Quotes about air
page 13

Dave Eggers photo
Omarosa photo

“Sometimes the air is awfully clear here. You can look off to sea and see the soft, warm, raggedy roof of clouds stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can look right on into eternity.”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (22 March 1942); p. 17
To Reach Eternity (1989)

George Chapman photo

“As far as white Aurora's dews are sprinkled through the air.”

George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator

Book VII, line 374, p. 104
The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (1611)

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“This year we must continue to improve the quality of American life. Let us fulfill and improve the great health and education programs of last year, extending special opportunities to those who risk their lives in our armed forces. I urge the House of Representatives to complete action on three programs already passed by the Senate—the Teacher Corps, rent assistance, and home rule for the District of Columbia. In some of our urban areas we must help rebuild entire sections and neighborhoods containing, in some cases, as many as 100,000 people. Working together, private enterprise and government must press forward with the task of providing homes and shops, parks and hospitals, and all the other necessary parts of a flourishing community where our people can come to live the good life. I will offer other proposals to stimulate and to reward planning for the growth of entire metropolitan areas. Of all the reckless devastations of our national heritage, none is really more shameful than the continued poisoning of our rivers and our air. We must undertake a cooperative effort to end pollution in several river basins, making additional funds available to help draw the plans and construct the plants that are necessary to make the waters of our entire river systems clean, and make them a source of pleasure and beauty for all of our people. To attack and to overcome growing crime and lawlessness, I think we must have a stepped-up program to help modernize and strengthen our local police forces. Our people have a right to feel secure in their homes and on their streets—and that right just must be secured. Nor can we fail to arrest the destruction of life and property on our highways.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Paul Glover photo

“These new green laws, organizations and personal styles show understanding that, no matter how super our computers, we will never invent substitutes for food, water and air, that our nation will progress or erode with its soil, that ultimately the land is the law of the land.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/8702.html (“Where Does Ithaca’s Food Come From?”), The Grapevine, cover story 1987-02-20

Sukarno photo
Thomas Müntzer photo

“The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property— the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.”

Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525) early Reformation-era German pastor who was a rebel leader during the German Peasants' War

Letter to the Princes, as cited in Transforming Faith Communities: A Comparative Study of Radical Christianity, p. 173 http://books.google.com/books?id=6FRJAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA173


(de) Sieh zu, die Grundsuppe des Wuchers, der Dieberei und Räuberei sein unser Herrn und Fürsten, nehmen alle Kreaturen zum Eigentum: die Fisch im Wasser, die Vögel in der Luft, das Gewächs auf Erden muß alles ihr sein (Jes. 5). Darüber lassen sie dann Gottes Gebot ausgehen unter die Armen und sprechen: »Gott hat geboten: Du sollst nicht stehlen.

Joseph Strutt photo
Sten Nadolny photo
Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji photo

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Louis Brandeis photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
George W. Bush photo

“Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. Americans sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.”

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

In response to reporter Brian Williams' question as to whether, after 9/11, the president should have asked all Americans to sacrifice for their country, NBC News interview, August 29, 2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNIOmbm3KYg&feature=related
2000s, 2006

John Ruysbroeck photo
Conrad Aiken photo

“We flow, we descend, we turn... and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air...”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

George William Curtis photo

“Hamilton doubted the cohesive force of the Constitution to make a nation. He was so far right, for no constitution can make a nation. That is a growth, and the vigor and intensity of our national growth transcended our own suspicions. It was typified by our material progress. General Hamilton died in 1804. In 1812, during the last war with England, the largest gun used was a thirty-six pounder. In the war just ended it was a two-thousand pounder. The largest gun then weighed two thousand pounds. The largest shot now weighs two thousand pounds. Twenty years after Hamilton died the traveler toiled painfully from the Hudson to Niagara on canal-boats and in wagons, and thence on horseback to Kentucky. Now he whirls from the Hudson to the Mississippi upon thousands of miles of various railroads, the profits of which would pay the interest of the national debt. So by a myriad influences, as subtle as the forces of the air and earth about a growing tree, has our nationality grown and strengthened, striking its roots to the centre and defying the tempest. Could the musing statesman who feared that Virginia or New York or Carolina or Massachusetts might rend the Union have heard the voice of sixty years later, it would have said to him, 'The babe you held in your arms has grown to be a man, who walks and runs and leaps and works and defends himself. I am no more a vapor, I am condensed. I am no more a germ, I am a life. I am no more a confederation, I am a nation.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

“Idmon, Phoebus' son,… to him the Father gave by his ordinance the foreknowledge of omens divine, whether he inquired of flames or close-viewed entrails smooth, or of the air thick with fowls that cannot lie.”
Phoebeius Idmon, ... cui genitor tribuit monitu praenoscere divum omina, seu flammas seu lubrica comminus exta seu plenum certis interroget aera pinnis.

Source: Argonautica, Book I, Lines 228 and 231–233

James K. Morrow photo
John Milton photo
Bill Maher photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Rachel Carson photo

“The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.”

Chapter 2, Page 6 http://books.google.com/books?id=5hR_i1rNzAYC&q=%22The+most+alarming+of+all+man's+assaults+upon+the+environment+is+the+contamination+of+air+earth+rivers+and+sea+with+dangerous+and+even+lethal+materials%22&pg=PA6#v=onepage
Silent Spring (1962)

Gary Snyder photo
Daniel Inouye photo

“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”

Daniel Inouye (1924–2012) American politician from Hawaii, Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran

Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition (Iran-Contra hearings) (1987)
Video of Inouye's excerpt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbFphX5zb8w
Daniel K. Inouye: Reference of excerpt http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Daniel-K.-Inouye
The Mission of Sheltron: Reference http://www.sheltron.us/sheltron/introduction.html

Jay-Z photo

“I'm still here mon frere I know the cross I bear,
They like, that's why they call you Hov? I'm like yea
I'm like air, little shots go through me, won't tear
One tissue no tears, no tissue not an issue”

Jay-Z (1969) American rapper, businessman, entrepreneur, record executive, songwriter, record producer and investor

Dig a Hole
Kingdom Come (2006)

Mike Oldfield photo
Michael Halliday photo
Donald Barthelme photo
Paul Cézanne photo

“Anyone who wants to paint should read Bacon. He defined the artists as homo additus naturae... Bacon had the right idea, but listen Monsieur Vollard, speaking of nature, the English philosopher, [Bacon] didn't for-see our open-air school, nor that other calamity which has followed close upon its heels: open-air indoors.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard in museum The Luxembourg, Paris 1897 - standing before the 'Olympia' of Manet; as quoted in Cézanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 36
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

Joseph Rodman Drake photo
Wallace Stevens photo
Tom Kean, Jr. photo

“Spring is in the air. In some places, that means longer days, blooming flowers and Opening Day. Here in New Jersey, the coming of spring means it’s the time of year when Trenton politicians ask us for more money. Not surprisingly, this year is no different.”

Tom Kean, Jr. (1968) Member of the New Jersey General Assembly and State Senate

On Jon Corzine's Budget (April 6, 2006); "The Corzine Budget: Same Old Tax and Spend ", Tom's Blog" (April 6, 2006) http://tomkean.com/today/index.cfm?e=user.about.blog&messageID=76.

Joanna Newsom photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
John Bright photo

“I am for "peace, retrenchment, and reform" — the watchword of the great Liberal party 30 years ago. Whosoever may abandon the cause I shall never pronounce another Shibboleth, but as long as the old flag floats in the air I shall be found a steadfast soldier in the foremost ranks”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech (28 April 1859); this phrase was first used by William IV in his speech from the Throne for the Whig government of Earl Grey (17 November 1830), quoted in The Times (29 April 1859), p. 6.
1850s

Kameron Hurley photo
John the Evangelist photo
W. H. Auden photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Johan Jongkind photo

“I have another painting finished, a view near Rotterdam, and then another in process, and very far along. I made them from nature, that is to say I made watercolors [in open air] after which I made my [oil]-paintings.”

Johan Jongkind (1819–1891) Dutch painter and printmaker regarded as a forerunner of Impressionism

In a letter to his Dutch friend Eugène Smits, 22 Nov. 1856; as quoted in Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, by Suzanne Boorsch, John Marciari; Yale University. Art Gallery, p. 246 - note 7

Douglas MacArthur photo
Nat King Cole photo
Shraddha Kapoor photo

“I am a die hard fan of dancing and would take my dad's clothes and my mom's clothes and dance in front of the mirror. I loved my dad's clothes as they had a lot of glitter in them. My whole family speaks in this sing song way and, for a short period of time, I would practice these air hostess speeches. While my dad was comfortable with me being an actor, the only thing he said no was to becoming an air hostess.”

Shraddha Kapoor (1987) Indian film actress & Singer

I was most upset with the way people were talking about my dad: Shraddha via The Times of India (April 21, 2013) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news-interviews/I-was-most-upset-with-the-way-people-were-talking-about-my-dad-Shraddha/articleshow/19649087.cms

Lewis Pugh photo
Thomas Gray photo

“Iron sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

The Fatal Sisters http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=fsio (1761), line 3

Henry Van Dyke photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Carol Ann Duffy photo

“I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars.”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Death and the Moon, from Feminine Gospels (2002).

William Cobbett photo

“I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects…. Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Source: The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1933), Ch. 8, p. 99.

James Hamilton photo
James Allen photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo
Stanley A. McChrystal photo
Patrick Modiano photo
George William Russell photo
Stanley A. McChrystal photo
Louis C.K. photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Hugh Laurie photo
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Charles Lindbergh photo
John Townsend Trowbridge photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo
William Morris photo

“To happy folk
All heaviest words no more of meaning bear
Than far-off bells saddening the Summer air.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"The Hill of Venus".
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)

E. C. George Sudarshan photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Alvin C. York photo
Elizabeth Bentley (writer) photo
Thomas Nashe photo

“Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us.”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 1590-1594.

Jacob Bronowski photo

“The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived — Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

The Reader's Digest (1964) Vol. 84; also quoted in Structure and Plan (1974) by Glen A. Love, p. 154

Robert Fisk photo
S. I. Hayakawa photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Statius photo

“Then they invite her to join the dance and approach the holy rites, and make room for her in their ranks and rejoice to be near her. Just as Idalian birds, cleaving the soft clouds and long since gathered in the sky or in their homes, if a strange bird from some distant region has joined them wing to wing, are at first all filled with amaze and fear; then nearer and nearer they fly, and while yet in the air have made him one of them and hover joyfully around with favouring beat of pinions and lead him to their lofty resting-places.”
Dehinc sociare choros castisque accedere sacris hortantur ceduntque loco et contingere gaudent. qualiter Idaliae volucres, ubi mollia frangunt nubila, iam longum caeloque domoque gregatae, si iunxit pinnas diversoque hospita tractu venit avis, cunctae primum mirantur et horrent; mox propius propiusque volant, atque aere in ipso paulatim fecere suam plausuque secundo circumeunt hilares et ad alta cubilia ducunt.

Source: Achilleid, Book I, Line 370

Laurence Sterne photo
Gregory Benford photo

““The peers just fill the air with their speeches.”
“And from what I've seen, vice versa.””

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 5 (p. 46)

Peter Medawar photo
Finley Peter Dunne photo

“Th' Turkey bur-rd's th' rale cause iv Thanksgivin'. He's th' naytional air. Abolish th' Turkey an' ye desthroy th' tie that binds us as wan people.”

Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) author

"Mr. Dooley on Thanksgiving," http://books.google.com/books?id=bTtaAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Th+Turkey+bur-rd's+th+rale+cause+iv+Thanksgivin+He's+th+naytional+air+Abolish+th+Turkey+an+ye+desthroy+th+tie+that+binds+us+as+wan+people%22&pg=PT126#v=onepage syndicated column (25 November 1900)
Thanksgiving http://books.google.com/books?id=EO0pAAAAYAAJ&q=%22th+Turkey+bur-rd-s+th+rale+cause+iv+Thanksgivin+he-s+th+naytional+air+abolish+th+turkey+an+ye+desthroy+th+tie+that+binds+us+as+wan+people%22&pg=PA128#v=onepage, Mr. Dooley's Opinions (1901)

Vitruvius photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Václav Havel photo

“I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Interview for the French newspaper Le Monde (29 April 1999); this statement is considered the source of the term w:Humanitarian bombing", frequently used about the Kosovo War.

Joanna Newsom photo
Koenraad Elst photo
John Oliver photo

“It's like catching an ice cream cone out of the air because a child was hit by a car.”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

" Brexit Update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0ac5HUpDU#t=0m48s" (ff. 0:00:48), June 27, 2016; on David Cameron announcing his resignation after the Brexit referendum.
Last Week Tonight (2014–present)

Edmund Spenser photo

“There's a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That's noted for fresh air and fun.”

Marriott Edgar (1880–1951) British poet

"The Lion and Albert", line 1.
Albert, 'Arold and Others (1938)

Jorge Luis Borges photo

“I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour's chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian… But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange because I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren't a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he'll say, 'Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever. Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian… Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, 'That's the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.' But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Richard Burgin, Conversation with Jorge Luis Borges, pages 92-93.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

Ethan Allen photo