“Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point.”

—  Samuel Butler

The Art of Propagating Opinion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri
Context: Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.

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Samuel Butler 232
novelist 1835–1902

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Samuel Butler photo

“Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Art of Propagating Opinion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

“It is an arithmetic, moreover, which cannot be denied even though we nearly all try to deny it. The arithmetic is simply this: Any positive rate of growth whatever eventually carries a human population to an unacceptable magnitude, no matter how small the rate of growth may be unless the rate of population growth can be reduced to zero before the population reaches an unacceptable magnitude. There is a famous theorem in economics, one which I call the dismal theorem, which states that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the population will grow until it is sufficiently miserable and starving to check its growth. There is a second, even worse theorem which I call the utterly dismal theorem. It says that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery than before and hence to increase the total sum of human misery.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The meaning of the twentieth century: the great transition, 1964, p. 126

Alexander Graham Bell photo

“You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Bell Telephone Talk (1901)
Context: You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

Lawrence H. Summers photo

“No free country will ever again have anything like the 90 percent tax rates that we had in this country. Past a certain point, high marginal tax rates are, indeed, terribly destructive.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal (April 5, 1998) "Rich now pay more in taxes", Mobile Register, p. F1.
1990s

Ray Bradbury photo

“Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)

Oscar Wilde photo

“Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II
Context: England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

Franz Kafka photo

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.”

Franz Kafka book The Trial

5; variant translations:
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
As quoted in The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols (1959) by Max Lerner, p. 452; also in Wait Without Idols (1964) by Gabriel Vahanian, p, 216; in Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation (1995) by Vivian Heller, 39; in "The Sheltering Sky" (1949) by Paul Bowles, p. 213; and in the poem "Father and Son" by Delmore Schwartz.
There is a point of no return. This point has to be reached.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Variant: From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
Source: The Trial

“The significant problems of living organisms are seldom those in which one can rigidly maintain constant all but two variables. Living things are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways. Often they present situations in which the essentially important quantities are either non-quantitative, or have at any rate eluded identification or measurement up to the moment. Thus biological and medical problems often involve the consideration of a most complexly organized whole.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 536

“We have been born into a certain Culture, at a certain phase of its organic development, we have certain gifts. These condition the earthly task which we must perform. The metaphysical task is beyond any conditioning, for it would have been the same in any age anywhere. The earthly task is merely the form of the higher task, its organic vehicle.”

Francis Parker Yockey book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics

Source: Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948), Chapter titled: The Imperative of Our Age, p. 111 Noontide Press edition.

Salman Rushdie photo

“There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

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