Quotes about lumber (32 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

H.P. Lovecraft book Dagon

Fiction
Source: "Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

God

“The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Madness

“Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.”

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Russian and Soviet writer

The I.V.Stalin White Sea - Baltic Sea Canal (1934)

Nature

“Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Falsely attributed to Darwin, but actually from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon, page 134 http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/c/11773-the-clansman-by-thomas-dixon?start=133.
Misattributed

Lie , World , Dreams , History

“Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 40

Hope

“All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1649/, st. 1
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Heart , Cry

“Frank Zhang: lumbering klutz, child of Mars, part-time pachyderm.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Time , Parting

“The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

The Taming of the Screw (1983)
Source: The Taming of the Screw: How to Sidestep Several Million Homeowner's Problems

Box

“Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.”

Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

Baby , Country

“I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this book because you are in the mood for a pleasant experience. If this is the case, I advise you to put this book down instantaneously, because of all the books describing the unhappy lives of the Baudelaire orphans, The Miserable Mill might be the unhappiest yet. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are sent to Paltryville to work in a lumber mill, and they find disaster and misfortune lurking behind every log.”

Daniel Handler book The Miserable Mill

The Miserable Mill (2000)

Books , Hope , Mood , Reading

“Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Vol. 3, Ch. VII, Over-Legislation
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891)

Law , Nature , Training

“I've got to say the soldiers in Vietnam that I was associated with in my three tours, who were pretty much front-line troops, were the best I'd ever seen on any battlefield. The soldiers were up against some incredibly difficult rules of engagement. I'll tell you a story. It's a real good story. We had some villages to run civic action and medical help in. My engineer company built a school. We were in the village of Binh My, and we got some lumber to rebuild a schoolhouse. We were about two thirds of the way completed. We had a teacher hired who was a cripple. My engineer company was bringing in the supplies in an armored personnel carrier along the little road up to the schoolhouse and they hit a mine. Luckily nobody was seriously injured. Well, the engineers went out there and fixed the armored personnel carrier, and then continued right on building the school. I went up to them and said, "You all are pretty complacent about this." And they said, "Sir, that's our job."”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

There's no way of telling who laid that mine. But it was someone who didn't want us to build that school. They knew we used that little trail. But we just went right on.
As quoted in The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1987), p. 78

School , Way , Teachers , Help

“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

World , Law , Nature , Light

“Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

[Sam Harris, 2 August 2005, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/the-politics-of-ignorance_b_5053.html, "The Politics of Ignorance", The Huffington Post, 2006-10-16]
2000s

World , School , Problem

“Dead we become the lumber of the world.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

After Death.
Other

World , Dead

“I'm also lumbered with the title of being a writer's writer, which is the worst possible reputation you can have, because, of course, other writers don't read other writers except to gain evidence against them. And it puts readers off.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

Reading

“Perhaps a better title for The Da Vinci Code might be Much Ado About Nothing. When you boil away the hype and hysteria, all that remains is a pedestrian murder mystery that isn't sufficiently challenging or scandalous to raise anyone's hackles. It's preposterous, overlong, and saddled with a sloppy denouement that defines the term "anti-climax." The film's two big "surprises" are telegraphed early, and the ease with which they can be guessed (using the "conservation of characters" process) leeches the movie of a large measure of its suspense. Individual scenes are entertaining in their own right, but the production as a whole is a lumbering mess.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1014 of The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Two-and-a-half star reviews

“You're supposed to eat the cows. They're great big lumbering stupid things - they'd be everywhere if we didn't eat them.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Stupidity

“At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.
The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.
The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees.
Close enough.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

July “BLOWBACK”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People , Tree

“It is not too much to say that when the Great War broke out our Generals had the most important lessons of their art to learn. Before they began they had much to unlearn. Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner.”

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

War Memoirs (1938)
War Memoirs

War , Art , Learning

“I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Crime Times, Nov./Dec. 1988

People , Books , World , Fear

“Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber, and takes out our brains to make room for it.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. II; XX
Lacon (1820)

Learning

“Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall;
Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught,
Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth:
O God! O Montreal!”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

A Psalm of Montreal http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/011204.htm, st. 1 (1884)

God , Beauty

“Let's face it: there are few things in this world more stupid than dancing. Except break dancing, which pirates and lumber jacks would agree is awesome. Other than that, dancing makes me envy cripples.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

The Best Page in the Universe

Stupidity , World , Dance , Envy

“No thoughtful persons could stand beneath one of these immense trees, gaze up into its canopy, and help but think that here is a remarkable organism—so much more than all the board-feet of lumber that men might cleave from it.”

Reed Noss (1952)

2000)[More than big trees, The redwood forest: History, ecology, and conservation of the coast redwoods, 1–6, https://books.google.com/books?id=6T3PeH_EbbYC&pg=PA1] (quote from p. 1

Men , Thinking , Tree , Help

“The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization.”

Harold Demsetz (1930–2019) American economist

Source: Production, information costs, and economic organization. 1972, p. 777, Lead paragraph

Problem

“If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live; when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state…”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)

Women , Stupidity , Girl , Hell

“The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Production, information costs, and economic organization. 1972, p. 777, Lead paragraph

Problem

“We printed our own money because we watched Federal dollars come to town, shake a few hands, then leave to buy rainforest lumber and fight wars.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2092/article/33/local.currency.in.each.other.we.trust (Whole Earth Catalog), Spring 1998
Context: “We printed our own money because we watched Federal dollars come to town, shake a few hands, then leave to buy rainforest lumber and fight wars. Ithaca's HOURS, by contrast, stay in our region to help us hire each other. While dollars make us increasingly dependent on transnational corporations and bankers, HOURS reinforce community trading and expand commerce which is more accountable to our concerns for ecology and social justice.”.

Money , War , Fight

“Many of the novels read in isolation can seem like lumber-rooms of ideas, cluttered and over-complex, as if attempting too much at once. Perhaps the fault lies in market circumstances and the terse Ace format for which Dick wrote. One could also argue that Dick's novels were a quarter the length they ought to have been to contain such complexity and richness. Even so, the marvellous, multi— levelled web of themes and concerns which emerges from this process of condensation gives Dick's work its specific feel, the very thing that makes it unique. Unrevised, eccentric and extravagant — even so, it's not too much to claim that Dick is perhaps the first real genius to have worked in the science-fictional mode since the days of Stapledon, a hybrid of Dickens and Dostoevsky, possessed of the comic delights and tragic depths of both, yet choosing work where his eccentricities were cherished. In any case, like so many SF writers, he learned to love the genre through the magazines long before his literary tastes were formed. He never quite recovered from that first infatuation with the forbidden van Vogtian delights.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Брайан Олдисс, «Кутёж на триллион лет»

Science , Reading , Learning , Idea

“I am what I am. I am Christ and Antichrist, God and Satan, Heaven and Hiroshima, Arcadia and Auschwitz.” Smiling devilishly, Sarkos lumbered up to Lovett. “Get it, fat boy? God is a duality. Dr. Jehovah and Mr. Hyde.” He lobbed the bottle cap into his mouth and chewed. “Allow me to tell you a bedtime story. It’s called ‘The Day the Gas Chambers Malfunctioned at Auschwitz.’ On second thought, why bother? You know the plot—the title gives it away—I’m surprised Braverman and Kelvin left it out of their overblown epic. Can you imagine how it feels to be a seven-year-old Jewish child, standing in line with hundreds of other Jewish children, waiting your turn to be thrown alive onto an open fire?”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Swallowing the bottle cap, Sarkos swerved toward Martin. “Don’t you see? It’s the only solution that can possibly work. No other theory comes close. Of course God has a dark side. Not just dark—evil. Radically, radically evil.”
Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 15 (p. 390; spoken by the Devil, named Jonathan Sarkos in the book)

God , Imagination , Waiting , Smile