Quotes about accuracy page 2
Maria Edgeworth book Castle Rackrent
Castle Rackrent (1800), Preface; Tales and Novels, vol. 1, p. 9.
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
As quoted in Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green
Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian
Woo, Elaine (April 23, 2014). "Adrianne Wadewitz dies at 37; helped diversify Wikipedia" http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-adrianne-wadewitz-20140424,0,1077455.story. Los Angeles Times. <br class="br">About
Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Welsh poet
Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 1, p. 353.
Criticism
“Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
"Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty." — Charles Simmons, Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (1852), p. 20: "Accuracy"
Misattributed
Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian
Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 5 : Impact and Consequences : The Afterlife of the Castle
Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist
"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) <br class="br">If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter
Quote in a letter to his son Lucien, 8 Mai 1903, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 149
Quote of Pissarro - referring to the writer of the book Impressionist Painting, it Genesis and Development, published in 1904
after 1900
Alfred Stillé book The Essentials of the Art of Medicine
The Essentials of the Art of Medicine. 1897. p 26.
Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria
Source: The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian ex-Chancellor’s account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, 1971, p. 53
Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman
Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 20 (in 1964 edition)
Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator
Autobiography, part V http://gspauldino.com/part5.html, gspauldino.com
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.199-200
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1880s, Reminiscences (1881)
Context: In several respects, I consider my father as one of the most interesting men I have known. He was a man of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) with, all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising accuracy you often would not guess whence; brief, energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most perfect picture — definite, clear, not in ambitious colors, but in full white sunliglit — of all the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which, did not become almost ocularly so. Never shall we again hear such speech as that was. The whole district knew of it and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how other-wise to express the feeling it gave them; emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly of humorous effect.
Paul Carus (1852–1919) American philosopher
Homilies of Science p. 15
Homilies of Science 1892
Context: Some imagine that science is limited to the lower sorts of natural facts only. Religious and moral facts have been too little heeded by our scientists. Thus people came to think that science and religion move in two different spheres. That is not so. The facts of our soul-life must be investigated and stated with scientific accuracy, and our clergy should be taught to purify religion with the criticism of scientific methods. They need not fear for their religious ideals. So far as they are true, and their moral kernel is true, they will not suffer in the crucible of science. Religion will not lose one iota of its grandeur, if it is based upon a scientific foundation; all that it will lose is the errors that are connected with religion and the sooner they are lost the better for us.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist
A Little Conserva-tive (1936)
Context: For more than a quarter of a century I have been known, in so far as I was known at all, as a radical. It came about in this way: I was always interested in the rerum cognoscere causas, liking to get down below the surface of things and examine their roots. This was purely a natural disposition, reflecting no credit whatever on me, for I was born with it.... Therefore when the time came for me to describe myself by some convenient label, I took one which marked the quality that I thought chiefly differentiated me from most of the people I saw around me. They habitually gave themselves a superficial account of things, which was all very well if it suited them to do so, but I preferred always to give myself a root-account of things, if I could get it. Therefore, by way of a general designation, it seemed appropriate to label myself a radical. Likewise, also, when occasion required that I should label myself with reference to particular social theories or doctrines, the same decent respect for accuracy led me to describe myself as an anarchist, an individualist, and a single-taxer.
Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist
Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 6
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Context: Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case. Wishing to point out this type of misconception, we quote P. T. Mora, an American biochemist, who writes about polysaccharides contained in the cell membrane: To admit that the action of enzymes and, enzymes and, more important, that their foundation is directed by the genetic code should not permit one to mantain that the information was selected by evolution (the consequence is mistaken for the cause); no one knows anything about this.
James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) Indian judge
Source: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873-1874), Ch. 4
Context: Men have an all but incurable propensity to try to prejudge all the great questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices upon their language. Law, in many cases, means not only a command, but a beneficent command. Liberty means not the bare absence of restraint, but the absence of injurious restraint. Justice means not mere impartiality in applying general rules to particular cases, but impartiality in applying beneficent general rules to particular cases. Some people half consciously use the word "true" as meaning useful as well as true. Of course language can never be made absolutely neutral and colourless; but unless its ambiguities are understood, accuracy of thought is impossible, and the injury done is proportionate to the logical force and general vigour of character of those who are misled.
Prologue as translated in Readings in European History, Vol. I (1904) edited by James Harvey Robinson, p. 450
Sic et Non (1120)
Context: There are many seeming contradictions and even obscurities in the innumerable writings of the church fathers. Our respect for their authority should not stand in the way of an effort on our part to come at the truth. The obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and may be discussed without impugning the good faith and insight of the fathers. A writer may use different terms to mean the same thing, in order to avoid a monotonous repetition of the same word. Common, vague words may be employed in order that the common people may understand; and sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement. Poetical, figurative language is often obscure and vague.
Not infrequently apocryphal works are attributed to the saints. Then, even the best authors often introduce the erroneous views of others and leave the reader to distinguish between the true and the false. Sometimes, as Augustine confesses in his own case, the fathers ventured to rely upon the opinions of others.
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer
"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí
Context: The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.
Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran
Excerpted Comments Made by Reza Pahlavi of Iran to a Group of Prominent American Business Leaders in New York City http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=414&page=2, Dec. 9, 2009. <br class="br">Speeches, 2008-2009
John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist
Quoted in New Cold War & looming threats, Frontline, India https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article25661115.ece (21 December 2018)
Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist
[Elst, Koenraad, Rao, Prof. Ramesh N., Gujarat after Godhra: real violence, selective outrage, 2003, Har Anand Publications, https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GuJtAAAAMAAJ, With]
Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist
Annie Besant, Forward
The Masters and the Path (1925)
Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist
By Harold Hoteliing a well-known US mathematical statistician, in 1938 quoted in "Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in India."
Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian
He avoided foreign terms which rushed in like a flood with the revival of learning, especially in proper names (as Melanchthon for Schwarzerd, Aurifaber for Goldschmid, Oecolampadius for Hausschein, Camerarius for Kammermeister). He enriched the vocabulary with such beautiful words as holdselig, Gottseligkeit.
Erasmus Alber, a contemporary of Luther, called him the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.
Luther's version is an idiomatic reproduction of the Bible in the very spirit of the Bible. It brings out the whole wealth, force, and beauty of the German language. It is the first German classic, as King James's version is the first English classic. It anticipated the golden age of German literature as represented by Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,—all of them Protestants, and more or less indebted to the Luther-Bible for their style. The best authority in Teutonic philology pronounces his language to be the foundation of the new High German dialect on account of its purity and influence, and the Protestant dialect on account of its freedom which conquered even Roman Catholic authors.
Notable examples of Luther's renderings of Hebrew and Greek words
Source: The same word silverling occurs once in the English version, Isa. 7:23, and is retained in the R. V. of 1885. The German Probebibel retains it in this and other passages, as Gen. 20:16; Judg. 9:4, etc.
Source: See Grimm, Luther's Uebersetzung der Apocryphen, in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1883, pp. 376-400. He judges that Luther's version of Ecclesiasticus (Jesus Sirach) is by no means a faithful translation, but a model of a free and happy reproduction from a combination of the Greek and Latin texts.
June Downey (1875–1932) American psychologist
August 1909, Popular Science Monthly Volume 75, Article:"The Varificational Factor in Handwriting", p. 150-151
about Handwriting
Samir D. Mathur Indian physicist
[What the information paradox is not., arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.0302, 2011, https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.0302]
Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science
Introductory. Pearson refers the reader to William Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1815) "General View of Poetry".
The Grammar of Science (1900)
“But those who are careless of accuracy in small things soon begin to neglect the most important.”
Plutarch book Parallel Lives
Aemilius, sec. 3
Parallel Lives
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician
Source: 'Democracy on its Trial', Quarterly Review, 110, 1861, p. 274
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 8, “A Game of Vampires” (p. 244)