“Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.”
As quoted in Margaret Mead, World's Grandmother (1975) by Ann Morse, Charles Morse, Harold Henriksen, p. 9
1970s
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Margaret Mead133
American anthropologist 1901–1978Related quotes
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31
Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
As quoted in "The Bolton Embarrassment" in The Nation (1 August 2005) http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=9416
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
“The responsibility of writers,” p. 167
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Mary Tyler Moore (1936–2017) American actress, television producer
As quoted in The Vegetarian Solution: Your Answer to Cancer, Heart Disease, Global Warming and More (2007) by Stewart D. Rose, p. 114
Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies
The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 20
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher
R. G. Collingwood (1937), as cited in: Patrick Suppes (1973), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.