Quotes about basics
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Paul Ryan photo
Henry Kissinger photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo
Michael Bloomberg photo
Richard Strauss photo

“Very fine, but why do you put so many wrong notes in? Basically, it is all built on simple triads.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Other sources

Adyashanti photo
Kirk Hammett photo
Ray Comfort photo
Irvine Welsh photo
Lil Wayne photo
H.V. Sheshadri photo
William Perry photo
Robert Crumb photo

“My generation comes from a world that has been molded by crass TV programs, movies, comic books, popular music, advertisements and commercials. My brain is a huge garbage dump of all this stuff and it is this, mainly, that my work comes out of, for better or for worse. I hope that whatever synthesis I make of all this crap contains something worthwhile, that it's something other than just more smarmy entertainment—or at least, that it's genuine high quality entertainment. I also hope that perhaps it's revealing of something, maybe. On the other hand, I want to avoid becoming pretentious in the eagerness to give my work deep meanings! I have an enormous ego and must resist the urge to come on like a know-it-all. Some of the imagery in my work is sorta scary because I'm basically a fearful, pessimistic person. I'm always seeing the predatory nature of the universe, which can harm you or kill you very easily and very quickly, no matter how well you watch your step. The way I see it, we are all just so much chopped liver. We have this great gift of human intelligence to help us pick our way through this treacherous tangle, but unfortunately we don't seem to value it very much. Most of us are not brought up in environments that encourage us to appreciate and cultivate our intelligence. To me, human society appears mostly to be a living nightmare of ignorant, depraved behavior. We're all depraved, me included. I can't help it if my work reflects this sordid view of the world. Also, I feel that I have to counteract all the lame, hero-worshipping crap that is dished out by the mass-media in a never-ending deluge.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 363

Noam Chomsky photo
Aldo Leopold photo
Matt Ridley photo
Robert Cheeke photo
Francis Heylighen photo
Stephen Colbert photo

“After acting for so many years, do you know who you are anymore? Because actors are liars basically, you lie about who you are to an audience.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Stephen Colbert to Viggo Mortensen, The colbert Report September 18, 2014

Clifford D. Simak photo

“Neutrinos are fundamental subatomic particles produced in nuclear reactions, like those in the sun. We always talk about the fact that we can’t see neutrinos or dark matter and that basically they’re invisible, but if you think about it from the other side, we’re also invisible to them.”

Evalyn Gates (1958)

Quoted in Most Interesting People 2012: Evalyn Gates http://clevelandmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=E73ABD6180B44874871A91F6BA5C249C&nm=Article+Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=1578600D80804596A222593669321019&tier=4&id=1A0E4E5D5FA548418C5BA0BFFE28C6A8, Cleveland Magazine (January 2012)

Manisha Koirala photo
Gary S. Becker photo
Sathya Sai Baba photo
Benjamin Graham photo
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk photo

“The nation has placed its faith in the precept that all laws should be inspired by actual needs here on earth as a basic fact of national life.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

As quoted in A World View of Criminal Justice (2005) by Richard K. Vogler, p. 116

Nikolai Krylenko photo

“The basic mistake in eyery case is made by those women who consider 'freedom of abortion' as one of their civil rights. We need new fighters - they built this life, we need people.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

On penalizing abortion in 1936. Quoted in Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, 1993

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Alex Jones photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Tsunetomo Yamamoto photo
Gerald Ford photo

“Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.”

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter II : Consciousness I: Loss Of Reality, p. 36

Lawrence Eagleburger photo
James Wilks photo

“I started out like most people just finding my local martial arts gym … and it's quite easy to start thinking that whatever you're in is the best thing that you can do, so … I assumed that Taekwondo is the best. … I started thinking, “Well, maybe there's something else that the other arts have offer,” so I started cross-training. Anyway, that got me into competing in mixed martial arts. So, I thought my diet was pretty good … and it was until I got injured … that I actually had some time to sit back and really analyze what I was eating, and I realized I hadn't applied the same scrutiny to my diet as I had to the martial arts training. So I saw a parallel there, that in martial arts there's a lot of nonsense out there, people teaching stuff that really doesn't work, and I'd realized that and started finding the truth in martial arts, and basically I realized I hadn't found the truth in nutrition, so last year I spent over 1,000 hours looking at peer reviewed medical science and realized that a plant-based diet is superior and optimal for health and athletic performance.”

James Wilks (1978) English martial artist

Speech at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo, in Woodland Hills, California (October 12-15, 2012). Video in “MMA Ultimate Fighter - James "Lighting" Wilks - Is Vegan”, in VegSource.com http://www.vegsource.com/news/2012/12/mma-ultimate-fighter---james-lighting-wilks---is-vegan-video.html.

Tenzin Gyatso photo

“If I say, "I am a monk." or "I am a Buddhist," these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

"Kindness and Compassion" p. 47.
The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness (1990)

George Galloway photo
Joe Satriani photo
Claudia Alexander photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart graduation commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSOOYx6wYM, .
2010s

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh photo

“The goal of providing basic literacy and education to all the world’s people is still the most basic development challenge.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

October 14, 2003, at the World Congress –Engineering and Digital Divide, Tunisia.

Václav Havel photo
Erik Naggum photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Pete Doherty photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“Continuous distributions are basic to the theory of probability and statistics, and the calculus is necessary to handle them with any ease.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“The actual effect of Rawls’s theory is to undercut theoretically any straightforward appeal to egalitarianism. Egalitarianism has the advantage that gross failure to comply with its basic principles is not difficult to monitor, There are, to be sure, well-known and unsettled issues about comparability of resources and about whether resources are really the proper objects for egalitarians to be concerned with, but there can be little doubt that if person A in a fully monetarized society has ten thousand times the monetary resources of person B, then under normal circumstances the two are not for most politically relevant purposes “equal.” Rawls’s theory effectively shifts discussion away from the utilitarian discussion of the consequences of a certain distribution of resources, and also away from an evaluation of distributions from the point of view of strict equality; instead, he focuses attention on a complex counterfactual judgment. The question is not “Does A have grossly more than B?”—a judgment to which within limits it might not be impossible to get a straightforward answer—but rather the virtually unanswerable “Would B have even less if A had less?” One cannot even begin to think about assessing any such claim without making an enormous number of assumptions about scarcity of various resources, the form the particular economy in question had, the preferences, and in particular the incentive structure, of the people who lived in it and unless one had a rather robust and detailed economic theory of a kind that few people will believe any economist today has. In a situation of uncertainty like this, the actual political onus probandi in fact tacitly shifts to the have-nots; the “haves” lack an obvious systematic motivation to argue for redistribution of the excess wealth they own, or indeed to find arguments to that conclusion plausible. They don't in the same way need to prove anything; they, ex hypothesi, “have” the resources in question: “Beati possidentes.””

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” pp. 22-23.
Outside Ethics (2005)

Nick Griffin photo
Everett Dean Martin photo

“Its aim is to “put something over” on people, with or without their knowledge or consent… neither truth nor the basic values of civilization get a fair hearing.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 142

Colleen Fitzpatrick photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Stephen Harper photo

“[S]ome basic facts about Canada that are relevant to my talk… Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

Dinesh D'Souza photo
Edwin Boring photo

“Introspectionism got its ism because the protesting new schools needed a clear and stable contrasting background against which to exhibit their novel features. No proponent of introspection a the basic method of psychology ever called himself an introspectionist.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 172 ; Cited in: Kurt Danziger, "The history of introspection reconsidered." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.3 (1980): 241-262.

George Carlin photo
Dylan Moran photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.
I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable …”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 49

George Ellis photo

“The basic viewpoint taken here is that physical theory must explain not only what happens in carefully controlled laboratory experiments, but also the commonplace features of life around us, for which we have a huge amount of evidence in our daily lives.”

George Ellis (1939) cosmologist from South Africa

"On the limits of quantum theory: Contextuality and the quantum–classical cut", Annals of Physics 327 (2012) 1890–1932

Lee Kuan Yew photo

“Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 27.

Peter L. Berger photo

“Secularization theory is a term that was used in the fifties and sixties by a number of social scientists and historians. Basically, it had a very simple proposition. It could be stated in one sentence. Modernity inevitably produces a decline of religion.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Peter L. Berger, Gregor Thuswaldner. " A Conversation with Peter L. Berger "How My Views Have Changed http://thecresset.org/2014/Lent/Thuswaldner_L14.html," at thecresset.org, Lent 2014, Vol LXXVII, No. 3, pp 16-21

Rob Enderle photo

“Intel has a long an ugly history of behaving unethically, mostly against competitors like AMD and more recently Qualcomm (its partner in this, Apple, was just highlighted as being basically anti-innovation).”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Intel's Biggest Problems to Fix: Ethics, Loyalty, Priorities https://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/intels-biggest-problems-to-fix-ethics-loyalty-priorities.html in IT Business Edge (25 June 2018)

Francis Escudero photo
E. C. George Sudarshan photo
James Burke (science historian) photo
Bruce Timm photo
Edward R. Murrow photo
Paul Keating photo
Jack Vance photo
Joni Madraiwiwi photo
Dave Matthews photo

“Every day things change, but basically they stay the same.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Seek Up
Remember Two Things (1993)

Larry Wall photo

“I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710281816.KAA29614@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Lee Smolin photo