“Love plays its lute behind the screen —
where is a lover to listen to its tune?”
Fakhruddin 'Iraqi (1213–1289) Persian philosopher
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
“I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and inconsiderable city to glory and greatness.”
As quoted by Plutarch, in Lives as translated by J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (1836), p. 84 http://books.google.com/books?id=UFROAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA84 <br class="br">Variant translation: 'Tis true, I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute, but I know how to raise a small and inconsiderate city to glory and greatness. <br class="br"> Plutarch's Themistocles, 2:3 http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg010.perseus-eng1:2 "...tuning the lyre and handling the harp were no accomplishments of his, but rather taking in hand a city that was small and inglorious and making it glorious and great" "...λύραν μὲν ἁρμόσασθαι καὶ μεταχειρίσασθαι ψαλτήριον οὐκ ἐπίσταται, πόλιν δὲ μικρὰν καὶ ἄδοξον παραλαβὼν ἔνδοξον καὶ μεγάλην ἀπεργάσασθαι." (at Perseus Project)
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Athenian statesman -524–-459 BCRelated quotes
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“The most interesting thing I learned during this time was how small a nuclear warhead was.”
Robert B. Laughlin (1950) American physicist
On his experiences in the military during his training on how to fire Pershing missiles.
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: Oklahoma is laid back and rather beautiful, with rolling brown hills not unlike the ones in California. The Pershing missiles, on the other hand, were not beautiful. They were horrible weapons of war — solid-fuel rockets five feet in diameter at the base, long as a moving van, and capable of throwing a tactical nuclear warhead 500 miles. They were launched from trucks and required a team of 10 men to service and fire. The most interesting thing I learned during this time was how small a nuclear warhead was. The nose cone of a Pershing is only about 18 inches in diameter at the base. I had not been interested at all in nuclear weaponry as a student, and so I had never thought through carefully about their "efficiency". It is sobering thought that these missiles were actually deployed in continental Europe in those days and that on at least one occasion, namely the 1973 Arab-Israel war, there was an alert serious enough to leave the commanding officers trembling.
Bo Xilai (1949) former Politburo member of the Communist Party of China
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