Quotes about essential
page 15

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“In selecting our subject…there are two factors which it should be borne in mind are essential, and these are Expression and Composition”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 16

Vandana Shiva photo

“Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On economic reforms in India and rape in India, from " Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/violent-economic-reforms-and-women" Yes Magazine (18 January 2013)

Mani Madhava Chakyar photo
Kurt Lewin photo

“For Aristotelian physics the membership of an object in a given class was of critical importance, because for Aristotle the class defined the essence or essential nature of the object, and thus determined its behavior in both positive and negative respects.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 143 Donald P. Spence (1994) The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis. p. 50 summarized this quote as "Class membership defined the essence or essential nature of the object".

Christopher Langton photo

“Artificial Life is concerned with tuning the behaviors of such low-level machines that the behavior that emerges at the global level is essentially the same as some behavior exhibited by a natural living system… Artificial Life is concerned with generating lifelike behavior.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.4-5 as cited in: Luis M. Rocha (2012) " The logical mechanisms of life http://informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/i-bic/lec02.html" on indiana.edu, August 27, 2012

Paul Thurrott photo
Pierre Nicole photo
Otto Neurath photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1763
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

Isaac Asimov photo
Salvador Dalí photo
Albert Einstein photo
Carl Sagan photo

“The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Martin Buber photo

“An example may clarify more precisely the relation between the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investigate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a specific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor, that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an unobserved passion its course will be different: there will be a release which is willed and which takes the place of the elemental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropologist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness, since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and especially with the unbroken natural connection between feelings and actions; and this connection is most powerfully influenced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthropologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience. … In the moment of life he has nothing else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human wholeness.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Variant: An example may clarify more precisely the relation between the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investigate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a specific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor, that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an unobserved passion its course will be different: there will be a release which is willed and which takes the place of the elemental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropologist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness, since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and especially with the unbroken natural connection between feelings and actions; and this connection is most powerfully influenced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthropologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience. … In the moment of life he has nothing else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human wholeness.
Source: What is Man? (1938), pp. 148-149

Vladimir Lenin photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Habib Bourguiba photo

“You are wrong. The state and its existence are essential before everything else. All this preoccupation with liberty is not serious.”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[TUNISIA: No Time for Democracy, TIME, Monday, Sept. 29, 1958, 2, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,821168-2,00.html, September 6, 2011]

Lyndall Urwick photo

“Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer – not “by guess and by God.””

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Source: 1950s, The pattern of management, 1956, p. 85; Cited in: " Lyndall Fownes Urwick http://www.managers-net.com/Biography/biograph7.html," at managers-net.com, 2016.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi photo
Antoni Tàpies photo
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo
Roger Garrison photo

“Except for Marxian theories, nearly all modern theories of the business cycle have essential elements that trace back to Knut Wicksell's turn-of-the-century writings on interest and prices. Austrians, New Classicists, Monetarists, and even Keynesians can legitimately claim a kinship on this basis. Accordingly, the recognition, that both the Austrians and the New Classicists have a Swedish ancestry does not translate into a meaningful claim that the two schools are essentially similar. To the contrary, identifying their particular relationships to Wicksellian ideas, like comparing the two formally similar business-cycle theories themselves, reveals more differences than similarities. … [T]o establish the essential difference between the Austrians and the New Classicists, it needs to be added that the focus of the Austrian theory is on the actual market process that translates the monetary cause into the real phenomena and hence on the institutional setting in which this process plays itself out.The New Classicists deliberately abstract from institutional considerations and specifically deny, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the interest rate plays a significant role in cyclical fluctuations (Lucas 1981, p. 237 151–1). Thus, Wicksell's Interest and Prices is at best only half relevant to EBCT. … Taking the Wicksellian metaphor as their cue, the New Classicists are led away from the pre-eminent Austrian concern about the actual market process that transforms cause into effect and towards the belief that a full specification of the economy's structure, which is possible only in the context of an artificial economy, can shed light on an effect whose nature is fundamentally independent of the cause.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Pages 98–99.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis photo
Susan Neiman photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On studying English rather than Latin at school, Chapter 2 (Harrow).
My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)

Aga Khan IV photo

“Tolerance, openness and understanding towards other peoples' cultures, social structures, values and faiths are now essential to the very survival of an interdependent world.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

Speech at the Ceremony to Inaugurate the Restored Humayun's Tomb Gardens, New Delhi, India (15 April 2003)

David Hume photo

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me… But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Part 4, Section 6
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Christopher Hitchens photo
James Madison photo
Dean Acheson photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Dana Gioia photo
Adolf Hitler photo
George Soros photo

“A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Why We Must Not Reelect President Bush (2004)

Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Henry Moore photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“It is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 14, pp. 17–362.
Collected Works

Herbert Marcuse photo

“The supremacy of thought (consciousness) also pronounces the impotence of thought in an empirical world which philosophy transcends and corrects — in thought. The rationality in the name of which philosophy passed its judgments obtained that abstract and general purity” which made it immune against the world in which one had to live. With the exception of the materialistic “heretics,” philosophic thought was rarely afflicted by the afflictions of human existence. Paradoxically, it is precisely the critical intent in philosophic thought which leads to the idealistic purifications critical intent which aims at the empirical world as a whole, and not merely at certain modes of thinking or behaving within it. Defining its concepts in terms of potentialities which are of an essentially different order of thought and existence, the philosophic critique finds itself blocked by the reality from which it dissociates itself, and proceeds to construct a realm of Reason purged from empirical contingency. The two dimensions of thought — that of the essential and that of — the apparent truths — no longer interfere with each other, and their concrete dialectical relation becomes an abstract epistemological or ontological relation. The judgments passed on the given reality are replaced by propositions defining the general forms of thought, objects of thought, and relations between thought and its objects. The subject of thought becomes the pure and universal form of subjectivity, from which all particulars are removed.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 135-136

Clement Attlee photo
Jules Michelet photo

“France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus.”

Jules Michelet (1798–1874) French historian

[Peface de la Histoire de France, Michelet, Jules, Flammarion, 1893-1894, VIII]
History of France, 1833-1867

Johan Huizinga photo

“Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.”

Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) Dutch historian

Source: In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936), Ch. 2.

Harsha of Kashmir photo
Alexander Bain photo
Herman Kahn photo

“Equally important to not appearing "trigger-happy" is not to appear prone to either accidents or miscalculations. Who wants to live in the 1960's and 1970's in the same world with a hostile strategic force that might inadvertently start a war? Most people are not even willing to live with a friendly strategic force that may not be reliably controlled. The worst way for a country to start a war is to do it accidentally, without any preparations. That might initiate an all- out "slugging match" in which only the most alert portion of the forces gets off in the early phase. Both sides are thus likely to be clobbered," both because the initial blow was not large enough to be decisive and because the war plans are likely to be inappropriate. To repeat: On all these questions of accident, miscalculation, unauthorized behavior, trigger-happy postures, and excessive destructiveness, we must satisfy ourselves and our allies, the neutrals, and, strangely important, our potential enemies. Since it is almost inevitable that the future will see more discussion of these questions, i will be important for us not only to have made satisfactory preparations, but also to have prepared a satisfactory story. Unless every-body concerned, both laymen and experts, develops a satisfactory image of strategic forces as contributing more to security than insecurity it is most improbable that the required budgets, alliances, and intellectual efforts will have the necessary support. To the extent that people worry about our strategic forces as themselves exacerbating or creating security problems, or confuse symptoms with the disease, we may anticipate a growing rejection of military preparedness as an essential element in the solution to our security problem and a turning to other approaches not as a complement and supplement but as an alternative. In particular, we are likely to suffer from the same movement toward "responsible" budgets pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920's and 1930's. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first almost lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Philippe Starck photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
George E. P. Box photo

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 424,

Vannevar Bush photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Ron Paul photo

“You can't literally cram a 25th hour into a 24-hour day. But you can shift activities and priorities so more time is available for essential tasks.”

Robert W. Bly (1957) American writer

101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success With Less Stress (1999)

Antoni Tàpies photo
Hermann Ebbinghaus photo
Michael Moore photo

“The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show … That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

" Michael Moore: Fascists Now Come With ‘A Smiley Face And Maybe A TV Show’ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-moore-donald-trump_us_5829c5bce4b02d21bbc97cab" - stated right after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and inspired by the 1980 book, Friendly Fasicism (November 14, 2016)
2016

Bell Hooks photo
P. W. Botha photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Steve Keen photo
William Westmoreland photo
Dennis Kucinich photo

“I think we have to get rid of nuclear weapons. The idea that somehow by having nuclear weapons you make the world a safer place is essentially insane.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Quoted in Alyssa Kim, "Kucinich Campaigns for Peace" (August 12, 2007). Kucinich was speaking on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News (August 12, 2007)

Kenneth Arrow photo
Rutherford B. Hayes photo
David Lloyd George photo

“Personally I am a sincere advocate of all means which would lead to the settlement of international disputes by methods such as those which civilization has so successfully set up for the adjustment of differences between individuals.
But I am also bound to say this — that I believe it is essential in the highest interests, not merely of this country, but of the world, that Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the Great Powers of the world. Her potent influence has many a time been in the past, and may yet be in the future, invaluable to the cause of human liberty. It has more than once in the past redeemed Continental nations, who are sometimes too apt to forget that service, from overwhelming disaster and even from national extinction. I would make great sacrifices to preserve peace. I conceive that nothing would justify a disturbance of international good will except questions of the gravest national moment. But if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Mansion House (21 July 1911) during the Agadir Crisis, quoted in The Times (22 July 1911), p. 7
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Friedrich Engels photo

“We are now approaching a social revolution, in which the old economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand — a man's hand — and from the endeavor to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's, but not on the man's part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished?
One might reply, not without reason: not only will it not disappear, but it will rather be perfectly realized. For with the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wagelabor will also disappear, and with it the proletariat and the necessity for a certain, statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money. Prostitution disappears and monogamy, instead of going out of existence, at last becomes a reality—for men also.
At all events, the situation will be very much changed for men. But also that of women, and of all women, will be considerably altered. With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children become? a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the "consequences" which now forms the essential social factor—moral and economic—hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man. Will not this be sufficient cause for a gradual rise of a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame? And finally, did we not see that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution, though antitheses, are inseparable and poles of the same social condition? Can prostitution disappear without engulfing at the same time monogamy?”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1804) as translated by Ernest Untermann (1902); Full English text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm - Full original-language German text of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me21/me21_025.htm

Clement Attlee photo
Georges Cuvier photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“The oppressive measures on pornography by the South Korean government are totally insane… It is actually seen that it oppresses masculinity and that it distorts the essentials. It is all done by the Ministry of Gender Equality and women’s organizations led by Korean feminists.”

Sung Jae-gi (1967–2013) South Korean masculism activist

Quoted in: " (Voice) Should pornography be censored? http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=104&oid=044&aid=0000127216" The Korea Herald (17 December 2012)

Albert Einstein photo

“The development during the present century is characterized by two theoretical systems essentially independent of each other: the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. The two systems do not directly contradict each other; but they seem little adapted to fusion into one unified theory.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"The Fundamentals of Theoretical Physics," (1940) as quoted in Out of My Later Years (1976)
1940s

Fred Rogers photo

“It's our insides that make us who we are, that allow us to dream and wonder and feel for others. That's what's essential. That's what will always make the biggest difference in our world.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Commencement Address at Middlebury College May, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20030906163501/http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/general_info/addresses/Fred_Rogers_2001.htm

Newton N. Minow photo

“Donald Ball and Wendell H. McCulloch, Jr., International Business: Introduction and Essentials, 5th ed. (Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin, 1993), p. 368.”

Newton N. Minow (1926) United States attorney and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission

Quote from a speech to the Association of American Law Schools

Aldous Huxley photo
André Malraux photo

“The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part III, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

Alex Salmond photo
Alexander H. Stephens photo

“We have all the essential elements of a high national career. The idea has been given out at the North, and even in the border States, that we are too small and too weak to maintain a separate nationality. This is a great mistake. In extent of territory we embrace five hundred and sixty-four thousand square miles and upward. This is upward of two hundred thousand square miles more than was included within the limits of the original thirteen States. It is an area of country more than double the territory of France or the Austrian empire. France, in round numbers, has but two hundred and twelve thousand square miles. Austria, in round numbers, has two hundred and forty-eight thousand square miles. Ours is greater than both combined. It is greater than all France, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain, including England, Ireland, and Scotland, together. In population we have upward of five millions, according to the census of 1860; this includes white and black. The entire population, including white and black, of the original thirteen States, was less than four millions in 1790, and still less in 76, when the independence of our fathers was achieved. If they, with a less population, dared maintain their independence against the greatest power on earth, shall we have any apprehension of maintaining ours now?”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Alan Guth photo
Ramanuja photo

“The individual self is subject to beginningless nescience, which has brought about an accumulation of karma, of the nature of both merit and demerit. The flood of such karma causes his entry into four kinds of bodies — heavenly, human, animal and plant beginning with that of Brahma downwards. This ingression into bodies produces the delusion of identity with those respective bodies (and the consequent attachments and aversions). This delusion inevitably brings about all the fears inherent in the state of worldly existence. The entire body of Vedanta aims at the annihilation of these fears. To accomplish their annihilation they teach the following:
(1) The essential nature of the individual self as transcending the body.
(2) The attributes of the individual self.
(3) The essential nature of the Supreme that is the inmost controller of both the material universe and the individual selves.
(4) The attributes of the Supreme.
(5) The devout meditation upon the Supreme.
(6) The goal to which such meditation, leads.
The Vedanta aims at making known the goal attainable through such a life of meditation, the goal being the realization, of the real nature of the individual self and after and through that realization, the direct experience of Brahman, which is of the nature of bliss infinite and perfect.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Source: Vedartha Sangraham, 11th century, p. 9-10.

Anton Chekhov photo