Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer
Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), pp. 17-18
"Him with His Foot in His Mouth," from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18023-4], p. 11
General sources
Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer
Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), pp. 17-18
“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”
Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author
“I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.”
John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster
Radio Talk. BBC Third Programme (1949)
Vitruvius book De architectura
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VI, Chapter IV, Sec. 1
“All human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.”
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist
“Science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings.”
Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor
How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)
Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author
The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.
One Human Minute (1986)
William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist
"Man alone, of all creatures of earth, can change his thought pattern and become the architect of his destiny." Actually said by Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his Miracle of Forgiveness (1969), p. 114. This predates any of the misquotations.
Other forms: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." This is also misattributed to Albert Schweitzer.
James did say: "As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness."
Misattributed
Context: Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives … It is too bad that most people will not accept this tremendous discovery and begin living it.