Quotes about understanding

A collection of quotes on the topic of understanding.

„The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.“

— Joseph Goebbels Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister 1897 - 1945
1930s, Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).Translated as “Those Damned Nazis: Why a Workers Party? “Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)

Sense

„The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put into the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the field.“

— Bartolomé de las Casas Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer 1474 - 1566
History of the Indies (1561)

Freedom

„when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.“

— George Steiner American writer 1929 - 2020

Way, World

„But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.“

— Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

People

„There are no buildings that have been built by chance, remote from the human society where they have grown and its needs, hopes and understandings, even as there are no arbitrary lines and motiveless forms in the work of the masons. The life and existence of every great, beautiful and useful building, as well as its relation to the place where it has been built, often bears within itself complex and mysterious drama and history.“

— Ivo Andrič, The Bridge on the Drina
The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 2

Life, Relation ships, Hope, Beauty

„I say the Arabs must leave Israel, precisely because I believe if the Arabs stay, they'll become the 'good Arabs' as I understand the term.“

— Meir Kahane American/Israeli political activist and rabbi 1932 - 1990
G-d's Law: an Interview with Rabbi Meir Kahane https://web.archive.org/web/20090219141224/http://kahane.org/meir/interview.htm

„When you have empathy toward your opponents, it helps you destroy them quicker. Because you understand exactly who they are. You understand what buttons to push. You understand if they're insecure, if they fear embarrassment. And you can really hit those buttons to strike a nerve.“

— Kobe Bryant American basketball player 1978 - 2020

Help, Fear

„You have the opportunity to be more than spectators, you can be actors in the revolution, writing about it, expressing yourselves about it. And the generations to come, what will they ask of you? You might produce magnificent artistic works from a technical point of view, but if you were to tell someone from the future generation, 100 years from bow, that a writer, an intellectual, lived in the era of the revolution and did not write about the revolution, and was not a part of the revolution, it would be difficult for a person in the future to understand this. In the years to come there will be so many people who will want to paint about the revolution, to write about the the revolution, to express themselves on the revolution, compiling data an information in order to know what it was like, what happened, how we used to live.“

— Fidel Castro former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba 1926 - 2016
Words to Intellectuals (1961), Fidel Castro Reader, pp. 238

Parting, People, Future, Personality

„The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot understand it“

— Ted Dekker, book House

Light

„It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!“

— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
Context: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.

Dependency

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„Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.“

— Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

„Even the wisest among us do not possess complete knowledge of every subject; however, they acquire a deep understanding regarding the limits of their knowledge. Acknowledge, the extent of your knowledge.

RJ Intindola – (Gandolfo) – 1994“

— RJ Intindola (Gandolfo)

Knowledge

„We have to understand the emergency of the situation. Our leadership has failed us. Young people must hold older generations accountable for the mess they have created. We need to get angry, and transform that anger into action.“

— Greta Thunberg Swedish climate change activist 2003
2018, Twitter post https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1076890299773976582 (23 December 2018)

People, Anger

„You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.“

— Greta Thunberg Swedish climate change activist 2003
2019, "You did not act in time" (April 2019)

Falseness, Hope, Suffering, Children

„It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.“

— William Godwin English journalist, political philosopher and novelist 1756 - 1836
Context: It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer vol. 1, p. 370 (1803)

„I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.“

— John Cage American avant-garde composer 1912 - 1992
1980s, Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (1988) Conversing with Cage

Idea, People

„Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam egestas wisi a erat. Morbi imperdiet, mauris ac auctor dictum.“

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