Quotes about expression
page 24

Gene Youngblood photo
Sathya Sai Baba photo
Simone Weil photo
James Madison photo

“You will find an allusion to some mysterious cause for a phenomenon in Stocks. It is surmised that the deferred debt is to be taken up at the next session, and some anticipated provision made for it. This may either be an invention of those who wish to sell, or it may be a reality imparted in confidence to the purchasers or smelt out by their sagacity. I have had a hint that something is intended and has dropt from 1 which has led to this speculation. I am unwilling to credit the fact, untill I have further evidence, which I am in a train of getting if it exists. It is said that packet boats & expresses are again sent from this place to the Southern States, to buy up the paper of all sorts which has risen in the market here. These & other abuses make it a problem whether the system of the old paper under a bad Government, or of the new under a good one, be chargeable with the greater substantial injustice. The true difference seems to be that by the former the few were the victims to the many; by the latter the many to the few. It seems agreed on all hands now that the bank is a certain & gratuitous augmentation of the capitals subscribed, in a proportion of not less than 40 or 50 [per cent] and if the deferred debt should be immediately provided for in favor of the purchasers of it in the deferred shape, & since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool & its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, & overawing it by clamours & combinations. Nothing new from abroad. I shall not be in [Philadelphia] till the close of the Week.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (8 August 1791)
1790s

Gertrude Stein photo
Kenneth Arrow photo

“As is by now well known, attempts to form social judgments by aggregating individual expressed preferences always lead to the possibility of paradox.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 25

E. B. White photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo

“Just as, in the case of the sunlight, on one who has never from the day of his birth seen it, all efforts at translating it into words are quite thrown away; you cannot make the splendour of the ray shine through his ears; in like manner, to see the beauty of the true and intellectual light, each man has need of eyes of his own; and he who by a gift of Divine inspiration can see it retains his ecstasy unexpressed in the depths of his consciousness; while he who sees it not cannot be made to know even the greatness of his loss. How should he? This good escapes his perception, and it cannot be represented to him; it is unspeakable, and cannot be delineated. We have not learned the peculiar language expressive of this beauty. … What words could be invented to show the greatness of this loss to him who suffers it? Well does the great David seem to me to express the impossibility of doing this. He has been lifted by the power of the Spirit out of himself, and sees in a blessed state of ecstacy the boundless and incomprehensible Beauty; he sees it as fully as a mortal can see who has quitted his fleshly envelopments and entered, by the mere power of thought, upon the contemplation of the spiritual and intellectual world, and in his longing to speak a word worthy of the spectacle he bursts forth with that cry, which all re-echo, "Every man a liar!"”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

I take that to mean that any man who entrusts to language the task of presenting the ineffable Light is really and truly a liar; not because of any hatred on his part of the truth, but because of the feebleness of his instrument for expressing the thing thought of.
On Virginity, Chapter 10

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley photo
George Boole photo

“That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, quoted in Kenneth E. Iverson's 1979 Turing Award Lecture
Attributed from posthumous publications

Eric Hoffer photo
Alison Bechdel photo
Jacques Lipchitz photo
Paul Theroux photo
Caspar David Friedrich photo

“Every truthful work of art must express a definite feeling, must move the spirit of the spectator either to joy or to sadness.... rather than try to unite all sensations, as thought mixed together with a twirling stick.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote in: 'Caspar David Friedrich's Medieval Burials', Karl Whittington - http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring12/whittington-on-caspar-david-friedrichs-medieval-burials
undated

Fredric Jameson photo
Ferdinand de Saussure photo
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah photo
Gino Severini photo

“I was interested in achieving a creative freedom, a style that I could express with Seurat's.... color technique [color-divisionism], but shaped to my own needs. Proof that I found it is in my paintings of that period, among which is the famous 'Pan-Pan a Monico' [Severini painted in 1912]. My preference for Neo-Impressionism dates from those works. At times I tried to suppress it, but it always worked its way back to the surface.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, p. 53; as quoted in: Shannon N. Pritchard, Gino Severini and the symbolist aesthetics of his futurist dance imagery, 1910-1915 https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pritchard_shannon_n_200305_ma.pdf Diss. uga, 2003.

Rudolf Clausius photo
Bram van Velde photo

“When I am painting, driven by lively tensions, I want to express what’s going on in me. When that tension has ceased, when the life in me became visible, then something happened which had to happen. Over and over again you experience a work which is created in this way. What happened? It is hard to say, because it was not my mind that led but the inner desire that revealed its inner life.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Letter to H.P. Bremmer, 17-11-1930, City Archive The Hague, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 50 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1930's

Raymond Chandler photo
Sun Myung Moon photo
Albert Einstein photo
Erik Naggum photo

“Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: new to lisp (3rd time lucky) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ef9b57ecc5555931 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles

Friedrich Hayek photo
Walter Scott photo
John Napier photo

“29 Proposition. The name of the beast expressed by the number 666. (cap. 13.) is the name λαγεινος onely.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), The First and Introductory Treatise

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Dave Sim photo
Richard Perle photo
Piet Mondrian photo
W. H. Auden photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Clinton Edgar Woods photo
William O. Douglas photo

“It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. We need all the ingenuity we possess to avert the holocaust.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

"The One Un-American Act," Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award
Other speeches and writings

Sandra Day O'Connor photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Clement Attlee photo

“We are told that we have to accept the Treaty of Rome. I have read the Treaty of Rome pretty carefully, and it expresses an outlook entirely different from our own. It may be that I am insular, but I value our Parliamentary outlook, an outlook which has extended throughout the Commonwealth. That is not the same position that holds on the Continent of Europe. No one of these principal countries in the Common Market has been very successful in running Parliamentary institutions: Germany, hardly any experience; Italy, very little; France, a swing between a dictatorship and more or less anarchic Parliament, and not very successfully. As I read the Treaty of Rome, the whole position means that we shall enter a federation which is composed in an entirely different way. I do not say it is the wrong way. But it is not our way. In this set-up it is the official who really puts up all the proposals; the whole of the planning is done by officials. It seems to me that the Ministers come in at a later stage—and if there is anything like a Federal Parliament, at a later stage still. I do not think that that is the way this country has developed, or wishes to develop. I am all for working in with our Continental friends. I was one of those who worked to build up NATO; I have worked for European integration. But that is a very different thing from bringing us into a close association which, I may say, is not one for defence, or even just for foreign policy. The fact is that if the designs behind the Common Market are carried out, we are bound to be affected in every phase of our national life. There would be no national planning, except under the guidance of Continental planning—we shall not be able to deal with our own problems; we shall not be able to build up the country in the way we want to do, so far as I can see. I think we shall be subject to overall control and planning by others. That is my objection.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/nov/08/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (8 November 1962).
1960s

Karl Mannheim photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. […] The internet can help bridge divides between people of different faiths. As the President said in Cairo, freedom of religion is central to the ability of people to live together. And as we look for ways to expand dialogue, the internet holds out such tremendous promise. […] We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely. The United States has been assisting in these efforts for some time, with a focus on implementing these programs as efficiently and effectively as possible. Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom. We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights, to fight climate change and epidemics, to build global support for President Obama's goal of a world without nuclear weapons, to encourage sustainable economic development that lifts the people at the bottom up.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

"Remarks on Internet Freedom", The Newseum, Washington, DC, January 21, 2010 http://web.archive.org/web/20100123145341/http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm
Secretary of State (2009–2013)

Wilfred Thesiger photo

“I once asked Bell whether during the years he was studying the quantum theory it ever occurred to him that the theory might simply be wrong. He thought a moment and answered, “I hesitated to think it might be wrong, but I knew that it was rotten.” Bell pronounced the word “rotten” with a good deal of relish and then added, “That is to say, one has to find some decent way of expressing whatever truth there is in it.” The attitude that even if there is not something actually wrong with the theory, there is something deeply unsettling—“rotten”—about it, was common to most of the creators of the quantum theory. Niels Bohr was reported to have remarked, “Well, I think that if a man says it is completely clear to him these days, then he has not really understood the subject.” He later added, “If you do not getschwindlig [dizzy] sometimes when you think about these things then you have not really understood it.” My teacher Philipp Frank used to tell about the time he visited Einstein in Prague in 1911. Einstein had an office at the university that over looked a park. People were milling around in the park, some engaged in vehement gesture-filled discussions. When Professor Frank asked Einstein what was going on, Einstein replied that it was the grounds of a lunatic asylum, adding, “Those are the madmen who do not occupy themselves with the quantum theory.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

Alfred North Whitehead photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Rollo May photo
George Boole photo

“That axiom of Metaphysicians which is termed the principle of contradiction and which affirms that it is impossible for anything to possess a quality, and in the same time not to possess it, is a consequence of the fundamental law of thought, whose expression is x²=x.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 49: as cited in: " Professor Boole's Mathematical theory http://books.google.com/books?id=tBNLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA62" in: Henry Longueville Manse, Philosophical pamphlets, (1853), p. 6

Skye Sweetnam photo
Louis Comfort Tiffany photo

“I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty, that has been my creed.”

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) American stained glass and jewelry designer

The Art Work of Louis C. Tiffany (Doubleday, Page & Co New York, 1916)

Alan García photo
Marcel Duchamp photo
Fernand Léger photo
Noah Porter photo

“Christianity is more than history; it is also a system of truths. Every event which its history records, either is a truth, or suggests a truth, or expresses a truth which man needs to assent to or to put into practice.”

Noah Porter (1811–1892) American academic

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 133.

Oswald Chambers photo

“Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Terms' p. 74
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

André Breton photo
Lin Yutang photo
John Muir photo

“Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirletters/id/9847/show/9846 to Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley (9 June 1872); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 9: Persons and Problems
1870s

Shankar Dayal Sharma photo

“I am here to defend the right of a member to express his views.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

When his ruling was protested by a member of the Parliament in the Raja Sabha and when he even threatened that he would resign from the post of Chairman, Rajya Sabha and Vice President of India, which eventually ended when the Congress party apologized to him on the floor of the house.
Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.202.

Amit Chaudhuri photo

“Expletives serve opinions well which are not sure enough of themselves to risk expression in restrained language.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 100

Colin Wilson photo

“…the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.”

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control

Algis Budrys photo
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben photo
Stephen King photo
Paul Gauguin photo
Lewis Mumford photo
Maimónides photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
John Calvin photo
David Brooks photo
Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“Can you also, Lucullus, affirm that there is any power united with wisdom and prudence which has made, or, to use your own expression, manufactured man? What sort of a manufacture is that? Where is it exercised? when? why? how?”
Etiamne hoc adfirmare potes, Luculle, esse aliquam vim, cum prudentia et consilio scilicet, quae finxerit vel, ut tuo verbo utar, quae fabricata sit hominem? Qualis ista fabrica est? ubi adhibita? quando? cur? quo modo?

Academica, Book II (Entitled Lucullus), Chapter XXVII, section 87

Charles Darwin photo

“When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow—to use the expression employed by a friend—we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one.”

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 23. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=38&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

George Henry Lewes photo
Donald Ervin Knuth photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Timothy Leary photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Kanō Jigorō photo
Walter Pater photo

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Calvin Coolidge photo
A. James Gregor photo
Kapil Sibal photo

“Freedom of expression doesn't mean tweeting through fake accounts. If the government has to be transparent, Twitterati should also reciprocate. This will help stop defamatory and criminal traffic on the Net. We should amend the law to force disclosure of identity.”

Kapil Sibal (1948) Indian lawyer and politician

On internet anonymity, as quoted in The govt does not understand social media nor does it know how to deal with it, says Kapil Sibal http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/it-minister-kapil-sibal-crackdowns-on-social-media-rth-campaign/1/247667.html, India Today (26 January 2013)