“What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.”
Source: The Dead of Night
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
John Marsden 26
author 1950Related quotes
“We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
State of the Union address (2 December 1902)
1900s
Context: Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.
How could you talk to a man like that?
Referring to Eamon de Valera in conversation with Michael Hayes, at the debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921
Michael Hayes Papers, P53/299, UCDA
Quoted in Doherty, Gabriel and Keogh, Dermot (2006). Michael Collins and the Making of the Irish State. Mercier Press, p. 153.
“Drawing the line,
The Boundary line
Between this form and that
Is what the mind does.”
Art Psalms (2008), Let Love Draw the Line
"Demonstrations over Islamic centre held in New York" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11274010, BBC, 11 September 2010.
2010s
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
Context: Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation. Therefore these two Sciences ought not to be confounded. The Antients did so industriously distinguish them from one another, that they never introduc'd Arithmetical Terms into Geometry. And the Moderns, by confounding both, have lost the Simplicity in which all the Elegancy of Geometry consists. Wherefore that is Arithmetically more simple which is determin'd by the more simple Æquations, but that is Geometrically more simple which is determin'd by the more simple drawing of Lines; and in Geometry, that ought to be reckon'd best which is Geometrically most simple. Wherefore, I ought not to be blamed, if with that Prince of Mathematicians, Archimedes and other Antients, I make use of the Conchoid for the Construction of solid Problems.<!--p.230
“Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines”
Dissenting in Pearce v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 315 U.S. 543, 558 (1942).
Judicial opinions
Context: The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.