Quotes about detail
page 7

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

On his approach to science popularization
An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

“The present volume, introductory to a series of works in more ample detail, is submitted to the public as a specimen of the manner in which the author conceives technological subjects should be discussed.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. viii

“At least we’ll hear less about corn subsidies and Corinthians II, or is it Two Corinthians? Discuss. No, don’t! Stupid, stupid people. Again, that’s Trump talking, not me. He uses that word to describe nearly everyone not named Donald J. Trump. He’s presented no governing philosophy, no policy details, nothing resembling even-keeled judgment. He’s running a combustible celebrity feud fest, and you love it.”

Timothy Egan (1954) American writer

How Stupid Is Iowa? (2016)

Love, People, Stupidity

“One can avoid misinterpreting information or jumping to false conclusions by cross checking important pieces of information through other methods of data collection. For example, if a questionnaire indicates major problems around supervision in one department, it may be useful to interview some supervisors and nonsupervisory personnel in the specific department for more detailed information. It also may be valuable to spend some time in the department observing the interactions between supervisors and subordinates. The most effective data collection strategy, therefore, is one that uses multiple measures and multiple methods of data collection. It is by combining data from interviews, questionnaires, observations, and archival sources that the consultant is able to triangulate and thus discard the data that may be distorted or biased.”

David A. Nadler (1948–2015) American organizational theorist

David A Nadler, Feedback and Organizational Development Using Data-Based Methods. Reading, Mass Addison-Wesley, 1977, p. 140; Cited in: Arthur G. Bedeian (1980). Organizations: Theory and Analysis : Text and Cases. p. 43.

Problem, Time, Falseness

“The most successful behaviour-liars are those who, instead of consciously concentrating on modifying specific signals, think themselves into the basic mood they wish to convey and then let the small details take care of themselves. This method is frequently used with great success by professional liars, such as actors and actresses. Their entire working lives are spent performing behavioural lies, a process which can sometimes be extremely damaging to their private lives. Politicians and diplomats are also required to perform an undue amount of behavioural lying, but unlike the actors they are not socially 'licensed to lie', and the resultant guilt feelings tend to interfere with their performances. Also, unlike the actors, they do not undergo prolonged training courses.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2000), p. 116
The Naked Ape (1967)

Lie, Feeling, Lying, Mood

“And so, as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright and gazing upon the splendor of the starry firmament, and also in being able to do with ease whatever they chose with their hands and fingers, they began in that first assembly to construct shelters. Some made them of green boughs, others dug caves on mountain sides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 2

Way, Mountain, Nature, Time

“Inaudible music may seem an odd notion, even a foolishly Romantic one—although it is partly the Romantic prejudice in favor of sensuous experience that makes it seem odd. Still, there are details of music which cannot be heard but only imagined, and even certain aspects of musical form which cannot be realized in sound even by the imagination.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music, Imagination

“So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Feeling, Fashion, Birth, Bird

“Though the beginnings and foundations of saintliness are implanted in every person's heart, if he does not occupy himself with them, he will witness details of saintliness without recognizing them and he will trespass upon them without feeling or perceiving that he is doing so. For sentiments of saintliness, fear and love of God, and purity of heart are not so deeply rooted within a person as to obviate the necessity of his employing certain devices in order to acquire them.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Love, God, Fear, Feeling

“It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Mathematics, Future, Cry

“The Process Chart is a device for visualizing a process as a means of improving it. Every detail of a process is more or less affected by every other detail; therefore the entire process must be presented in such form that it can be visualized all at once before any changes are made in any of its subdivisions. In any subdivision of the process under examination, any changes made without due consideration of all the decisions and all the motions that precede and follow that subdivision will often be found unsuited to the ultimate plan of operation.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Process charts (1921), p. 3.

Decision, Change

“So great has been man's progress that today all civilized nations have their great universities, with highly trained specialists, who devote a lifetime to the study of some minute detail of a particular department. His ideas have become so extended and complex that hundreds of thousands of words are necessary to give expression to his thoughts, and libraries with millions of volumes contain only a fraction of his written convictions. …the knowledge of the average man on the street is incomparably higher than that of the eminent scholar of a few centuries ago.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 28

Idea, Knowledge, Study, Universe

“Models of management sometimes come from task and function analyses of management jobs. Someone studies what managers do, or what duties and responsibilities they are expected to perform, and then develops a model or image of what competent management is (Mintzberg, 1973). Typically, task and function analyses result in detailed descriptions of what activities must be performed in the job. Often these are not arrayed in any order of importance or relevance to the particular job or to the desired output from someone performing the job. Such models have been tested, in that systematic research is conducted to determine if the dentified activities are part of the job. Unfortunately, models based on task or function analysis focus on the job and do not address the person in the job. In doing so, the models include many specific and detailed descriptions of activities, but no mention is made of the characteristics that enable or increase the likelihood of a person performing those activities. These models do not establish a casual link between characteristics of people and performance in a job.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 7-8.

People, Study, Parting, Personality

“When you get in these people when you… get these people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that' ah, without going into the details… don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.' And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case, period!”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

The 'smoking gun tape' on (23 June 1972)
1970s

People, Lie, Error, Feeling

“Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

Art, Gauge, Box

“Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Way, Nature, Memory, Speed

“In most British enterprises senior executives worked closely in the same office building, located in or near the largest plant, having almost daily personal contact with, and thus directly supervising middle and often lower-level managers. Such enterprises had no need for the detailed organization charts and manuals that had come into common use in large American and German firms before 1914. In these British companies, selection to senior positions and to the board depended as much on personal ties as on managerial competence. The founders and their heirs continued to have a significant influence on top-level decision-making even after their holdings in the enterprise were diminished.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 242.

Decision, Dependency, Personality

“I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?"”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

.
Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

Wisdom

“I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light. but hey, that would be going into sexual details…”

Mark Sanford (1960) 115th Governor of South Carolina

From emails to Argentine mistress; reported in " Sanford-Maria e-mails shed light on governor's affair http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html", The State (June 25, 2009).

Love, Beauty, Kiss, Light

“…in various types of organisms, from snails to flies to mice to people. …learning and memory, as well as synaptic and neuronal plasticity, represent a family of processes that share a common logic and some key components but vary in the details of their molecular mechanisms.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

People, Family, Learning, Memory

“The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

The Rickover Effect (1992)

“Enterprise Engineering is not a single methodology, but a sophisticated synthesis of the most important and successful of today's change methods. "Enterprise Engineering" first explains in detail all the critical disciplines (including continuous improvement, radical reinvention of business processes, enterprise redesign, and strategic visioning). It then illustrates how to custom-design the right combination of these change methods for your organization's specific needs.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Book summary
The great transition (1995)

Business, Change, Success

“This pioneer work, written for both the professional economist and the businessman, has become a classic in its field. It is a detailed examination of the structure of the large business corporation in relation to its actual economic functioning. Because Gordon views the corporation not as an external institution but as organized human activity, his emphasis is on the personal and volitional elements in leadership, or how businessmen actually shape their practices. His analysis is based on a formidable mass of case material and statistical data”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Abstract
Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945)

Business, Personality

“Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 44 - "With Mahatma Gandhi At Wardha

Life, World, Reality, Parting

“Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153-154

Women, Men

“Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?… Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework… Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Life, Death, Way, Imagination

“The brilliant summaries by Bourbaki (1969) and Weyl (1951)… set a high standard of exposition, but… there is room for a history of mathematical ideas which will demand less mathematical expertise and offer a more detailed account of the motivation of research.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

History, Mathematics, Motivation, Idea

“None of the free [ a. o. his first religious] imaginative pictures that I painted at this time [c.1909] or later, had any kind of model, or even a clearly conceived idea. It was quite easy for me to imagine a work right down to its smallest details, and in fact my preconceptions were usually far more beautiful than the painted outcome: I became the copyist of the idea. Therefore I liked to avoid thinking about a picture beforehand, all I needed was a vague idea of luminescences of colour. The work then developed of its own accord under my hands.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

Nolde's quote c. 1909; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 81
1900 - 1920

Beauty, Imagination, Idea, Thinking

“I always think twice before reading the biography of a writer I admire. Biographers sometimes latch onto small details, unreliable eyewitness accounts, character traits that appear puzzling or disappointing – all of which is like the crackling sound that messes with radio transmissions, making the music and the voices impossible to hear. It is only by actually reading his books that we gain intimacy with a writer. This is when he is at his best and he is speaking to us in a low voice without any of the static.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

From Nobel Lecture (2014)

Books, Music, Disappointment, Thinking

“I changed the rules for allowing people to buy into my system as a franchisee. I explained in detail how tough running a Jimmy John's can be. I explained the long hours, the unforgiving weather, the late nights, the weekends, and all of the sacrifices that go along with the industry.”

Jimmy John Liautaud (1964) Jimmy John's Owner, Founder, & Chairman

How a 19-year-old turned a sandwich shop into a billion-dollar business
Business Insider
1983-09-08
Kate
Taylor
http://www.businessinsider.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-jimmy-johns-2016-9

People, Change, Weather, Night

“With the invention of printing, mass standardized culture had become possible.
With the inventions of photography and then cinema, the standardization of popular culture began to progress geometrically and its rate of change slowed down.
In addition, the complete documentation of daily life made possible by these technological advances presented the mass of humanity, for the first time in history, with a mirror in which to regard itself. Less and less had it been able to look away, as its own image became more detailed and perfect, especially with the burden of information that became available at the end of the twentieth century.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that retro was the only fashion.”

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 6, “Alec and His Friends” (p. 105)

Life, History, Fashion, Change

“Tsenov comes out of a detailed source-check which many of his predecessors have hardly ever seen. It facilitates the reader by printing these sources in the original … From the same sources it can be seen that the Bulgarians were south of the Danube for 350 years, so they did not come until 679. from the Volga, but not only before the Slavs, but before the Huns in Illyria and Thrace, that the Bulgarians lived in 350 AD. along the lower Danube in the Byzantine Empire, i. south of the lower Danube, and that they were a mighty people, not only in Moesia but also in Thrace and Illyria.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

quotations for him Source: Hans Filipp, рецензия на "Die Abstammung der Bulgaren..." http://stahlhelm-wse.narod.ru/PHILOLOGISCHEWOCHENSCHRIFT.htm, “Philologishe Wochenschrift”, Heft 10/11, 14 März 1931

People

“We think the more detailed and exhaustive our plans, the more likely the future will actually mirror our vision. But it rarely even comes close.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Thinking, Future

“The preceding chapters described various models of mental illness. Seven major varieties of models have been described. Seven major varieties of models have been described. Three are scientific: medical, psychological, and sociocultural. Four are philosophical-moral: hermeneutic-linguistic, phenomenological- existential, humanistic, and moral-legal. Most of these major varieties can be divided into more circumscribed models giving rise to a total number of fifteen. In turn, some of these may be further divided into submodels. Thus, there are three psychodynamic, three behaviouristic, two cognitive, two macro- and two microsocial, two linguistic-symbolic, # two phenomenological, two humanistic, two hypersanity, and three moral-legal submodels. The detailed classification of the models of mental illness is presented in Tabel II.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 319 ( chapter online http://positivedisintegration.com/Weckowicz1984.pdf)

“Barani mourned: “Should the king consider the payment of a few tankas by way of jiziya as sufficient justification for their allowing all possible freedom to the infidels to observe and demonstrate all orders and detail of infidelity, to read the misleading literature of their faith, and to propagate their teachings, how could the true religion get the upper hand over other religions, and how could the emblems of Islam be held high? How will the true faith prevail if rulers allow the infidels to keep their temples, adorn their idols, and to make merry during their festivals with beating of drums and dhols, singing and dancing?””

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

Faith, Religion, Way, Literature

“My parents seem to me possessed of great dignity. An aristocratic reserve. Like the very rich who live behind tall walls, my mother and father are always mindful of the line separating public from private life. Watching a celebrity talk show on television, they listen for several minutes as a movie star with bright teeth recounts details of his recent divorce. And I see my parents grow impatient. Finally, my mother gets up from her chair. Changing the channel, she says with simple disdain, ‘Cheap people.’ My mother and my father are not cheap people. They never are tempted to believe that public life can also be intimate. And I realize that my parents will be as puzzled by my act of self-revelation as they are by the movie star’s revelations on the talk show. They never will call me cheap for publishing an autobiography. But I can well imagine their faces tightened by incomprehension as they read my words.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Why does he do this?
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, People, Imagination, Star

“It is unlikely that you'll have anything emerge from MEF (Major Economies Forum) by way of detailed programmatic specificity.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd bamboozles Germans with 'programmatic specificity', 9 July 2009, 15 November 2013, Perth Now http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/rudd-bamboozles-germans-with-programmatic-specificity/story-e6frg12c-1225747867748, Addressing the German press and Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, 2009 2009

Way

“Mani Madhava Cakyar with his unfailing urge for complicated, difficult and minute details has enriched the art during the decades of his unparalleled performing life without permitting even an iota of compromise regarding the essentials of traditional style. He has served his Kuladharma ever since his maiden appearance with tireless effort, enthusiasm, perseverance and vigor. He introduced new forms to improve this art form without impairing its tradition. The effectiveness of these innovations which only a genius could visualise and perform has already been proved several times”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

"The Hindu (1989)
Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya
Source: K. A. Chandrahasan, In pursuit of excellence (Performing Arts), "The Hindu", Sunday March 26, 1989

Life, Art, Effort, Appearance

“In what manner that power can be applied to draw water or ore from mines, to discharge iron bullets to a great distance, to propel ships against the wind, and to a multitude of other similar purposes, it would be too long here to detail; but each individual, according to the particular occasion, must select the construction of machinery appropriate to his purpose.”

Denis Papin (1647–1713) French physicist, mathematician and inventor

"A New Method of Obtaining Very Great Moving Powers at Small Cost" (1690)

Water, Drawing

“In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, p. 64 (2012 ed.)

Way, Sense, Science, Change

“Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Les douleurs muettes et stupides sont hors d'usage: on pleure, on récite, on répète, on est si touchée de la mort de son mari, qu'on n'en oublie pas la moindre circonstance.
Aphorism 79
Les Caractères (1688), Des Femmes

Death, Fashion, Forgetting

“In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

MEMOIRS OF AN ICBM PIONEER Simon Ramo broke with Howard Hughes, then built TRW, the company that developed the U.S. missile. He says what went right then would go wrong today. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/04/25/70453/index.htm in FORTUNE Magazine, April 25, 1988

Flying

“When happily ever after fails
And weve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly
But I know a place where we can go
Thats still untouched by man
Well sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind.
You can lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me.
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence.”

Don Henley (1947) American singer, lyricist, producer and drummer

"The End of the Innocence" (co-written with Bruce Hornsby)
Song lyrics, The End of the Innocence (1989)

Grass, Flying

“This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 1, “The Law of Gravitation,” p. 15: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&t=12m45s

Lie, Hope, Idea, Understanding

“Hitherto our principal difficulty has arose from a want of proper supplies of money, and from the inefficacy of that which we obtained; but now there appears a scene opening which will introduce new embarrassments. The Congress have recommended to the different States to take upon themselves the furnishing certain species of supplies for our department. The recommendation falls far short of the general detail of the business, the difficulty of ad justing which, between the different agents as well as the different authorities from which they derive their appointments, I am very apprehensive will introduce some jarring interests, many improper disputes, as well as dangerous delays. Few persons, who have not a competent knowledge of this employment, can form any tolerable idea of the arrangements necessary to give despatch and success in discharging the duties of the office, or see the necessity for certain relations and dependencies. The great exertions which are frequently necessary to be made, require the whole machine to be moved by one common interest, and directed to one general end. How far the present measures, recommended to the different States, are calculated to promote these desirable purposes, I cannot pretend to say; but there appears to me such a maze, from the mixed modes adopted by some States, and about to be adopted by others, that I cannot see the channels, through which the business may be conducted, free from disorder and confusion.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money, Idea, Business, Knowledge

“There are two kinds of thinkers, scholars and scientists. The first are the 'trail blazers' who propose new revolutionary ideas, point to new directions for scientific and intellectual developments, create new paradigms of science and scholarship, but leave the details to others. The second are those who follow the new trail, carry out careful experimentation and research within the established paradigm, and work out the precise formulations of theories in a particular domain of knowledge.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 2

Idea, Knowledge, Science

“As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Life, Death, Children, Sex

“Ben Stein: What do think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics, or in evolution?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it could come about in the following way: it could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of our chemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer, and that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable, process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ()

Life, Way, Intelligence, Thinking

“Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (…) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not.”

Patrick Suppes (1922–2014) philosopher from United States of America

Pragmatism in Physics, in P. Weingartner, G. Schurz & G. Dorn (Eds.), The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky (1998), p. 245, ISSN=1026-9347.

Way, Sport

“The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. 1: The Naked and the Nude

Art, Parting

“Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

“Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.”

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

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Life, World, Fear, Water

“This volume is an analysis of the American party system, an account of the structure, processes and significance of the political party, designed to show as clearly as possible within compact limits what the function of the political party is in the community. My purpose is to make this, as far as possible, an objective study of the organization and behavior of our political parties. It is hoped that this volume may serve as an introduction to students and others who wish to find a concise account of the party system; and also that it may serve to stimulate more intensive study of the important features and processes of the party. From time to time in the course of this discussion significant fields of inquiry have been indicated where it is believed that research would bear rich fruit. In the light of broader statistical information than we now have and with the aid of a thorough-going social and political psychology than we now have, it will be possible in the future to make much more exhaustive and conclusive studies of political parties than we are able to do at present. The objective, detailed study of political behavior will unquestionably enlarge our knowledge of the system of social and political control under which we now operate. But such inquiries will call for funds and personnel not now available to me.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: The American Party System, 1922, p. v; Preface lead paragraph

Hope, Behavior, Communication, Knowledge

“I strongly object to the fact that this stupid operation in the Ardennes is sometimes called the 'Rundstedt Offensive'. This is a complete misnomer. I had nothing to do with it. It came to me as an order complete to the last detail. Hitler had even written on the plan in his own handwriting "not to be altered."”

Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) German Field Marshal during World War II

Quoted in "Churchill and Hitler: Essays on the Political-Military Direction of Total War" - Page 194 - by David Jablonsky - History - 1994

Stupidity

“…understanding information entropy in the power grid per kilowatt of power delivered or the radio frequency communication power expended within the power grid per kilowatt of power delivered will be more valuable than understanding the detailed packet structure of a half-dozen supervisory control and data acquisition protocols.”

Stephen F Bush

Bush, Stephen F., Smart Grid: Communication-Enabled Intelligence for the Electric Power Grid, ISBN: 978-1-119-97580-9, 576 pages, March 2014, Wiley-IEEE Press.

Communication, Understanding

“Since we don’t have a time machine, we can only make educated guesses about the looks, skills, and personality of each individual.… We took great care not to contradict biblical details.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

As quoted in My Encounter with Ken Ham's Giant Ark http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/july-web-only/ken-ham-ark-encounter-visit.html?start=1, Christian Post (July 22, 2016)

Education, Time, Personality

“What is new poetry? The difference is not mere details of form, measure rhyme schemes or diction, but a return to contemporary speech, thought, imagination and spiritual life, coupled with oriental (Japan & China) and cosmopolitan influences, and a direction of vision, with perfection of form and delicacy of feeling.”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

The New Poetry -An anthology ed Monroe & Henderson Macmillan 1918
The New Poetry (1918)

Life, Feeling, Imagination, Perfection

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Source: Linux Times, 2004-10-25 http://web.archive.org/web/20050404020308/http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=145,

People, Way, Thinking, Help

“Now, a symbol is not, properly speaking, either true or false; it is, rather, something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner.”

Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) French physicist, historian of science

[U]n symbole n'est, à proprement parler, ni vrai, ni faux; il est plus ou moins bien choisi pour signifier la réalité qu'il représente, il la figure d'une manière plus ou moins précise, plus ou moins détaillée...
[Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem, translated by Philip P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press, 1991, 069102524X, 168]
Notice sur les Titres et Travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem rédigée par lui-même lors de sa candidature à l'Académie des sciences (mai 1913), The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906)

Reality, Falseness

“Auto-suggestion is disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming autosuggestion as my discovery. Far from it, auto-suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter I. The reality of auto-suggestion.

Learning, Appearance

“You gentlemen may laugh, but that is true, all right; it sounds ridiculous, I know, but it is fact. Now if the problem were put up to any of you man to develop science of shoveling as it was put up to us, that is, to a group of men who had deliberately set out to develop the science of all kinds of all laboring work, where do you think you would begin? When you started to study the science of shoveling I make the assertion that you would be within two days – just as we were in two days –well on the way toward development of the science of shoveling. At least you would outlined in your minds those elements which required careful, scientific study in order to understand science of shoveling. I do not want to go into all of the details of shoveling, but I will give you some of the elements, one or two of the most important elements of the science of shoveling; that is, the elements that reach further and have more serious consequences than any other. Probably the most important element in the science of shoveling is this: There must be some shovel load at which a first-class shoveler will do his biggest day’s work. What is that load? To illustrate: when we went to the Bethlehem Steel Works and observed the shoveler in the yard of that company, we found that each of the good shovelers in that yard owned his own shovel; they preferred to buy their own shovels rather than to have the company furnish them. There was a larger tonnage of ore shoveled in that woks than of any other material and rice coal came next in tonnage. We would see a first-class shoveler go from shoveling rice coal with a load of 3.5 ponds to the shovel to handling ore from the Massaba Range, with 38 pounds to the shove Now, is 3.5 pounds the proper shovel load or is the 38 pounds the proper load? They cannot both be right. Under scientific management the answer to this question is not a matter of anyone’s opinion; it is a question for accurate, careful, scientific investigation.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Testimony of Frederick W. Taylor... 1912, p. 111.

Men, Way, Understanding, Question

“Examining the musical language of Prokofiev in a more detailed way, we must acknowledge that for him melody was always the most important element of music, one that determined the quality of the composition”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev: His Life and the Evolution of His Musical Language

Music, Way

“As an artist, I am very familiar with how to show the details, how to transform them into a language people can understand. They [the government] know that the Internet is a strong force, unbearable for them.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

People, Understanding, Strong

“I am interested in detail. I enjoy decoration. By accumulating this mass of detail you throw light on things in a longer sense: in the long run it all adds up. It creates a texture — how shall I put it — a background, a period, which makes everything you write that much more convincing. Of course, all artists are terrible egoists. Unconsciously you are largely writing about yourself. I could never write anything factual; I only have confidence in myself when I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguise.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

Books, Confidence, Sense, Light

“Our understanding of the Macedonians' emergence into history is confounded by two events: the establishment of the Macedonians as an identifiable ethnic group, and the foundation of their ruling house. The "highlanders" or "Makedones" of the mountainous regions of western Macedonia are derived from northwest Greek stock; they were akin both to those who at an earlier time may have migrated south to become the historical "Dorians", and to other Pindus tribes who were the ancestors of the Epirotes or Molossians. That is, we may suggest that northwest Greece provided a pool of Indo-European speakers of Proto-Greek from which were drawn the tribes who later were known by different names as they established their regional identities in separate parts of the country… First, the matter of the Hellenic origins of the Macedonians: Nicholas Hammond's general conclusion (though not the details of his arguments) that the origin of the Macedonians lies in the pool of proto-Greek speakers who migrated out of the Pindus mountains during the Iron Age, is acceptable.”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

"Makedonika", Regina Books, Claremont CA

Age, History, Mountain, Understanding

“The Sichuan disaster is not the first nor the most wrongful. But all the details of this tragedy will be forgotten, and once again it will be like nothing ever happened. Eventually all these disasters will together create a bizarre miracle called civilization and evolution.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009

“Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

The Recursive Universe (1985), p. 31

World, Success, Wealth

“People may wonder why I am content to prescribe such a general and apparently vague formula as "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better" for all and every ailment. The reason is, strange as it may seem, that our subconscious mind does not need the details. The general suggestion that everything "in every way" is going well is quite sufficient to set up the procedure of persuasion which will carry its effects to the different organs and improve every function. I have had remarkable demonstration of this in the course of my long teaching and experiments. Time and again I have seen patients cured, not only of the particular disease for which they sought relief, but also of minor disabilities which they had almost forgotten.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter III: Auto-suggestion in practice.

People, Disease, Way, Time

“I was deeply moved by the incomparable achievements of the German Wehrmacht, leading to such prodigious successes. I followed the development of operations in minute detail with the aid of maps. Under brilliant leadership all sections of the armed forces displayed the greatest courage to achieve deeds that were quite stunning. The ignominy of November 1918 in the forest of Compiègne has been wiped out and the Diktat of Versailles torn up!”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Letter to Kurt Jagow (5 July 1940), quoted in John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 1238
1940s

Courage, Success

“Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Look to Windward
Culture series, Look to Windward (2000)

God, Sense, Memory, Animals

“Faced with almost an infinity of details you cannot afford to deal constantly with the specific; you must learn to embrace more and more detail under the cover of generality.”

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

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

Learning

“To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

Patience

“[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.
I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Art, Way, Water, Painting

“I am not sanguine as you know about the success of any effort to recall to the attention of the public the details of our long agitation – I doubt the possibility of any body making the history an interesting one. In fact, it is not a pleasant chapter to go over again in all its minutiae; for it was but a blundering unsystematic series of campaigns, in which we were indebted for our success to the stupidity of our foes, & still more to the badness of their cause.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Archibald Prentice (13 September 1853), quoted in Archibald Prentice, The History of the Anti-Corn Law League. Volume I (London: Routledge, 1968), p. xxi.
1850s

Stupidity, History, Effort, Success

“Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge.”

Larry Samuelson (1953) American economist

Larry Samuelson. Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection. 1997. Overview.

People, Error, Game, Knowledge

“It is true that the Rigveda does not provide us details of the inner layout of these forts, but surely the text was not meant to be a treatise on Vastusastra. May it be remembered that it is essentially a compilation of prayers to gods and should be looked at as such. All the evidence that it provides regarding the material culture of the then people is only incidental.”

B. B. Lal (1921) Indian archaeologist

Aryan invasion of India: perpetuation of a myth, In: Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. — 1st ed. — London: Routledge, 2005. p.67.

God, People

“It is human love, not that of a god, which is glorified in the Song, and that with a wealth of detail, which rules out an allegorical interpretation.”

Robert Gordis (1908–1992) American rabbi and theologian

"The Song of Songs and Lamentations", p. 8

Love, God, Wealth

“It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

posthumous quotes, The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas', (1961)

Courage, Nature

“Dying is a strange business, and I'm not going to bore you with the details. I might have weeks or I might have months and though it's a cliche, it's true that so many of the things I once believed to be important no longer are. …I find myself reflecting on the essential moments of my life.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Carly, Chapter 43, p. 336
2009, Safe Haven (2010)

Life, Business

“The political Right currently runs the country. That's very annoying, but pretending it isn't true is foolhardy. What is really annoying is that in the late 1970s some of us were giving speeches and writing articles explaining that rightists intended to take over the country. It wasn't hard to figure that out, since at the same time right-wing ideologues and strategists were also giving speeches and writing articles describing in elaborate detail how they planned to do it. Well, they did it.”

Chip Berlet (1949) American political analyst

"Eyes Right: Social Movements Need An Infrastructure To Succeed" (Chop Berlet on countering the rise of the political Right), in Z Magazine, Vol. 18 (2005), p. 17; also quoted in Flanders Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics From the Politicians (2007), p. 109

Time, Country

“One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live — for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

People, Stupidity, Business, Knowledge

“A science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories—though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Afterword to Exposures, p. 246
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Business, Science, Help

“Of Henryson as of Chaucer it can be said that the picturesque detail owes its effectiveness to the solidity and seriousness of what it grows from. Henryson's Fables (like La Fontaine’s – they deserve the comparison) do more than present types of human beings in animal guises and animals comically behaving like human beings; they build up a total and consistent society, both rendered and criticized.”

Robert Henryson (1425–1506) Scottish makar (poet)

Patrick Cruttwell, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 326.
Criticism

Animals

“Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're doing every day.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Author Marcus Buckingham, cited in: Michel Beaudry, " Sam Rees - making the Whistler leap http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/sam-rees-making-the-whistler-leap/Content?oid=2519430," at piquenewsmagazine.com, November 28, 2013.

Dreams, Hope, Way, Passion

“While doing justice to the intellectual power with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained their supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity, has condemned them to ultimate failure — "and herein," he says, "I see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing." For the rest, he begs his readers not to suppose that every minute detail in the daily life of Flatland must needs correspond to some other detail in Spaceland; and yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work may prove suggestive as well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest minds who — speaking of that which is of the highest importance, but lies beyond experience — decline to say on the one hand, "This can never be," and on the other hand, "It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it."”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Preface to the Second and Revised Edition (1884)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Life, Wisdom, World, Justice

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

World, Law, Problem, Sun

“Thank you for calling the Powers of Darkness. Your call may be recorded for security and training purposes. For general moral and ethical enquiries, press 1 on your keypad. To make a reservation, press 2. For details of our special discount packages for lawyers, politicians, and Microsoft executives, press 3.”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (2006)

Training

“Since we only consider the universe on a very large scale, and make abstraction of all details and local irregularities, our universe must be homogeneous and isotropic. It follows… that the three-dimensional space of it must be what mathematicians call a space of constant curvature.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Universe

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain, People, Feeling, Nature

“In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, Truth, Faith, Error

“Once … I was offered a lift by some carters … It was the Thursday before Easter. I was seated in the first cart, with a strong, red, coarse carman, who evidently drank. On entering a village we saw a well-fed, naked, pink pig being dragged out of the first yard to be slaughtered. It squealed in a dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man. Just as we were passing they began to kill it. A man gashed its throat with a knife. The pig squealed still more loudly and piercingly, broke away from the men, and ran off covered with blood. Being near-sighted I did not see all the details. I saw only the human-looking pink body of the pig and heard its desperate squeal; but the carter saw all the details and watched closely. They caught the pig, knocked it down, and finished cutting: its throat. When its squeals ceased the carter sighed heavily. 'Do men really not have to answer for such things?”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

he said.
Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. IX

Men, Strong

“We consider the notion of "system" as an organising concept, before going on to look in detail at various systemic metaphors that may be used as a basis for structuring thinking about organisations and problem situations.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Creative Problem Solving (1991), p. 2.

Problem, Thinking

“Muslim historians, in India and abroad, have written hundreds of accounts in which the progress of Islamic armies across the cradle of Hindu culture is narrated, stage by stage and period by period. A pronounced feature of these Muslim histories is a description-in smaller or greater detail but always with considerable pride-of how the Hindus were slaughtered en masse or converted by force, how hundreds of thousands of Hindu men and women and children were captured as booty and sold into slavery, how Hindu temples and monasteries were razed to the ground or burnt down, and how images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses were destroyed or desecrated. Commandments of Allah (Quran) and precedents set by the Prophet (Sunnah) are frequently cited by the authors in support of what the swordsmen and demolition squads of Islam did with extraordinary zeal, not only in the midst of war but also, and more thoroughly, after Islamic rule had been firmly established.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Women, Men, God, War

“The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964). Cited in: William M. Block, M. Dale Strickland, Bret A. Collier, Markus J. Peterson (2008) Wildlife Study Design. Springer. p. 20 among other places.

Money, Question, Study