The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you're finished.
It's because you alienate half the room talking about sports. Half the crowd will be against you no matter what you say.
You have a race problem that must be solved, or else you will alienate every non-white person on this earth within the next few years, or within the next few months.
Lesson 1 from Spitzer: Don't alienate the legislature on Day 1.
Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.
I'm not a good businessman and I don't promote myself particularly well. It's best I don't talk to anybody lest I alienate myself.
If I practice I'll really alienate people.
You can't make a movie for everybody. You can't go into it trying to alienate people, but you have to assume that you're going to.
There's a version of Tony [from "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"] that I think could be heightened. Trying to find the balance. A lot of that comes from "Who is he?" I think we've all kind of met that dude. The comic book enthusiast, or someone who gets too excited about things, but his own enthusiasm tends to alienate him. I relate to it because I've seen that guy.
One thing you really have to watch as a writer is getting on a soapbox or pulpit about anything. You don't want to alienate readers.
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
Find friends who ALIGN with your destiny & lose friends who ALIENATE you from destiny!
We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
The right to freedom being the gift of God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.
Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Names generate meaning in a short amount of space — they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.
Television from its inception had the number one goal to alienate as few people as possible. That's why if you look at 1950s, 1960s American sitcoms, the characters don't live any place in particular, religion is never discussed, politics is never discussed, you never really know what anyone's job is; nothing that could make these people seem different from you is ever discussed.
You don't spend ten years appealing to middle-aged women and then suddenly turn around and start trying to connect with 25-year-old women. You're almost certainly going to alienate the people who have an investment in your brand, and there's no guarantee you're going to be successful with the new group.
When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people
