Quotes about learning (6820 quotes, page 44)

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood. It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the President effectively. I didn't learn that what I'd said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later. … Neither, I believe, did President Bush. he too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who know the truth -- including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney -- allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

Scott McClellan book What Happened

Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, on the illegal outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by White House officials, What Happened; Politico.com http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2C2AD8E6-3048-5C12-00DD5B339097C9F9

Truth , Lie , Housing

“When the Superior Man (Junzi) eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Tao and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can say, "he loves learning."”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The Analects, Chapter I

Love , People , Personality , Perfection

“What has particularly interested me about these horses is that, after thousands of years of domestication, they have adapted so successfully to life in the wild. If these horses are really as healthy and as sound as they appear, then there is probably a lot we can learn from them, such as the way their hooves are shaped and the manner in which they shape them.”

Jaime Jackson (1947) Horse hoof care professional

"Incipit"
The Natural Horse (1997)

Life , Way , Appearance , Horse

““The rules that society chooses to live by have always struck me as especially fascinating,” she said. “There are things one can do but not talk about, and there are things one can talk about but not do. There are things—not apparently gender-related—that men can do, but not women, and there are things women can do, but not men. We live in an invisible maze, and we have all learned where to turn and when, so as to find our way through.”
“Some of the rules are good, Mary, and many are necessary,” Lord Darcy said mildly.
“You misunderstood me, my dear,” Mary of Cumberland told him. “As in magic, where there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or the spell won’t work; so in society there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or we won’t understand each other or trust each other, and it will all come tumbling down around us. The problem is that the rules of society, unlike magic, have never been formalized mathematically, and we don’t know which words are essential to the spell and which are just silly words.””

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 132)

Women , Men , Way , Mathematics

“We aim at a target—an end—marked by a point. The arrows go to right and left, high or low, according to the address of the shooters. In the mean time, after a considerable number of trials, the butt, which has not yet been touched, perhaps, a single time, becomes so well pointed out by the marks around it, that they would aid at once in rediscovering it, if it should chance to be lost sight of. Nay, more than this; even aims the most unfortunate may be made to conduce to this end; commencing with those marks which are farthest away, if they be sufficiently numerous, one may learn from them the real position of the point they surround.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Chance , Time

“I… praise the newly opened halls of fossil mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. …teaching us about evolutionary trees by organizing the entire hall as a central trunk and set of branches… placing our brains in our feet and letting us learn by walking. …the chosen geometry of evolutionary organization… violates the traditional picture of life's history, thus illustrating… an important principle in the history of science: the central role of pictures, graphs, and other forms of visual representation in channeling and constraining our thought. …Words are an evolutionary afterthought. …My colleagues have actually done it. …They have ordered all the fossils into an unconventional iconographic tree that fractures the bias of progress. …so that we can preambulate along the tree of life and absorb the new scheme viscerally by walking… They have taken Colbert's radical idea and arranged all the fossils by their branching order, not their later "success" or "advancement."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

Groups that branch early appear early in the hall... Sea cows and elephants are at the end of the hall, horses in the middle, and primates near the beginning.
"Evolution by Walking", pp. 249-254.
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life , History , Idea , Tree

“It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

Senlin: A Biography (1918)

Star , Light

“I dare aver
He is a brave discoverer
Of climes his elders do not know.
He has more learning than appears
On the scroll of twice three thousand years.”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"The Discoverer".

Appearance

“Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have religion; and added, let those who have not science and art have the popular faith; let them have this escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the people turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of splendor and pomp and power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life that now is--in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest to learn.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

Life , People , Faith , Religion

“What, then, is to be done? We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to “think the state” once again, we shall not get very far. But what precisely should the state do? Minimally, it should not duplicate unnecessarily: as Keynes wrote, “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” And we know from the bitter experience of the past century that there are some things that states should most certainly not be doing.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

Thinking , Past

“I thank God for all the people whom God sent into my life, the people who gave their best so that I could learn to give my best.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 69

Life , God , People

“It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Sex and the Shakespeare Reader http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2003).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Men

“In this place they knew him and were aware of how hard he had to strain. He would rather be among strangers who might possibly be more like himself. There had to be such people—perhaps far, far away. And there he would be able to learn more easily how to be fast.”

Sten Nadolny book The Discovery of Slowness

p, 125
The Discovery of Slowness (1983, 1987)

People

“We want to learn from the west about science and technology and how to manage the economy, but this must be combined with specific conditions here. That's how we have made great progress in the last twenty years.”

Jiang Zemin (1926) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

As quoted in "Jiang Zemin Talks With Wallace" https://web.archive.org/web/20140306052558/http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jiang-zemin-talks-with-wallace/ (August 2000), CBS.
2000s

Science

“As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. In the course of my research I learned (to my surprise) that biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design. God created the cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God.”

Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm

God , Age , Religion , Study

“As we strive to teach others we must have the humility to acknowledge that we too still have much to learn. And we must have the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of the world around us. Women who have been taught that modesty and pliancy are among the prized virtues of our gender are marvellously equipped for the learning process. But they must be given the opportunity to turn these often merely passive virtues into positive assets for the society in which they live.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Women , World , Change

“Knowledge ceases to be wisdom when one has no method for making sense or use of what one learns.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: Book 2, Chapter 7 (p. 591), The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Wisdom , Knowledge , Sense

“Derangement is the signature expression of the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late sixties. While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic polices. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the police pushers’ fantasies of “globalization” and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire plant must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U. S. A.The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speak to us in the manner of the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being. On the contrary; the backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That is champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That is greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the plant does not give it pause.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Introduction: What's the Matter with America (pp. 5-6).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Money , War , People , World

“When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance"”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

whatever that may be
Dijkstra (1993) "From my Life" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1166.html (EWD 1166).
1990s

Mathematics , Decision , Study , Universe

“Ever since Darwin tied knots between human beings and the rest of the animal world, many people have frantically attempted to untie them again, declaring that even though our roots are in the animal world we have left them so far behind as to make any comparisons utterly meaningless. To some extent this is true, because the quality that makes us unique in the biological kingdom is the enormous capacity to learn.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins (1977)

People , World , Animals

“In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

"An Anthropologist Looks at the Teacher's Role" http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/texts/med00marg42anthlook.html, in Educational Method, Vol 21, (1942) p. 219-223
1940s

Life , Way , Behavior , Sense

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Music , Winter , Change , Past

“We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial — denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being.”

Philip Berrigan (1923–2002) Priest and anti-war activist

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996), p. 204

Love , God , Law , Exercises

“It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Newell & Simon (1958), quoted in AI, by Daniel Crevier
1940s-1950s

World , Way , Problem , Thinking

“I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro… and, of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i. e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Books , Reading , Childhood

“You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Patrick McDonald (October 13, 1988) "David Lee Roth: Outrageous or normal?", The Advertiser.

Music , Star , Drawing

“Next time I'll learn to dive maybe, but I'm not a woman.”

Thierry Henry (1977) French association football player

After the 2006 Champions League final.
Source: [Henry denies diving against Spain, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2006/teams/france/5123952.stm, BBC Sport, 28 June, 2006, 2006-10-18]

Time

“I would like to say I handle criticism well. In fact I enjoy reading the comments of the critics. It's great to have critics blasting you all the time. It keeps you on your toes, spurs you, challenges you, makes you want to get better. I take everything positively. There's so much to learn and do.”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

Movie Mag International (September 2004)

Time , Reading

“I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax- lights and embroidery, at such times and under such circumstances as should be devoted to lifting the secret vision to Him whose home is Infinity, and His being — Eternity. That when I thought of sin and sorrow, of earthly corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe — I could not care for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when the pains of existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before me — when the mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in view — _then_, even the scientific strain, or the prayer in a language learned and dead, harassed: with hindrance a heart which only longed to cry — "God be merciful to me, a sinner!"”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Chapter XXXVI: The Apple of Discord

God , Pain , Secret , Hope

“Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , Children , Way , Parent

“Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i. e., one not created for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem nihilistic and dark. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Those are real purposes, not illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Douthat on the rampage against secularism, gets it all wrong http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/douthat-on-the-rampage-against-secularism-gets-it-all-wrong/" December 23, 2013

Life , Books , Faith , Sense

“Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth, but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him. It may be that some future century will vindicate this unseemly performance; in the meanwhile it will be of interest to examine the reasons which he gives us for it. He says, in the first place, that he found this study of himself, this registering of his moods and imaginations, extremely amusing; it was an exploration of an unknown region, full of the queerest chimeras and monsters, a new art of discovery, in which he had become by practice “the cunningest man alive.” It was profitable also, for most people enjoy their pleasures without knowing it; they glide over them, and fix and feed their minds on the miseries of life. But to observe and record one’s pleasant experiences and imaginations, to associate one’s mind with them, not to let them dully and unfeelingly escape us, was to make them not only more delightful but more lasting. As life grows shorter we should endeavour, he says, to make it deeper and more full. But he found moral profit also in this self-study; for how, he asked, can we correct our vices if we do not know them, how cure the diseases of our soul if we never observe their symptoms? The man who has not learned to know himself is not the master, but the slave of life: he is the “explorer without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and when all is done, the fool of the play.””

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 6
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life , People , Pleasure , Truth

“What do you want to have true? Pick something between total fantasy & 51% believable, get going, & readjust as you learn.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

17 January 2011 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/26824930679062528
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“October: Red Lanterns”, p. 63.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "August: The Green Pasture," "September: The Choral Copse," "October: Smoky Gold," and "October: Red Lanterns"

Dogs , Way , Thinking

“It is said that when the host is worthy, the guests become innumerable. Yu-tsun must consider you a worthy host. You ought to feel flattered."
"Enough," Pao-yu said impatiently. "I do not pretend to be worthy and I don't care to associate with such worthy people as he."
"Still the same Pao-yu," River Mist commented. "I should think you would be interested in the Examinations now that you are older and are ambitious to get a degree. Failing that, you ought to associate with officials, so as to learn something of the official world and acquire some friends to help you in the future. You will get nowhere if you spend your life among us.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 158

Life , People , World , Feeling

“At its fundamentally flawed core, the aim of almost any learning program is to help us become who we are not… From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to our shortcomings than to our strengths.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

As cited in: Patrick Hollingworth (2016), The Light and Fast Organisation. p. 156
StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007

Time , Help

“We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, how we should be cautious in our dealings with a foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect and, needless to say, with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite! They were slaves in their Diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only a country like Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] can offer. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves ['eved ki yimlokh – when a slave becomes king – Proverbs 30:22]. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage. But when these people feel that the law is on their rival's side and, even more so, if they are right to think their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then, even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, p. 15.

Love , Hostility , People , Justice

“Primates, some birds, and humans have mirror neurons… that fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing… We've found mirror neurons in Broca's area, a part… involved in speaking, and learning to speak. …our mirror neurons may be firing when we see or hear musicians perform … in preparation for being able to mirror or echo them back as part of a signaling system.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Bird , Parting

“I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, One Hand Clapping (1961)

People , Travel

“My position is to listen to my constituents, learn from the best information available and ultimately make sound, rational decisions that are going to be beneficial to the people of the 8th Congressional District.”

Gabrielle Giffords (1970) American politician

On her political positions during campaign — [Stephanie Innes, Giffords: Too soon to settle on a plan for health care, The Arizona Daily Star, August 11, 2009, A1, Arizona]

People , Decision

“All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I've met a man I've been awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as he could go. If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever tried to fight me, I should have run myself — I'm such a coward; but just as soon as they hear me roar they all try to get away from me, and of course I let them go.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Way , Nature , Animals , Fight

“I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

The Education of Women (1719)

Women , World , Education , Sex

“If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Men , Education , Sex , Intelligence

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Letter to the editor of Solidarity (1914-11-29)

Sense , Reading , Heart , Personality

“Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal. Therefore it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goalseeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is life.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 120–121.

Life , Idea , Sense , Memory

“Of what value is the study of management?
The study of management has been omitted from the student's training until comparatively recently, for a very different reason than was psychology. It was never doubted that a knowledge of management would be of great value to anyone and everyone, and many were the queer schemes for obtaining that knowledge after graduation. It was doubted that management could be studied otherwise than by observation and practice. Few teachers, if any, believed in the existence, or possibility, of a teaching science of management. Management was assumed by many to be an art, by even more it was thought to be a divinely bestowed gift or talent, rather than an acquired accomplishment. It was common belief that one could learn to manage only by going out on the work and watching other managers, or by trying to manage, and not by studying about management in a class room or in a text book; that watching a good manager might help one, but no one could hope really to succeed who had not " the knack born in him."”

Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972) American psychologist and industrial engineer

Source: Psychology of management, 1914, p. 2-3

Books , Hope , Art , Knowledge

“The one reason that I could not ignore, the one reason that grew deep inside me till it consumed me with guilt, was the realisation that I was abusing my faith for a mere political project. After learning in prison that Islamism was not the religion of Islam, but rather a political ideology dressed up as Islam, I no longer felt guilty simply for criticising a political system inspired by modern European constructs, while justified by seventh-century norms.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 210

Faith , Religion

“I'm very happy as I am. I realise that I made sacrifices early in my career and that it was hard on my relationships because, when I am working, I am very focused and it isn't easy, when you have been in the studio all day, to say to someone, 'I'll meet up with you later on.' I learned that it was necessary to be dedicated and put work first. But, at the same time, it was a wonderful feeling to be successful at doing something I loved.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Love , Feeling , Time , Success

“There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge — that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 29
Variant translation: I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the desire to know learning.

Knowledge

“I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides my home, and thus become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christoper Manes, who said, 'For most cultures through history--including our own in preliterate times--the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls.' Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, 'The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees--all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

Source: A Language Older Than Words (2000), p. 361

People , World , Disease , Home

“The highest strength is acquired not in overcoming the world, but in overcoming one’s self. Learn to be cruel to thyself, to withstand thy appetites, to bear thy sufferings, and thou shalt become free and able.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 164

World , Suffering

“When it was assumed that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, it was correspondingly presumed that their flight evolved among climbers that first glided and then developed powered flight. This has the advantage that we know that arboreal animals can evolve powered flight with the aid of gravity, as per bats. When it was realized that birds descended from deinonychosaurs, many researchers switched to the hypothesis that running dinosaurs learned to fly from the ground up. This has the disadvantage that it is not certain whether it is practical for tetrapod flight to evolve among ground runners working against gravity.
The characteristics of birds indicate that they evolved from dinosaurs that had first evolved as bipedal runners, and then evolved into long armed climbers. If the ancestors of birds had been entirely arboreal, then they should be semiquadrupedal forms whose sprawling legs were integrated into the main airfoil, like bats. That birds are bipeds whose erect legs are separate from the wings indicates that their ancestors evolved to run.”

Gregory Scott Paul book The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Gregory S. Paul (2010) The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Princeton University Press, p. 52
The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Bird , Animals , Flying

“Learn to accept your mistakes. Don't be a perfectionist about everything.”

Michael Korda (1933) British writer

Power : How To Get It, How To Use It (1976)

“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.

History

“AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 42

World , Shoe , Heart , Parting

“In the United States, international business still means the U. S. and the rest of the world. Here it is different. We wanted to learn about the reality of international business and understand the role and scope of strategy within that.”

Renée Mauborgne American economist

Renée Mauborgne in: Stuart Crainer, " W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne: The Thought Leader Interview http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11695?gko=d33f3," strategy+business, January 12, 2002. First Quarter 2002. Issue 26 (originally published by Booz & Company)

World , Understanding , Business , Reality

“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls' genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women's rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 14, “Opening the Muslim Mind: An Enlightenment Mind (pp. 212-213)

Love , Women , People , Religion

“There is little abstract art, today, and what there is is stammering and imperfect. It is an attempt to let the world speak for itself, instead of reporting the speech of mind excited by their picture of the world. The Greek, The Gothic, and the Renaissance artist set forth the world the way he saw it, felt it, and wished to have it; man wished above all to be nourished by art; he achieved his desire but sacrificed everything else to this one aim: to construct homunculus, to substitute knowledge for strength and skill for spirit. The ape aped his creator. He learned to put art itself to the ends of trade..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

World , Art , Way , Knowledge

“When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?”

Harry Browne (1933–2006) American politician and writer

“When Will We Learn?”, posted one day after 9/11, Antiwar.com, (Sept. 12, 2001).
2000s

World

“Music is so personal to me. I can be myself, and say what I want to say. I feel I'm honest and don't try to hide things. But music enables people to learn about my personality, how I'm evolving. Even if I don't feel comfortable talking about something, I can feel comfortable expressing that same thing through my music.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

"Hilary Duff comes to Manchester on Jan. 27" http://www.seacoastonline.com/2004news/dover/12312004/arts/56606.htm. The Dover Community News. December 31 2004. Retrieved October 25 2006.
On the recording of Hilary Duff (2004), her third album and second non-holiday album.

People , Music , Feeling , Personality

“Argument is conclusive… but… it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may never rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment. For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns, his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.”

Roger Bacon (1220–1292) medieval philosopher and theologian

Cited in: Carol A. Dingle (2000) Memorable Quotations: Philosophers of Western Civilization. p. 21

Truth , Knowledge

“For me," he explains his mammoth project, "it is an obligation to know and learn to understand the various styles living within the guitar, to work with them and pursue them up to a certain point and, when I feel I have learned enough about them, to let them go again. These CDs are a form of pool, a rucksack with everything I have at the moment and what I have focused on.”

Andreas Paolo Perger (1970) Guitarist, Improviser, Composer

Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 1997, Ralf Dombrowski

Feeling , Understanding

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?…I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing; but the man who lives the span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning- that, I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

David Malter to his son, Reuven (p. 217)
The Chosen (1967)

Life , Pain , World , Understanding

“Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Instigations of Ezra Pound (1920), p. 109

“I don't suppose that hard work, discipline, and a perfectionist attitude toward my work did me any harm. They are a big part of my makeup today, as any of my co-workers will tell you. And when life seemed unbearable, I learned to live in my imagination, and to step inside other people's skins- indispensable abilities for an actress.”

Lucille Ball (1911–1989) American actress and businesswoman

Pages 9-10
Love, Lucy (1996)

Life , People , Imagination , Parting

“This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 22, Quantum Computing, Putting qubits to work, p. 203

Law , Hope , Mathematics , Idea

“John King: FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
Mitt Romney: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we're doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we've got to stop doing, because we're borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we're taking in. We cannot —
John King: Including disaster relief, though?
Mitt Romney: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

GOP debate, , quoted in
2011

Money , People , Question , Thinking

“I suggest we learn to love ourselves before it's made illegal.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Morning View (2001)

Love

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Source: Disputed, Hitler Speaks (1940), p. 186

“There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Why would-be engineers end up as English majors, May 21, 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html,
2010s

People , School , Problem

“If there's four Vietcong in a village with knives and punji sticks, we'll bring in a B-52. And I think, sometimes we need to learn to fight smarter instead of to fight richer. And this is what I mean, you know, education, "oh, education's expensive;" no it's not, books are cheap, (the) internet's cheap, we can fight smarter, we can learn. So, that's where resource-to-kill-ratio comes from.”

Max Brooks (1972) American author

Lecture of Opportunity | Max Brooks: World War Z https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nGG5E04cog

Books , Education , Thinking , Fight

“Inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Tractate of Education (1644)

Men , God , Age , Hope

“Multiplication of whole Numbers …Note, that for the more easie solution of this proposition, it were necessary to have in memory the multiplication of the 9 simple Characters among themselves, learning them by rote out of the Table here placed…”

Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer

Disme: the Art of Tenths, Or, Decimall Arithmetike (1608)

Memory

“But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Lucky Jim, 1968

People , Imagination , Sense , Strong

“My mother cannot learn to have any reliance upon my financial judgment or promises. It's partly, I suppose, because she still thinks of me as a child…She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up butter from the spring(house), for fear I won't do it quite right!…This unaccountable daughter who roams the world, borrowing money here and getting shot at there…is a pride, in a way, but a ceaseless apprehension, too.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter to Guy Moyston, (July 18, 1925).

Money , World , Fear , Way

“As the reader is aware, at the cradle of our learning stood the philosophy of Asia Minor and Greece, itself influenced in turn by Indian and Oriental philosophical and religious conceptions. It is the tragedy of this philosophy that, although it was traditionally directed towards the undogmatic acquisition of wisdom and virtue, always regarding the freedom of human rational thought in visionary fashion as the highest good, it nevertheless inevitably led to a mental hardening of the arteries into coercive thought models.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: Prognostics, 1971, p. 57. Chapter 4: Philosophical models of the future http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polak%204.%20Philosophical%20Models.htm

Wisdom , Fashion , Freedom

“A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone… education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one… in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
.. Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if… reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
…These are the principal grounds on which… the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Life , Children , Truth , Education

“They have learned to uncover truths in many forms, and that an answer need not be final.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Truth

“As it is, being a South Indian I used to say my own lines and everybody marveled at it, and then to learn Bhojpuri… Dilipsaab was very helpful.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Why Vyjayanthimala has 'nothing to say' about today's heroines

Help

“you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

World

“I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural…something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually, the way young Frenchmen are…but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just … just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at things in the light they do. I've learned now, and it is a thing which needs learning, the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love.”

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) American author and conservationist

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

Love , Life , Men , Way

“[Armenian] is a rich language, however, and would amply repay any one the trouble of learning it.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

"To Mr. Moore", From the Letters of Lord Byron, 5 December 1816, p. 12.
Lord Byron's Armenian Exercises and Poetry (1870)

“I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts, and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can't be judged only by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgements make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes only response to pain.”

Bill Clinton My Life

My Life (2004), page 15
2000s

Life , Pain , People , Laughter

“They who study mathematiks only to fix their minds, and render them the steadyer to apply to all other things, as there are many who profess to do, are as wise as those who think by rowing boats, to learn to swim.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Prose Observations (Oxford: 1979), p. 4

Thinking , Study

“Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Back to the Dump" (p.414)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Life , Education

“The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Rolling Stone (2 August 1973)
1970s

“Just as a Muslim studies Islam, the Jew has to study Judaism. Everyone has to learn the heritage of his family and the history that dates back thousands of years.”

Lev Leviev (1956) Soviet-born Israeli businessman, philanthropist and investor

Interview, Jewish Chronicle, 7 March 2008 http://thejc.com/home.aspx?AId58607&ATypeId1&searchtrue2&srchstrLev%20leviev&srchtxt1&srchhead1&srchauthor1&srchsandp1&scsrch0

Family , History , Study

“Stalin made mistakes. He made mistakes towards us, for example, in 1927. He made mistakes towards the Yugoslavs too. One cannot advance without mistakes… It is necessary to make mistakes. The party cannot be educated without learning from mistakes. This has great significance.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Said to Enver Hoxha, on his visit to China in 1956, as quoted in Hoxha's (1986) The Artful Albanian, (Chatto & Windus, London), ISBN 0701129700

Education

“At last, after many lives of striving, many lives of working, growing purer and nobler and wiser, life after life, the Soul makes a distinct and clear speaking forth of a will that now has grown strong; and when that will announces itself as a clear and definite purpose, no longer the whisper that aspires, but the word that commands, then that resolute will strikes at the gateway which leads to the Outer Court of the Temple, and strikes with a knocking which none may deny— for it has in it the strength of the Soul that is determined to achieve, and that has learned enough to understand the vastness of the task that it undertakes.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

p. 17

Life , Soul , Understanding , Strong

“Mael, a scion of a royal family of Cambria, was sent in his ninth year to the Abbey of Yvern so that he might there study both sacred and profane learning. At the age of fourteen he renounced his patrimony and took a vow to serve the Lord. His time was divided, according to the rule, between the singing of hymns, the study of grammar, and the meditation of eternal truths.”

Anatole France book Penguin Island

Book I : The Beginnings, Ch. I : Life Of Saint Mael
Penguin Island (1908)

Truth , Age , Family , Study

“As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

In speech http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2623880720070926 to schoolchildren in New York City, urging Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, (September 26, 2007) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ej7ZEnjSeA&feature=related
2000s, 2007

Children

“The characteristic poetic strategy of our time—refine your singularities—is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 37
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Time

“Consolidation didn’t make him a New Yorker, and nothin’ on earth can. A man born in Germany can settle down and become a good New Yorker. So can an Irishman; in fact, the first word an Irish boy learns in the old country is “New York,” and when he grows up and comes here, he is at home right away. Even a Jap or a Chinaman can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklynite never can. p. 41”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 10, Brooklynites Natural-Born Hayseeds

Home , Boy , Country

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

As quoted by Francis Crick in his presentation "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology" http://oregonstate.edu/dept/Special_Collections/subpages/ahp/1995symposium/crick.html (1995).
1990s

Idea

“If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

Change , Falseness

“The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. …As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), X. Revolutions as Changes of World View, p. 114 (3rd edn.)

Books , Way , Change , Dependency

“If you're a child of store owners, if you're brought up in a store, you learn good manners. You have to be genial, well-liked. You're not going to sell a customer if you're rude. You also get with different age groups, and different types of people. So be respectful. Being respectful is very important. You have to learn this.”

Gay Talese (1932) American writer

In an interview with David L. Ulin to Los Angeles Times - Gay Talese talks with David L. Ulin http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/10/gay-talese-talks-with-david-l-ulin.html (October 15, 2010)

People , Age