Quotes about comprehension
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Mao Zedong photo

“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together?”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Guerilla Warfare http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/ch06.htm (1937), Chapter 6 - "The Political Problems of Guerilla Warfare"
This is usually aphorized as "The people are the sea that the revolutionary swims in," or an equivalent.

Albert Einstein photo

“No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.”

Es ist das schönste Los einer physikalischen Theorie, wenn sie selbst zur Aufstellung einer umfassenden Theorie den Weg weist, in welcher sie als Grenzfall weiterlebt.
Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (1920) Tr. Robert W. Lawson, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920) pp. 90-91.
1920s

Mohamed ElBaradei photo
Oliver E. Williamson photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Werner von Siemens photo
Gene Youngblood photo
Albert Einstein photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo
Louis Sullivan photo
Henry Suso photo
Mark Hopkins (educator) photo
James Braid photo
Ken Wilber photo
Newt Gingrich photo

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

"What Was Newt Gingrich Talking About?" http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/weigel/2010/09/12/what_was_newt_gingrich_talking_about.html
2010s

Brian Cowen photo

“We have seen already how resistant public opinion is, firstly to comprehension of the new paradigm in which we have to operate; and secondly, to the rationale behind the decisions we have had to take.”

Brian Cowen (1960) Irish politician

Miriam Lord's Week, The Irish Times, 1 November 2008, 2010-06-12, https://archive.is/nQfKu, 2013-01-04 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/1101/1225321623480.html,
Cowen's reaction to widespread public opposition to the October 2008 budget and the public's questioning of the rationale behind the cuts and why certain sections of the community were initially targeted.
2008

Friedrich Engels photo
Neil Armstrong photo
Robert Cheeke photo
James Branch Cabell photo

“The comprehensiveness of OR’s aim is an example of a ‘systems’ approach, since ‘system’ implies an interconnected complex of functionally related components.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 7; cited in Werner Ulrich (2004, p. 210)

John Stuart Mill photo
Perry Anderson photo
Jean Metzinger photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Francis Escudero photo
Henry Rollins photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo
David Oistrakh photo
Abdullah II of Jordan photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben photo
Max Frisch photo

“You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

I'm not Stiller (1955)

Horace Mann photo
Maimónides photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Albert Einstein photo
Lee Zeldin photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
Kenneth Minogue photo
Vyasa photo
William Ellery Channing photo
Bruno Schulz photo

“Only now did the scales fall from my eyes. For how great is the force of credulity, how powerful the suggestion of terror! Such incomprehension! But this was a man! A chained-up man, whom I, by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical, and comprehensive elision, had taken for a dog.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/sanatorium1.htm
His father, Living things

Lindsey Graham photo

“Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship.
I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform – and at the same time – the elimination of birthright citizenship.
In addition, I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President”

Lindsey Graham (1955) United States Senator from South Carolina

7:45am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057282345991106560 then 7:51am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057283734519463937 then 11:01am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057286251517116416 as quoted 30 October 2018 by CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-birthright-citizenship-1.4883589
2010s

Albrecht Thaer photo

“After his death I did not attend any more lectures, although I paid for them. Schroeder was succeeded by Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, born in Gross Vargula, near Erfurt, 1738; and descended in a direct line, on his mother's side, from Doctor Martin Luther. He established a dispensary for poor patients, and gave medicine gratia, on condition of his being attended by about thirty pupils. Here it was that I first began to display the knowledge I had gained from my friend, the late Doctor Schroeder; and Baldinger, not seeing me attend his lectures, naturally supposing I was lazy and dull of comprehension, exclaimed, with astonishment, "What will become of this boy?" Whereupon, considering myself insulted by the Doctor, I wished to retire; when he embraced me, and said, good-humouredly, "No, no such a clever young fellow never came under my observation." From this time I became his best friend and daily visitor; I passed whole days and weeks in his valuable and extensive library, and almost in the constant society of his amiable, highly gifted, and accomplished wife; his confidence was so great, that he left the entire direction of his dispensary to me, and even entrusted me with the care of his own family when unwell. Having given up all connexion with my former friends, the students, I selected one Leisewitz, the author of "Julius de Tarent." We sympathised in each other's feelings, and became inseparable. His amiable qualities and inoffensive wit drew around us the best society; but, to our great regret, many of them belonged to a new school of freethinkers, whose principles we endeavoured, by the assistance of the pious Madame Baldinger, to eradicate from their minds; and thus it was thnt Providence brought me over again to the firm belief of the truth of our Divine religion.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Desmond Tutu photo
Roger Scruton photo
Albert Einstein photo
Adolf Hitler photo
John Danforth photo
Buckminster Fuller photo
Vincent Massey photo

“Rational comprehension of the universe is not enough. We must call to our aid not merely reason, but the vision and the spiritual insight of the ages. These things we must seek.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at the Convocation of the University of Manitoba, October 28, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Vitruvius photo
Howard Stern photo
Géza Révész photo

“Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.
Croce: Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression.
Dittrich: Language is the totality of expressive abilities of individual human beings and animals capable of being understood by at least one other individual.
Eisler: Language is any expression of experiences by a creature with a soul.
B. Erdmann: Language is not a kind of communication of ideas but a kind of thinking: stated or formulated thinking. Language is a tool, and in fact a tool or organ of thinking that is unique to us as human beings.
Forbes: Language is an ordered sequence of words by which a speaker expresses his thoughts with the intention of making them known to a hearer.
J. Harris : Words are the symbols of ideas both general and particular: of the general, primarily, essentially and immediately; of the particular, only secondarily, accidentally and mediately.
Hegel: Language is the act of theoretical intelligence in its true sense, for it is its outward expression.
Jespersen: Language is human activity which has the aim of communicating ideas and emotions.
Jodl: Verbal language is the ability of man to fashion, by means of combined tones and sounds based on a limited numbers of elements, the total stock of his perceptions and conceptions in this natural tone material in such a way that this psychological process is clear and comprehensible to others to its least detail.
Kainz : Language is a structure of signs, with the help of which the representation of ideas and facts may be effected, so that things that are not present, even things that are completely imperceptible to the senses, may be represented.
De Laguna: Speech is the great medium through which human co-operation is brought about.
Marty: Language is any intentional utterance of sounds as a sign of a psychic state.
Pillsbury-Meader: Language is a means or instrument for the communication of thought, including ideas and emotions.
De Saussure: Language is a system of signs expressive of ideas.
Schuchardt. The essence of language lies in communication.
Sapir: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”

Géza Révész (1878–1955) Hungarian psychologist and musicologist

Footnote at pp. 126-127; As cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 313-314
The Origins and Prehistory of Language, 1956

Richard Huelsenbeck photo

“The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.... the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

as quoted in The Sound of Poetry / The poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin; University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 310, note 22
a critic on the sound-poetry of Dadaist Hugo Ball

Iain Banks photo
Agatha Christie photo
John Banville photo

“His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 80 (p. 802)

Subhas Chandra Bose photo
Stewart Brand photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
John Desmond Bernal photo

“World Encyclopaedia. -- Behind these lies another prospect of greater and more permanent importance; that of an attempt at a comprehensive and continually revised presentation of the whole of science in its social context, an idea most persuasively put forward by H. G. Wells in his appeal for a World Encyclopaedia of which he has already given us a foretaste in his celebrated outlines. The encyclopaedic movement was a great rallying point of the liberal revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The real encyclopaedia should not be what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has degenerated into, a mere mass of unrelated knowledge sold by high-pressure salesmanship, but a coherent expression of the living and changing body of thought; it should sum up what is for the moment the spirit of the age…
The original French Encyclopaedia which did attempt these things was, however, made in the period of relative quiet when the forces of liberation were gathering ready to break their bonds. We have already entered the second period of revolutionary struggle and the quiet thought necessary to make such an effort will not be easy to find, but some effort is worth making because the combined assault on science and humanity by the forces of barbarism has against it, as yet, no general and coherent statement on the part of those who believe in democracy and the need for the people of the world to take over the active control of production and administration for their own safety and welfare.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 306-307. Chapter SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION. The Function of Scientific Publication. See also World Brain

Anselme Bellegarrigue photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Alfred Binet photo

“Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Alfred Binet (1909, 118) as cited in: Seymour Bernard Sarason, ‎John Doris (1979), Educational handicap, public policy, and social history. p. 32
Modern ideas about children, 1909/1975

Hillary Clinton photo
Emmanuel Levinas photo
George Biddell Airy photo
Elizabeth Kostova photo
Jack Vance photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.”

Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefJesu.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (the "Jefferson Bible"), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 498–499
1810s

James Martin (author) photo
Antonio Negri photo
Rockwell Kent photo
George William Curtis photo
Ernest Gellner photo
Frances Kellor photo
Antoni Tàpies photo

“The material presence of the work only serves as a conveyer launching an invitation to the observer to take part of the comprehensive game of the thousand and one emotions and visions.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 26.

Fernand Léger photo
Kurt Lewin photo