
“The greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Buck Owens, RIP George Jones: 1931-2013 http://communityvoices.post-gazette.com/arts-entertainment-living/get-rhythm/item/36485-rip-george-jones-1931-2013, 1988
( June 16, 2005 http://web.archive.org/web/20050617/corner.nationalreview.com/05_06_12_corner-archive.asp#066356)
2000s, 2005
“The greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Buck Owens, RIP George Jones: 1931-2013 http://communityvoices.post-gazette.com/arts-entertainment-living/get-rhythm/item/36485-rip-george-jones-1931-2013, 1988
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity".
The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.
“I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.”
“The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language.”
Context: The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet.
Quoted by Peter Guber, in
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), p. 67
Context: For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
“In geometry his greatest achievement was an accurate value of π.”
His rule is stated as: dn^2+(2a-d)n=2s, which implies the approximation 3.1416 which is correct to the last decimal place.
In, p. 245.
Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
“Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.”
Sections 128 - 129
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Context: Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Bing Crosby in a letter to Fred Astaire, c.1948, on Astaire's return in Easter Parade, as quoted in Astaire's biography, Steps in Time, United States, 1959. p. 293. ISBN 0815410581.
British Telecom advertisement (1993), part of which was used in Pink Floyd's Keep Talking (1994) and Talkin' Hawkin'<nowiki/> (2014)
Context: For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.