Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)
1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)
1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)
Context: From its very beginning our country has been enriched by a complete blend of varied strains in the same ethnic family. We are, in some sense, an immigrant nation, molded in the fires of a common experience. That common experience is our history. And it is that common experience we must hand down to our children, even as the fundamental principles of Americanism, based on righteousness, were handed down to us, in perpetuity, by the founders of our government.
Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)
1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)
Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 62.
1925
Context: We were not peculiarly impressed with speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.
Liu Yandong (1945) Chinese politician
Source: "刘延东:中南人民守望相助 友谊历久弥坚" https://www.mfa.gov.cn/ce/cezanew//chn/zngxss/jyjl/t1457724.htm (27 April 2017)
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist
No. 15
On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)
Context: There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
2002
“… reality, the name we give to the common experience.”
Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright
Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City
http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/news/bloomberg_calls_for_national_energy_reforms
Energy Reform
Lance Armstrong book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
Source: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo
Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 10, “The Method of Science”, p. 105