
„How potent is the fancy! People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination.“
— Geoffrey Chaucer English poet 1343 - 1400
Source: The Canterbury Tales
— Geoffrey Chaucer English poet 1343 - 1400
— Charles Sanders Peirce American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist 1839 - 1914
Vol. VI, par. 286
Collected Papers (1931-1958)
— Arthur Conan Doyle, book The Valley of Fear
Source: The Valley of Fear
— Pierre Bonnard French painter and printmaker 1867 - 1947
— Alan Turing British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist 1912 - 1954
Variant: Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
— Nancy Mitford British writer 1904 - 1973
Source: Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels
— Lu Xun Chinese novelist and essayist 1881 - 1936
Original: (zh-CN) 革命是要人生,不是要人死!
Source: [citation needed]
— Jonathan Davis Heavy metal singer, frontman for Korn 1971
— Tim Berners-Lee British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web 1955
From An Insight, An Idea with Tim Berners-Lee http://www.weforum.org/sessions/summary/insight-idea-tim-berners-lee at 27:27 (25 January 2013)
Context: When somebody has learned how to program a computer … You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.
— Alfred Austin British writer and poet 1835 - 1913
Prose Papers on Poetry Macmillan & Co 1910.
Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)
— John Lennon English singer and songwriter 1940 - 1980
You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one;
I hope some day you will join us,
And the world will live as one.
"Imagine" (song)
Lyrics, Imagine (1971 album)
— Julius Streicher German politician 1885 - 1946
Deswegen müssen die Völker sterben, damit der Jude leben kann. Er hetzt die Völker zum Krieg, um aus dem Brudermord der weißen Rasse Gewinn zu ziehen.
Im Weltkrieg mussten 11 Millionen Nichtjuden sterben. Der Jude aber war der Sieger.
05/20/1932, speech in the Hercules Hall in Nuremberg ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)
— Mitt Romney American businessman and politician 1947
In response to the question, "How would you run against Hillary and Bill Clinton in November?", MSNBC, Republican Presidential Candidate Debate, FL, 2007-01-25
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President
— Jonathan Safran Foer, book Everything Is Illuminated
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
— Northrop Frye Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912 - 1991
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
— Sheri S. Tepper American fiction writer 1929 - 2016
Strange Horizons interview (2008)
Context: I say the entities that are named as gods by Earthians are imagined into being by Earthians as personal helper-buddies, justifiers, threateners (my god can beat up your god). They don't "run on" anything any more than a mirror image "runs on" anything. They merely reflect what people want them to be. "I want to have more children than my brother does, thus proving I'm a better man than he is, so my god tells me I should have a big family." "I want to screw women, so my god is going to give me seventy virgins I can screw for all eternity." The "gods" in The Margarets who could really do anything were actually an old, highly evolved race of real people. The others were only reflections. The real God, who may really exist, is outside all that, perhaps watching closely, perhaps merely asleep for a few trillion years while the experiment runs out.
We — thee and me as individuals — will never know that God, though after a few trillion years, the universe as a whole may come to understand that God.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, book The Discovery of India
The Discovery of India (1946)
Context: The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.
— Warren Farrell, book The Myth of Male Power
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 119.
— Muhammad Ali African American boxer, philanthropist and activist 1942 - 2016
— Neal Shusterman American novelist 1962
Source: UnDivided