Quotes about hearing
page 15

Bel Kaufmanová photo
Alexander H. Stephens photo

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the north, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

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

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Noam Chomsky photo
John Heywood photo

“Who is so deafe or so blinde as is hee
That wilfully will neither heare nor see?”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part II, chapter 9.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Cristoforo Colombo photo
Jonathan Edwards photo
Andy Warhol photo
Pauline Kael photo
Derren Brown photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Babe Ruth photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Tessa Virtue photo
Hermann Hesse photo
Henry Rollins photo
Colin Meloy photo

“People don’t automatically appreciate the difference between listening and hearing any more than they do the difference between looking and seeing.”

Ivor Tiefenbrun (1946) Scottish businessman

Interview in Audio Perfectionist Journal http://www.auriclepublishing.com/page0/assets/Ivor%20%20Interview%20for%20web.pdf.
2006

Sharron Angle photo

“Q: Why is it that in all of your commercials you have the image of Latinos? What do you see when you hear, and I quote, "illegal aliens?"
Sharron Angle: I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials. I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence. What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That's the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists; we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don’t know why they're coming. So we have to secure all of our borders and that's what that was about, is border security. Not just our southern border, but our coastal border and our northern border.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

speaking to Rancho High School's Hispanic Student Union
Jon
Ralston
Video: Angle tells Hispanic kids “I’m not sure those are Latinos” in her ad (!), says really about northern border (!!)
2010-10-17
Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/ralstons-flash/2010/oct/17/video-angle-tells-hispanic-kids-im-not-sure-those-/
2010-10-20
Quinn
Bowman
Terence
Burlij
Angle Caught on Tape Again, Tells Latino Students They 'Look a Little More Asian'
2010-10-19
The Rundown
PBS
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/10/the-morning-line-angle-caught-on-tape-again.html
2010-10-20

Henry Clay Trumbull photo
Joe Biden photo

“But Titus said, with his uncommon sense,
When the Exclusion Bill was in suspense:
"I hear a lion in the lobby roar;
Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door
And keep him there, or shall we let him in
To try if we can turn him out again?"”

James Bramston (1694–1744) British writer

Art of Politics (1729). Colonel Titus is reported to have said, "I hope we shall not be wise as the frogs to whom Jupiter gave a stork for their king. To trust expedients with such a king on the throne would be just as wise as if there were a lion in the lobby, and we should vote to let him in and chain him, instead of fastening the door to keep him out". On the Exclusion Bill, Jan. 7, 1681.

Fernando J. Corbató photo
Herman Melville photo
Maxwell D. Taylor photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Anne Brontë photo

“You may have as many words as you please, – only I can’t stay to hear them.”

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. III : A Controversy; Helen to Gilbert

Karen Kwiatkowski photo
Ron White photo
Homér photo
Hesiod photo
Ani DiFranco photo
Scott Kurtz photo

“Can't hear you. I'm inside my protective blanket of fear.”

PvP, Wednesday, September 6, 2000 http://www.pvponline.com/comic/2000/09/06/wed-sep-06/
PvP (1998)

Carl Sagan photo
TotalBiscuit photo

“…Why am I even whispering? It's not like they're actually gonna hear me.”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Insurgency (standalone) (January 29, 2014)

Frederick William Robertson photo

“The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 112.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
Bryan Adams photo

“To really love a woman,
To understand her, you gotta know her deep inside.
Hear every thought, see every dream.
And give her wings, when she wants to fly.
Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms,
You know you really love a woman.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?, written by Bryan Adams, Mutt Lange, and Michael Kamen
Song lyrics, 18 til I Die (1996)

David Morrison photo
Theodore L. Cuyler photo
Paul Simon photo
Billy Joel photo
Eugen Drewermann photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo
John Buchan photo
Nelson Mandela photo
Mario Cuomo photo
Ben Carson photo

“I want people to see me as an honest person, a person who is actually willing to express what they believe. The way I look at it, if people don't like that, I'd rather not be in office. I don't want to be in office under false pretenses, just saying things people want to hear so I can get elected.”

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

As quoted in "Carson: I won't tell lies to get elected" http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/256687-carson-i-wont-be-silenced (2015), by Jonathan Easley, The Hill (October 12, 2015).

Bill Hicks photo
Chris Matthews photo
Sorley MacLean photo

“My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, 1982, quoted in Krause, Corinna. Eadar Dà Chànan: Self-Translation, the Bilingual Edition and Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/3453/Krause2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Letters and interviews

Bernie Sanders photo

“My ears may have been playing a trick on me, but I thought I heard the gentleman a moment ago say something quote unquote about homos in the military. Was I right in hearing that expression? Was the gentleman referring to the thousands and thousands of gay people who have put their lives on the line in countless wars defending this country? Was that the groups of people that the gentleman was referring to? You have insulted thousands of men and women who have put their lives on the line. I think they are owed an apology.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking to Representative Duke Cunningham on the floor of the House of Representatives, 11 May 1995, from Watch Bernie Sanders Demolish A Republican Over ‘Homos In The Military’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-duke-cunningham-homophobia_us_56cb75eee4b041136f17dc9f by Zach Carter, The Huffington Post (22 February 2016)
1990s

Aurangzeb photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
George Meredith photo

“With patient inattention hear him prate.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Bellerophon, st. 4 (1887).

Noam Chomsky photo
Samuel Butler photo
David Dixon Porter photo
John Flavel photo

“How much better it is to see men live exactly than to hear them argue with subtlety!”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 315.

Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge photo

“Let each of us hear this letter with the conviction that it is addressed especially to him; let him say in his heart, All this is for me.”

Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge (1803–1874) Dutch minister

Source: Sermons on the First Epistle of Peter (1855), p. 3

Bono photo
Jack Layton photo
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo
Toni Morrison photo
Daniel J. Boorstin photo
William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher photo

“As to proceedings in Courts of justice, it is for the interest of all the public to hear what takes place in Court.”

William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher (1815–1899) British lawyer, judge and politician

Pittard v. Oliver (1891), L. J. 60 Q. B. D. 221.

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Bones of the Earth” (p. 134)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

Jesse Ventura photo
Edmund Spenser photo

“Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands.”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Epithalamion, line 223; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

John Cheever photo
Morrissey photo

“I could never really make the connection between Christian and Catholic. I always imagined that Christ would look down upon the Catholic church and totally disassociate himself from it. I went to severe schools, working class schools, where they would almost chop your fingers off for your own good, and if you missed church on Sunday and went to school on a Monday and they quizzed you on it, you'd be sent to the gallows. It was like 'Brush you teeth NOW or you will DIE IN HELL and you will ROT and all these SNAKES will EAT you'. And I remember all these religious figures, statues, which used to petrify every living child. All these snakes trodden underfoot and blood everywhere. I thought it was so morbid. I mean the very idea of just going to church anyway is really quite absurd. I always felt that it was really like the police, certainly in this country at any rate, just there to keep the working classes humble and in their place. Because of course nobody else but the working class pays any attention to it. I really feel quite sick when I see the Pope giving long, overblown, inflated lectures on nuclear weapons and then having tea with Margaret Thatcher. To me it's total hypocrisy. And when I hear the Pope completely condemning working class women for having abortions and condemning nobody else… to me the whole thing is entirely class ridden, it's just really to keep the working classes in perpetual fear and feeling total guilt.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

from "All men have secrets and these are Morrissey’s", interview by Neil McCormick,Hot Press (4 May 1984)
In interviews etc., About life and death

Margaret Cho photo
Iltutmish photo
John Adams photo
Stanisław Leszczyński photo

“Where religion speaks, reason has only a right to hear.”

Stanisław Leszczyński (1677–1766) king of Poland

No. 2.
Maxims and Moral Sentences

John McCain photo

“Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Allegedly said in March 1986 during the U.S. senate race. The above quotation was pieced together by a journalist from the recollection of one or more sources, and prived in the Tucson Citizen on October 27, 1986 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/15/sources-recall-mccains-jo_n_112955.html http://www.rumromanismrebellion.net/2008/07/15/the-comedy-stylings-of-shecky-mccain/
Disputed

Kenneth Grahame photo

“Don't, for goodness' sake, keep on saying 'Don't;' I hear so much of it, and it's monotonous, and makes me tired.”

The Boy to the dragon.
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

M. R. James photo

“There was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill, and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning…He looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive.”

M. R. James (1862–1936) British writer

"A School Story", from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, 1947) p. 188.

Gore Vidal photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“There is a saying by Gustave Dore which I have always admired: "J'ai la patience d'un boeuf." [I have the patience of an ox]. I find in it a certain goodness, a certain resolute honesty, more, it has a deep meaning that saying, it is the word of a real artist. When one thinks of the men from whose heart such a saying sprang, all the arguments one too often hears of art dealers about "natural gifts", seem to become a terrible raven's croaking.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Autumn 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 336) p. 34
1880s, 1883

Garrison Keillor photo

“It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

As quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations‎ (1988) by James Beasley Simpson, p. 211

Aldo Leopold photo

“It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.”

“September: The Choral Copse”, p. 53.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "August: The Green Pasture," "September: The Choral Copse," "October: Smoky Gold," and "October: Red Lanterns"

John Dryden photo

“With ravished ears
The monarch hears;
Assumes the god,
Affects the nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Alexander’s Feast http://www.bartleby.com/40/265.html (1697), l. 37–41.

William Blake photo

“And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Introduction, st. 5
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Devendra Banhart photo
Garth Brooks photo

“Somewhere other than the night
She needs to hear I love you.
Somewhere other than the night
She needs to know you care.
She wants to know she's needed,
She needs to be held tight
Somewhere other than the night.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

Somewhere Other Than the Night, written by Kent Blazy and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, The Chase (1992)

E. W. Howe photo

“Every time you become confidential with some people, you hear of a new kind of dirty trick.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p211.

Errol Morris photo
Garth Brooks photo

“On a prayer,
In a song,
I hear your voice,
And it keeps me hanging on.
Oh, raining down, against the wind,
I'm reaching out,
'Till we reach the circle's end.
When you come back to me again.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

When You Come Back to Me Again, written by Jenny Yates and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Scarecrow (2001)

Kent Hovind photo