Quotes about first
page 82

Sonia Sotomayor photo

“I disagree with Les. We always found good cunt at the Lyceum. Friendly cunt, clean cunt, spare cunt, jeans and knicker stuffed full of nice juicy hairy cunt, handfuls of cunt, palmful grabbing the cunt by the stem, or the root – infantile memories of cunt – backrow slides – slithery oily cunt, the cunt that breathes – the cunt that’s neatly wrapped in cotton, in silk, in nylon, that announces, that speaks or thrusts, that winks that’s squeezed in a triangle of furtive cloth backed by an arse that’s creamy, springy billowy cushiony tight, knicker lined, knicker skinned, circumscribed by flowers and cotton, by views, clinging knicker, juice ridden knicker, hot knicker, wet knicker, swelling vulva knicker, witty cunt, teeth smiling the eyes biting cunt, cultured cunt, culture vulture cunt, finger biting cunt, cunt that pours, cunt that spreads itself over your soft lips, that attacks, cunt that imagines – cunt you dream about, cunt you create as a Melba, a meringue with smooth sides – remembered from school boys’ smelly first cunt, first foreign cunt, amazing cunt – cunt that’s cruel. Cunt that protects itself and makes you want it even more cunt – cunt that smells of the air, of the earth, of bakeries, of old apples, of figs, of sweat of hands of sour yeast of fresh fish cunt. So – are we going Les? We might pick up a bit of crumpet.”

East (1975), Scene 17

Joseph Addison photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Vermont is a State I Love (1928)

“Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus… of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.
Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.
This is indeed amazing.
Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.”

G. Spencer-Brown (1923–2016) British mathematician

Source: Laws of Form, (1969), p. 104-05; as cited in: David Phillip Barndollar (2004) The Poetics of Complexity and the Modern Long Poem https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2004/barndollardp50540/barndollardp50540.pdf, The University of Texas at Austin, p. 12-13.

Theodore Wilbur Anderson photo
Jorge Luis Borges photo

“The event took place in the month of February of 1969, to the north of Boston, in Cambridge. I didn't write it down right away because my first intention was to forget it, so as not to lose my mind.”

El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi primer propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón.
"The Other" ["El Otro"], The Book of Sand (1975)

Jane Roberts photo
Jeane Kirkpatrick photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Erich Heckel photo

“I finished my first woodcut in Dresden in 1905 after the Xylographic art, cutting out of the hard boxwood the clean sketches with the slate pencil. Then followed the rounded iron, to arrive at the woodcut more freely through the simply ripped out sketch on the log (alder, lime tree, poplar), which would be utilized from here on out. Then finally came a short cobbler knife, and without a pré-sketch, the hand cuts freely into the wood a woodcut, just like it would work on paper with the pen.”

Erich Heckel (1883–1970) German artist

Heckel later summarized in this way his woodcut developments, mainly developed during his years in Die Brücke
Source: Brücke' Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Druckgraphik, Magdalena M. Moeller; Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, p. 21; as quoted by Louise Albiez https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272168564Claire (incl. translation), Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May, 2013 p.12

Kent Hovind photo
Richard Holbrooke photo
David Lloyd George photo

“Free Trade is a great pacificator. We have had many quarrels, many causes of quarrels, during the last fifty years, but we have not had a single war with any first-class Power. Free Trade is slowly but surely cleaving a path through the dense and dark thicket of armaments to the sunny land of brotherhood amongst nations.”

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

Speech in Manchester (21 April 1908), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 43.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

John Napier photo

“And if any number of equals to a first sine be multiplied together producing a second, just so many equals to the Logarithm of the first added together produce the Logarithm of the second.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

Appendix, The relations of Logarithms & their natural numbers to each other
The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

George W. Bush photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Charles Handy photo
Hugo Black photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“1936. He is not laughed at, that laughs at himself first.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Francis Escudero photo
Jacques Maritain photo
James Joyce photo

“This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.”

Stephen Hero (1944)
Context: Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Brigham Young photo

“Go to the United States, into Europe, or wherever you can come across men who have been in the midst of this people, and one will tell you that we are a poor, ignorant, deluded people; the next will tell you that we are the most industrious and intelligent people on the earth, and are destined to rise to eminence as a nation, and spread, and continue to spread, until we revolutionize the whole earth. If you pass on to the third man, and inquire what he thinks of the "Mormons," he will say they are fools, duped and led astray by Joe Smith, who was a knave, a false Prophet, and a money digger. Why is all this? It is because there is a spirit in man. And when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached on the earth, and the kingdom of God is established, there is also a spirit in these things, and an Almighty spirit too. When these two spirits come in contact one with the other, the spirit of the Gospel reflects light upon the spirit which God has placed in man, and wakes him up to a consciousness of his true state, which makes him afraid he will be condemned, for he perceives at once that "Mormonism" is true. "Our craft is in danger," is the first thought that strikes the wicked and dishonest of mankind, when the light of truth shines upon them. Say they, "If these people called Latter-day Saints are correct in their views, the whole world must be wrong, and what will become of our time-honoured institutions, and of our influence, which we have swayed successfully over the minds of the people for ages. This Mormonism must be put down."”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, 1:187-188 (June 19, 1853)
1850s

Thomas Browne photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Robert Harris photo
Joseph Beuys photo

“I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

Willie Dixon photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
James Weldon Johnson photo
John Barrowman photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

H.V. Sheshadri photo
Felix Ehrenhaft photo

“What about the orbiting of the so-called electrons around their central nucleus? What has really been observed unequivocally? Nothing of the moving particle; what has rather been observed are phenomena which at first glance have nothing to do at all with the motion of bodies. Everything else that leads to the atomic model, is a long chain of inferences.”

Felix Ehrenhaft (1879–1952) Austrian physicist

Wie steht es bei dem Kreisen der sogenannten Elektronen um ihren zentralen Kern? Was ist hier wirklich unmittelbar wahrgenommen worden? Nichts von den bewegten Teilchen; was vielmehr beobachtet wurde, sind Erscheinungen, welche auf den ersten Blick mit der Bewegung von Körpern gar nichts zu tun haben. Alles übrige, was zum Atommodell geführt, ist eine lange Kette von Schlüssen.
In an address to the Viennese Chemisch-Physikalische Gesellschaft http://www.cpg.univie.ac.at/, April 26, 1932, as quoted by [Joseph Braunbeck, Der andere Physiker: das Leben von Felix Ehrenhaft, Leykam Buchverlagsgesellschaft, 2003, 3701174709, 51]

Nicolas Chamfort photo
Ellsworth Kelly photo
Mark Kingwell photo

“But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only the first.”

Mark Kingwell (1963) Canadian philosopher

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 2, Rights And Duties, p. 68

Tommy Robinson photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Anu Partanen photo
Terry Brooks photo

“Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:
# Be as verbally explicit and universal as possible…. The effect is to make `proper' scientific statements seem to talk only about an unchanging universal realm….
# Avoid colloquial forms of language and use, even in speech, forms close to those of written language. Certain words mark language as colloquial…, as does use of first and second person…
# Use technical terms in place of colloquial synonyms or paraphrases….
# Avoid personification and use of specifically or usually human attributes or qualities…, human agents or actors, and human types of action or process…
# Avoid metaphoric and figurative language, especially those using emotional, colorful, or value laden words, hyperboles and exaggeration, irony, and humorous or comic expressions.
# Be serious and dignified in all expression of scientific content. Avoid sensationalism.
# Avoid personalities and reference to individual human beings and their actions, including (for the most part) historical figures and events….
# Avoid reference to fiction or fantasy.
# Use causal forms of explanation and avoid narrative and dramatic accounts…. Similarly forbidden are dramatic forms, including dialogue, the development of suspense or mystery, the element of surprise, dramatic action, and so on.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 133-134, as cited in: Mary U. Hanrahan, "Applying CDA to the analysis of productive hybrid discourses in science classrooms." (2002).

Marsden Hartley photo

“I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT – exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Quote in his letter to Adelaide Kuntz, October 24, 1939; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 130
1931 - 1943

Alan Keyes photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“I have devoted exhaustive study to the Protocols of Zion. In the past objection was always made that they were not suited to present day propaganda. In reading them now I find that we can use them very well. The Protocols of Zion are as modern today as they were when published the first time! At noon I mentioned this to the Führer. He believed the protocols to be absolutely genuine!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

As quoted in The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Will Eisner, (10/2/2005), p.110; and in Survivors Victims and Perpetrators:, Essays on the Nazi Holocaust https://books.google.com/books/about/Survivors_Victims_and_Perpetrators.html?id=Hyg98sfH3CAC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false by Joel E. Dimsdale, p.311.
Diary excerpts

“The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 119

Nakayama Miki photo
Joe Satriani photo
Louis Kronenberger photo

“Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

Source: Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 65.

Lafcadio Hearn photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo
Grace Slick photo
Pete Doherty photo
David Feherty photo

“My first wife was a great housekeeper. She kept both houses.”

David Feherty (1958) professional golfer, broadcaster, writer

Feherty joking about his first wife while announcing Bo Van Pelt in 2012 Tavistock Cup. ( YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpK7ipARF3o )

Will Arnett photo
Olga Rozanova photo

“Only the absence of honesty and of a true love of art provides some artists with the affrontery to live on stale cans of artistic economics stocked up for years, and, year in year out, until they are fifty, to mutter about what they had first started to talk about when they were twenty.”

Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) Russian artist

Quote, 1913, in 'Osnovy novogo tvorchestva i prichiny ego neponimaniia,', in 'Soiuz molodezhi' (St. Petersburg), March 1913, p. 20; translated in John E. Bowlt, The Russian Avant- Garde: Theory and Criticism; Thames and Hudson, London 1988, p. 109

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick photo
Terry Goodkind photo
Michael McIntyre photo
Samuel Vince photo

“The rapid establishment of Christianity must therefore have been from the conviction which those who embraced it, had of its "Truth and power unto salvation." Christianity at first spread itself amongst the most enlightened nations of the earth - in those places where human learning was in its greatest perfection; and, by the force of the evidence which attended it, amongst such men it gained an establishment. It has been justly observed, that "it happened very providentially to the honour of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were t their height, and when there were men who made it the business of their lives to search after truth and lift the several opinions of the philosophers and wise men, concerning the duty, the end, and chief happiness of reasonable creatures." Both the learned and the ignorant alike embraced its doctrines; the learned were not likely to be deceived in the proofs which were offered; and the same cause undoubtedly operated to produce the effect upon each. But an immediate conversion of the bulk of mankind, can arise only from some proofs of a ddivine authority offering themselves immediately to the senses; the preaching of any new doctrine, if lest to operate only by its own force, would go but a very little way towards the immediate conversion of the gnorant, who have no principle of action but what arises from habit, and whose powers of reasoning are insufficient to correct their errors. When Mahomet was required by his followers to work a miracle for their conviction, he always declined it; he was too cautious to trust to an experiment, the success of which was scarcely whithin the bounds of probablity; he amused his followers with prtended visions, which with the aid afterwards of the civil and military powr; and as the accomplishment of that event was by a few obscure persons, who founded their pretentions upon authority from heaven, we are next to consider, what kind of proofs of their divine commission they offered to the world; and whether they themselves could have been deceived, or mankind could have been deludded by them.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 20; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 261-262

Stanisław Lem photo

“If you told me I was nearer to 40 than 35 when I first played for England in 1966, I would not sue for slander.”

Basil D'Oliveira (1931–2011) Cricket player of England.

Of the controversy about his true age.
Daily Telegraph Obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/8901064/Basil-DOliveira.html

Bill Hybels photo
William Golding photo

“How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 3: Huts on a Beach

Poul Anderson photo

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Clarence Thomas photo
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
John Adams photo

“Although neither nation has been brought to admit that they were chargeable with the first infraction, yet no American can forget the carrying off the negroes.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to T. Pickering (7 December 1799), Philadelphia. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2107#lf1431-09_head_047
1790s

Cormac McCarthy photo
Bernard Lewis photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo

“On his first hand he wore rings of stone,
Iron, Amber, Wood and Bone.
There were rings unseen on his second hand,
One was blood in a flowing band,
One was air all whisper thin,
And the ring of ice had a flaw within.
Full faintly shone the ring of flame,
And the final ring was without name.”

A poem from the second book of the The Kingkiller Chronicle, quoted in an interview at Fantasymundo (1 August 2009) http://www.fantasymundo.com/articulos/2207/fantasymundo_entrevista_patrick_rothfuss_nombre_viento
The Wise Man's Fear (2011)

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven photo

“Else von Freytag-Loringhoven is the first Dadaiste in New York and […] the Little Review has discovered her. This movement should capture American like a prairie fire.”

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) German poet

John Rodker, "Dada' and Else von Freytag-Loringhoven," The Little Review 7.2 (May-June 1920): p 36.
About

Rick Perry photo
Bill Bryson photo

“I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy- five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 36

“O men! be just Give aid first and counsel afterwards.”

Camillo Federici (1749–1802) Italian actor and playwright (1749-1802)

Eh! uomini, slate giusti. Prima soccorrete, e poi consigliate.
Il Delatore, Act III, Sc. I. — (Lucia).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 298.

“When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Conversation with W.C. Seitz, in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983
after 1970

Otto Neurath photo
El Lissitsky photo
Peter Akinola photo

“We had thought Mike the greatest; now we began to discover he was only human and, worse, we had our first dismaying confrontation with the fact that he would not back up his ministers.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 4, Sixty days of decision, p. 63

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi photo
Brigham Young photo
Stafford Cripps photo
Yves Klein photo
Alan M. Dershowitz photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“Life-as-it-could-be is a territory we can only study by first creating it.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)