Quotes about fit
page 5

Robert Herrick photo
Béla H. Bánáthy photo
Margaret Sanger photo

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue in birth control.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Editors of American Medicine in a review of Sanger's article "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" published in Birth Control Review, May 1919
Misattributed

J. Bradford DeLong photo

“Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust–and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state. After social democracy has been leveled and the rubble cleared away, then–perhaps–a limited range of issues can be discussed and debated by a–limited–restored democracy, with some kind of group of right-wing army officers descended from latifundistas Council of Guardians in the background to ensure that property remains sacred and protected, and the government small enough to fit in a bathtub. […] Hayek was formed in Austria. From his perspective the property and enterprise respecting Imperial Habsburg government of Franz Josef eager to make no waves, to hold what it has, and to keep the lid off the pressure cooker appears not unattractive. This is especially so when you contrasted would be really existing authoritarian alternatives: anti-Semitic populist demagogue mayors of Vienna; nationalist Serbian or Croatian politicians interested in maintaining popular legitimacy by waging class war or ethnic war; separatists who seek independence and then one man, one vote, one time. An “authoritarian” after the manner of Franz Josef looks quite attractive in this context–and if you convince yourself but they are as dedicated to small government neoliberalism as you are, and that the Lykourgan moment of the form will be followed by soft rule and popular assent, so much the better. And if the popular assent is not forthcoming? Then Hayek can blame the socialists, and say it is their fault for not understanding how good a deal they are offered.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Sören Kierkegaard photo
Talib Kweli photo
Anna Politkovskaya photo

“We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.”

Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006) Russian journalist

As quoted in " Poisoned by Putin: The horror of Beslan was made still worse by the intimidation of Russia's servile media http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/09/russia.media" (9 September 2004), The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited.

Alphonse Daudet photo

“There is no law, in literature, against picking up a rusty weapon; the important thing is to be able to sharpen the blade and to reforge the hilt to fit one's hand.”

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) French novelist

Il n'est pas défendu, en littérature, de ramasser une arme rouillée; l'important est de savoir aiguiser la lame et d'en reforger la poignée à la mesure de sa main.
Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1888) p. 178; George Burnham Ives (trans.) Thirty Years in Paris (Boston: Little, Brown, 1900) p. 134.

John Ralston Saul photo
William Saroyan photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

As quoted in Nicky Woolf, "'PUAhate' and 'ForeverAlone': inside Elliot Rodger's online life", The Guardian (May 30, 2014)
Bodybuilding.com, PUAhate and ForeverAlone posts

Stuart A. Umpleby photo

“The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

von Glasersfeld, 1987
Stuart A. Umpleby (1994) The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems http://www.itk.ntnu.no/ansatte/Gulbrandsoey_Kenneth/documents/papers/THE%20CYBERNETICS%20OF%20CONCEPTUAL%20SYSTEMS.pdf. p. 3

Thomas Carlyle photo

“… I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran … It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words … We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech … The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart … we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men … Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.”

Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), pg. 64-67
1840s

Lupe Fiasco photo

“In the interests of the ideal of maximum output, [our society] judges men by their fitness for jobs, not jobs by their fitness for men.”

John Passmore (1914–2004) Australian philosopher

Source: The Perfectibility of Man (1971), p. 280.

John Buchan photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Quentin Crisp photo
Confucius photo
Ray Comfort photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Alfred Russel Wallace photo

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Emily Dickinson photo
Cornstalk photo

“My son, the Great Spirit has seen fit that we should die together; and has sent you here. It is his will. Let us submit. It is best…”

Cornstalk (1720–1777) Native American in the American Revolution

To his son Elinipsico as a mob approached them in Point Pleasant (10 November 1777), as quoted in "Cornstalk, the Shawanee Chief" by Rev. William Henry Foote, in The Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 16, Issue 9, (September 1850) pp. 533-540 http://victorian.fortunecity.com/rothko/420/aniyuntikwalaski/cornstalk.html

Thomas Hobbes photo
Ben Jonson photo

“Lady: How do's it fit? wilt come together? Prudence: Hardly. Lad: Thou must make shift with it. Pride feels no Pain.”

Act II, Scene I
The New Inn, or The Light Heart (licensed 19 January 1629; printed 1631)

H. G. Wells photo
Nancy Cartwright photo

“Every Sunday I’d take a 20-minute bus ride to his house in Beverley Hills for a one-hour lesson and be there for four hours […] They had four sons, they didn’t have a daughter and I kind of fitted in as the baby of the family.”

Nancy Cartwright (1957) American actress

Quoted in And speaking of the Simpsons, 2004-08-12, Edinburgh Evening News, 2009-02-07 http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/thesimpsons/And-speaking-of-the-Simpsons.2554090.jp,
Referring to her voice training lessons with Butler

Willa Cather photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Lisa Randall photo

“Science is not religion. We're not going to be able to answer the "why" questions. But when you put together all of what we know about the universe, it fits together amazingly well.”

Lisa Randall (1962) American theoretical physicist and an expert on particle physics and cosmology

The Discover Interview: Lisa Randall (July 2006)

James Hudson Taylor photo

“The missionaries should be men of apostolic zeal, patience, endurance, willing to be all things to all men. May the Lord raise up suitable instruments, and fit me for this work.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Two: Over the Treaty Wall. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1982, 23).

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
James Allen photo
Albert Einstein photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Thomas Aquinas photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
John Maynard Smith photo
Andrew Marvell photo

“How fit is he to sway
That can so well obey ("Horatian Ode," 83-84),”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650), lines 83-84; on political authority.

“Thou too take courage, wealth despise,
And fit thee to ascend the skies,
Nor be a poor man's courtesies
Rejected or disdained.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book VIII, p. 286

Larisa Oleynik photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
William Morris photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo
Frank McCourt photo
Josh Billings photo

“The man who kan ware a paper collar a hole week and keap, it klean, aint fit for enny thing else.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo

“Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

pg 86.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

Hendrik Werkman photo

“the art-critic has provided the products of my lab with a (new) label: 'abracadabra'.... [but] one can not speak about abracadabra-ism, and that is its advantage on all –isms: it doesn't know time and limits and especially not the 'periods of time' [but] only seasons.... all -isms are dead, blown away, sprayed in the air, gone (here imagery does not fit, imagery is always wrong) - only for the 'abracadabra' is the future wall, the coming wall in the next house - how much the 'peinture' of other fabrics is curving and folding itself, polished or blown-up, it's all for nothing... We are not addressing those offspring but only the artists in this world..”

Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945) Dutch artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Hendrik Werkman, in het Nederlands): de critiek heeft de producten van mijn laboratorium voorzien van een (nieuw) etiket: abracadabra.. ..van abacadabraïsme kan men niet spreken en dat is haar voorsprong op alle ismen: het kent geen tijd en geen grenzen en vooral geen 'perioden' [maar] slechts jaargetijden.. ..alle ismen zijn dood, verwaaid, verstoven, weg (hier past beeldspraak niet, beeldspraak is altijd valsch) slechts voor het abracadabra is de toekomstige wand, de komende wand in het komende huis hoe ook de peintuur van ander maaksel zich kromt en plooit, poets of opblaast, het is al om niet.. ..wij richten ons immers niet tot deze nakomers maar uitsluitend tot de artisten op deze globe..
Quote of Werkman from his 'Proclamatie / Procamation 2. Nov. 1932, published at nr. 13, at the left border of the river Aa'; print on paper; (transl. Fons Heijnsbroek) - from the collection of Gemeentemuseum The Hague
Werkman is referring to an article by nl:Johan Dijkstra in the 'Provinciale Groninger Courant' who called Werkman's art-works 'abacadraba', but meant in a rather positive sense, because Dijkstra missed it at the exhibition of De Ploeg, Autumn 1932
1930's

Lawrence Lessig photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Morrissey photo

“Well, the problem I've had with all the interviews I've had in America - I had meetings with about nine labels - and they all say to me "Will your new songs fit in with what is popular and what is in the chart?"”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

And I say "Good God, I hope not!"
From a radio interview with Janice Long (2002)
In interviews etc., About pop culture

Miley Cyrus photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Ernest Flagg photo
Jonathan Edwards photo

“Arakawa: Yes, and because I think I look a little like a cartoon cow, so it fits.”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

Jean Dubuffet photo
Christina Aguilera photo
Thomas Kuhn photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Lawrence Lessig photo
Gabrielle Roy photo
C.K. Prahalad photo

“Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations.”

C.K. Prahalad (1941–2010) Indian academic

C. K. Prahalad, cited in: Don Soderquist (2005), The Wal-Mart Way, p. 178

N. Gregory Mankiw photo

“You should make life fit to you, not to make you fit life…”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Zire Notes (May 2004 - December 2006)

Karel Appel photo

“.. at least fifty [gouaches painted in complete dark], one after another. Then I made a light, a candle, and I picked them up and turned them around, as I couldn't see a top or a bottom. I finished them off as I felt fit, a bit more white or a red spot [in his studio in Amsterdam, in 1947”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quote from a talk in 1990 with Rudi Fuchs; in 'Appel, about growing older'; as quoted by Frank van der Ploeg, in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12(2004) http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200401_01/_low001200401_01_0027.php

Richard Dawkins photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Jane Roberts photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Ricardo Sanchez photo
Thomas Aquinas photo

“I answer that, It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation. This can be made clear if we observe the mode of generation carried out in various living things. Some living things do not possess in themselves the power of generation, but are generated by some other specific agent, such as some plants and animals by the influence of the heavenly bodies, from some fitting matter and not from seed: others possess the active and passive generative power together; as we see in plants which are generated from seed; for the noblest vital function in plants is generation. Wherefore we observe that in these the active power of generation invariably accompanies the passive power. Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female. And as among animals there is a vital operation nobler than generation, to which their life is principally directed; therefore the male sex is not found in continual union with the female in perfect animals, but only at the time of coition; so that we may consider that by this means the male and female are one, as in plants they are always united; although in some cases one of them preponderates, and in some the other. But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation. Therefore directly after the formation of woman, it was said: "And they shall be two in one flesh"”

Gn. 2:24
I, q. 92, art. 1 (Whether the Woman should have been made in the first production of things?)
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Ben Carson photo

“"You do your best, we do the rest." That fit the way I felt about God. I was going to give God my best and then it was up to God to do the rest.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 46

Charles P. Mattocks photo
André Maurois photo

“It was still the custom of the countryside to build with local materials produced as close to the selected site as possible, for transport was difficult, even the best of country roads being more fitted for horseback traffic rather than heavy loads.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Source: Dashpers http://www.dashper.net.nz/dashpers.htm (unfinished, unpublished novel), Chapter Two - A House is built

“The newspaper fits the reader’s program while the listener must fit the broadcaster’s program.”

Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1919–1988) American diplomat

The Enduring American Press (October 1964) edited by The Hartford Courant

Paul Theroux photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Margaret Mead photo
Parker Palmer photo
Ian Holloway photo

“Reporter: Ian, have you got any injury worries? Holloway: No, I'm fully fit, thank you.”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

Happy Holloways - the crazy quotes which defined football in 2010, Goal.com, James, Daly, 2010-12-30, 2011-04-29 http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/2896/premier-league/2010/12/30/2277614/happy-holloways-the-crazy-quotes-which-defined-football-in,
Sourced quotes

Harold Pinter photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo