Elizabeth Foreman Lewis
- “Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?” ~ John Donne
- “If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you’re on the right track.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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“Hope is a very unruly emotion.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “The tongue may be an unruly member– But silence poisons the soul.” ~ Edgar Lee Masters
- “My father always used to say, “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument.” Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.” ~ Desmond Tutu
- “I’ve always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions.” ~ Rivka Galchen
- “Man’s chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.” ~ Ernest Jones
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“Sound is a very unruly thing, and you have to really respect that it’s going to differ every time you play.” ~ Victoria Legrand
- “Dogs who chase cars evidently see them as large, unruly ungulates badly in need of discipline and shepherding.” ~ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
- “The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.” ~ James, son of Zebedee
- “When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again; the unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision; but it is bound to return, provided the effort is sustained; until the day when all bonds are broken, delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present.” ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
- “Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thoughts…planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion.” ~ Renzo Novatore
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“It is God alone who can subdue and govern the unruly wills of sinful men.” ~ George Whitefield
- “In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
- “What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their own unruly emotions, and bruised by rejection and ridicule, authentic disciples may have stumbled and frequently fallen, endured lapses and relapses, gotten handcuffed to the fleshpots and wandered into a far county. Yet, they kept coming back to Jesus.” ~ Brennan Manning
- “When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
…
then I began to wonder” ~ Adrienne Rich - “Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden’s National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.” ~ Walter E. Williams
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“When you write ,it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.” ~ Edwidge Danticat
- “In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Busy old fool, unruly Sophie” ~ Diana Wynne Jones
- “They said my friends were just an unruly mob, and I should get a hair cut and get a new job.” ~ George Thorogood
- “For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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“The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated.” ~ Edward Kasner
- “When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.” ~ Edwidge Danticat
- “Unruly beings are as unlimited as space They cannot possibly all be overcome, But if I overcome thoughts of anger alone This will be equivalent to vanquishing all foes. Where would I possibly find enough leather With which to cover the surface of the earth? But (wearing) leather just on the soles of my shoes Is equivalent to covering the earth with it. Likewise it is not possible for me To restrain the external course of things; But should I restrain this mind of mine What would be the need to restrain all else?” ~ Shantideva
- “Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”” ~ Dick Cavett
- “Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers’seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late schoolboys, and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride, Call countryants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” ~ John Donne
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“Unruly ambition is deaf, not only to the advice of friends, but to the counsels and monitions of reason itself.” ~ Roger L’Estrange
- “The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you’re dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings – and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.” ~ Ian Rankin
- “What ought to be done is neglected, what ought not to be done is done; the desires of unruly, thoughtless people are always increasing.” ~ Max Muller
- “At one point I was introduced to a devastatingly handsome young man — beautiful, really — with black unruly hair, large sensitive eyes fringed by long dark lashes, a full sensuous mouth — and an irresistible personality. His name was Tony Curtis.” ~ Janet Leigh
- “My most noticeable physical trait is, hands down, my hair. It’s big, unruly and curly, and you can spot it from a mile away… literally.” ~ Becca Fitzpatrick
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“The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.” ~ Dick Cavett
- “But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism.” ~ Yaron Brook
- “The Poet, gentle creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; His fits when he is neither sick nor well, Though no distress be near him but his own Unmanageable thoughts.” ~ William Wordsworth
- “God’s word is unpredictable in its power… The Church has to accept this unruly freedom of the word, which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our calculations and ways of thinking.” ~ Pope Francis
- “The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate and
energetic people safe, prosperous and free.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke -
“Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?” ~ Marisa Silver
- “I hope that through my work, artists will take some chances, break some rules, and make art that comes from inside of them. I would like to be remembered as a kind person, a great Mom, and a bit unruly – in a good way!” ~ Angela Cartwright
- “It is clear that God is saying, ‘I gave man dominion over the earth, but he lost it. Now I desire mature sons and daughters who will in My name exercise dominion over the earth and subdue Satan, the unruly, the rebellious. Take back My world from those who would loot it and abuse it. Rule as I would rule.'” ~ Pat Robertson
- “I know it’s trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it’s all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.” ~ Toni Morrison
- “We shop out of boredom, for release, for excitement, for a sense of achievement, for a sense of control over our unruly existences. And every so often, we shop because we need something to wear.” ~ Tim Gunn
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“All Australians are an uneducated and unruly mob.” ~ Douglas Jardine
- “Each of us contributes our own piece to the whole, each in our own way, each in our own time with the gifts and talents that are ours. You ask about possible vehicles for change: question, stand, speak, act. Engage in unruly behavior. Disturb the status quo. Take direct action. Commit civil disobedience. Make art. Build community. Dance. Sing. Farm. Cook. Create something beautiful and then give it away. Find your own monkey wrench and use it with the force of love. Sharpen your pencil. Vote.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams
- “The President [Barack Obama] became quite emotional about transgender student rights, threatening to pull Department of Education funds from school districts that do not comply with federal regulations. Black children are suspended from school three times more than white children are, and there is no evidence that black children are three times as unruly.” ~ Julianne Malveaux
- “He’d changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He look like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.” ~ Rick Riordan
- “Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.” ~ Joanne Harris
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“The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.” ~ Katherine Anne Porter
- “Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.” ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
- “The most experience I had in the criminology field is playing a thug as an actor. That was my first paid job. The police academy at the college was paying people to reenact the calls that potential cops would get. So I got to play thugs and people who were unruly.” ~ Jeremy Renner
- “People always ask my mom what I did as a kid. My mom says, “He wasn’t a bad kid. He was never an unruly kid, always listened and obeyed.”” ~ Larry the Cable Guy
- “It’s very important that we instill some respect for the parents. In America especially, the kids are unruly, screaming at mommy and daddy, running the show.” ~ Ziggy Marley
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“Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.” ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
- “Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.” ~ George Will
- “I drew laughing, high-breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.” ~ J. D. Salinger
- “One of my favorite things to do is to craft and to write songs and tell stories, and another thing is to really just flip out basically, and release kind of my unruly energies.” ~ Eugene Hutz
- “How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.” ~ Suzanna Hupp
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“Great Ambition, unchecked by principle, or the love of Glory, is an unruly Tyrant.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
- “The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a “turbulence and a folly” that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.” ~ Lewis H. Lapham
- “[To the mother of two unruly children in a restaurant after the woman said she really didn’t know what to do with her children:] Have you tried infanticide?” ~ Joan Crawford
- “The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.” ~ Margaret Halsey
- “Fiercely original and uncommonly lovely, The Witch’s Boy is equal parts enchanting and haunting. Kelly Barnhill is master of truly potent and unruly magic; luckily for readers, she chooses to use her powers for good.” ~ Anne Ursu
- “If you love men and they are unfriendly, look into your love; if you rule men and they are unruly, look into your wisdom; if you are courteous to them and they do not respond, look into your courtesy. If what you do is vain, always seek within.” ~ Mencius
