Quotes about most
page 65

Terence McKenna photo
Patrick Buchanan photo
Larry Correia photo
Daniel Bell photo

“The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.”

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 1, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 33

Freeman Dyson photo
Edward Jenks photo
Gertrude Breslau Hunt photo
Joseph E. Stiglitz photo

“When one is considering systems it's always wise to raise questions about the most obvious and simple assumptions.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. ix

Dr. Seuss photo

“Young cat! If you keep
Your eyes open enough,
Oh, the stuff you will learn!
The most wonderful stuff!”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“As a rule, in pictorial photography a long-focus lens will on the whole be most satisfactory.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, The use of the lens in pictorial work, p. 58

“Most managers are so concerned with today, and with getting our own real and imagined problems settled, that we are incapable of planning corrective or positive actions more than a week or so ahead.”

Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) Quality guru

Cited in: Joseph C. Fields. Total Quality for Schools: A Suggestion for American Education. 1993, p. 47
Quality Is Free, 1977

Scott Jurek photo
Larry Wall photo

“We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Warren Farrell photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Norman Lamm photo

“Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.”

Norman Lamm (1927) American rabbi

Seventy faces: articles of faith (2002)

Hafsat Abiola photo
Simon Newcomb photo
Moses Hess photo

“We Germans are the most universal, the most European people of Europe.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Ibid
Die europäische Triarchie (The European Triarchy)

Walt Whitman photo

“I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited;
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Night on the Prairies
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Jennifer Beals photo
John Quincy Adams photo
David Fleming photo
Warren Farrell photo

“Perhaps the most prevailing expectation of men is our Superman expectation: the fear we are merely Clark Kents who won't be accepted unless we are a Superman.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 96.

Andrea Dworkin photo
James O'Keefe photo
Koichi Tohei photo

“The grammar of Panini is one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever seen, and no other country can produce any grammatical system at all comparable to it, either for originality of plan or analytical subtlety.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: Indian Wisdom https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CgBAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA172, W. H. Allen & Company, 1876, p. 172.

Alan Rusbridger photo
Ann Wagner photo

“I decided to run to become the Lafayette township committee woman, and I served in that position for nine years. It’s probably the most grassroots neighborhood, neighbor-to-neighbor kind of politics one can do. It’s very important to keep in touch with the real people out there and to learn at the most basic level how to activate and turn out the grassroots”

Ann Wagner (1962) American diplomat

The next RNC chairwoman? Amb. Ann Wagner wary of transatlantic creep of socialism — and Michael Steele http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/30/the-next-rnc-chairwoman-amb-ann-wagner-wary-of-transatlantic-creep-of-socialism-—-and-michael-steele/ (December 12, 2010)

Rein Vihalemm photo

“The most essential example of the theory of self-organisation in chemistry is the theory of non-linear, non-equilibrium thermodynamics of chemical reactions presented by Prigogine and his co-workers.”

Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) Estonian philosopher of chemistry

Source: Chemistry as an Interesting Subject for the Philosophy of Science, 2001, p. 195

Babe Ruth photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“What mathematics, therefore are expected to do for the advanced student at the university, Arithmetic, if taught demonstratively, is capable of doing for the children even of the humblest school. It furnishes training in reasoning, and particularly in deductive reasoning. It is a discipline in closeness and continuity of thought. It reveals the nature of fallacies, and refuses to avail itself of unverified assumptions. It is the one department of school-study in which the sceptical and inquisitive spirit has the most legitimate scope; in which authority goes for nothing. In other departments of instruction you have a right to ask for the scholar’s confidence, and to expect many things to be received on your testimony with the understanding that they will be explained and verified afterwards. But here you are justified in saying to your pupil “Believe nothing which you cannot understand. Take nothing for granted.” In short, the proper office of arithmetic is to serve as elementary 268 training in logic. All through your work as teachers you will bear in mind the fundamental difference between knowing and thinking; and will feel how much more important relatively to the health of the intellectual life the habit of thinking is than the power of knowing, or even facility of achieving visible results. But here this principle has special significance. It is by Arithmetic more than by any other subject in the school course that the art of thinking—consecutively, closely, logically—can be effectually taught.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 292-293.

Elaine Paige photo
Ryan North photo

“Don't worry, it's very clear that the painting was done by a human, most likely a human with one eye removed and a feverent if incorrect understanding of design and anatomy.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Blog comment http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/38861.html?thread=1226189#t1226189

Wilfred Thesiger photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“2168. 'Tis better for thee to be wise and not seem so, than to seem wise and not be so: Yet Men, for the most Part, desire and endeavor the contrary.”

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

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Pat Conroy photo

“Here is how my father appeared to me as a boy. He came from a race of giants and demi-gods from a mythical land known as Chicago. He married the most beautiful girl ever to come crawling out of the poor and lowborn south, and there were times when I thought we were being raised by Zeus and Athena. After Happy Hour my father would drive his car home at a hundred miles an hour to see his wife and seven children. He would get out of his car, a strapping flight jacketed matinee idol, and walk toward his house, his knuckles dragging along the ground, his shoes stepping on and killing small animals in his slouching amble toward the home place. My sister, Carol, stationed at the door, would call out, "Godzilla's home!" and we seven children would scamper toward the door to watch his entry. The door would be flung open and the strongest Marine aviator on earth would shout, "Stand by for a fighter pilot!" He would then line his seven kids up against the wall and say, "Who's the greatest of them all?" "You are, O Great Santini, you are." "Who knows all, sees all, and hears all?" "You do, O Great Santini, you do."”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

We were not in the middle of a normal childhood, yet none of us were sure since it was the only childhood we would ever have. For all we knew other men were coming home and shouting to their families, "Stand by for a pharmacist," or "Stand by for a chiropractor".
Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Michael Chabon photo
Herbert A. Simon photo
Henry Knox photo
Richard Brautigan photo
George Holmes Howison photo

“The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.”

Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944) American writer

Source: Modes and Morals (1920), Ch. 2

Robert Burton photo
Eugène Delacroix photo

“General Systems Theory, as originally intended by Von Bertalanffy, is an ideal framework for the modeling of a business enterprise. Work, in its most civilized form should enrich, empower and emancipate. Thus we must continue to find ways to support work as a humanistic, not mechanistic endeavor. We must continue to seek out new models of business that support and enhance the individual as well as the collective whole. Given all this new technology, we need new institutions for handling it.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Beer (1974) Designing Freedom. House Of Anansi Press, Toronto cited in: B. Dawson (2007) "Bertalanffy Revisited: Operationalizing A General Systems Theory Based Business Model Through General Systems Thinking, Modeling, And Practice", In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the ISSS, 2007.

George Holmes Howison photo

“My readers, I fear, have like my reviewer been somewhat misled by looking into my concluding essay for the most important proofs of my main position. But there I am dealing with a problem, or with problems, important and intricate, indeed, but still subordinate to this main one, and only auxiliary to my principal aim.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix D: Reply to a Review in the New York Tribune, p.416

Ai Weiwei photo

“In an environment without public platform nor protection, the individual is the most powerful and most responsible.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei on Twitter in English (beta). http://aiwwenglish.tumblr.com/ (January 10, 2011)
2010-, Twitter feeds, 2010-12

Marc Chagall photo
Alan Rusbridger photo

“The BBC is almost certainly the best news organisation in the world – the most serious, comprehensive, ethical, accurate, international, wide-ranging, fair and impartial.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Source: 2010s, Does journalism exist? (2010), p. 5. Partly cited in: Bob Franklin (2013) The future of journalism. p. 1968.

Tad Williams photo

“Perhaps it is fortunate that most heroes who die for their people cannot come back to see what the people do with that hard-bought life and freedom.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 20, “Travelers and Messengers” (p. 639).

Benjamin Franklin photo

“I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being. … I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

"Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion" (1728).
1720s

Kirsten Dunst photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“The desire to see for the sake of seeing is with most people the only desire to be gratified; hence the delight in detail.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 27

Adolf Hitler photo
Joseph Chamberlain photo

“I say that this Bill has been changed in its most vital features, and yet it has always been found perfect by hon. Members behind the Treasury Bench. The Prime Minister [William Gladstone] calls "black," and they say, "it is good": the Prime Minister calls "white," and they say "it is better." It is always the voice of a god. Never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Cheers, cries of "Progress!" and "Judas!"
Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1893/jul/27/committee-progress-new-clauses-26th-july#column_724 in the House of Commons (27 July 1893) against the Irish Home Rule Bill
1890s

James Frazer photo
Susie Bright photo

“When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

" Bright Ideas http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/qa/multi_1/documents/04461778.asp", interview by Tamara Wieder, Boston Phoenix, February 11, 2005.

Bart D. Ehrman photo
Ty Cobb photo
Robert Wilson Lynd photo

“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879–1949) Irish writer

Searchlights and Nightingales https://books.google.com/books?id=z7pCAQAAIAAJ&dq=%22The+belief+in+the+possibility+of+a+short+decisive+war+appears+to+be+one+of+the+most+ancient+and+dangerous+of+human+illusions.%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22human+illusions%22 [Google Books snippet view only] (1939), p. 67.

Frank W. Abagnale photo

“I made a lot of exits through side doors, down fire escapes or over rooftops. I abandoned more wardrobes in the course of five years than most men acquire in a lifetime. I was slipperier than a buttered escargot.”

Frank W. Abagnale (1948) American security consultant, former confidence trickster, check forger, impostor, and escape artist

Source: Catch Me if You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake, 2002, Ch.1 Pg.4(a), Ch.1 Pg. 11(b),Back cover(c), Ch.6 Pg.116(d)

Denise Scott Brown photo
Benjamín Netanyahu photo

“Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the idea that Iran's goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is ridiculous. Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: That we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs. Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it's not crazy. It's detestable but it's deterrable. Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world's most dangerous regime won't use the world's most dangerous weapons. And I promise you that as Prime Minister, I will never gamble with the security of Israel. From the beginning, the Ayatollah regime has broken every international rule and flouted every norm. It has seized embassies, targeted diplomats and sent its own children through mine fields. It hangs gays and stones women. It supports Assad's brutal slaughter of the Syrian people. Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terror. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Iran's proxies have dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers, planted thousands of roadside bombs, and fired over twenty thousand missiles at civilians. Through terror from the skies and terror on the ground, Iran is responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. In 1983, Iran's proxy Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 240 American servicemen. In the last decade, its been responsible for murdering and maiming American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just a few months ago, it tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant just a few blocks from here. The assassins didn't care that several Senators and members of Congress would have been murdered in the process. Iran accuses the American government of orchestrating 9/11, and it denies the Holocaust. Iran brazenly calls for Israel's destruction, and they work for its destruction – each day, every day. This is how Iran behaves today, without nuclear weapons. Think of how they will behave tomorrow, with nuclear weapons. Iran will be even more reckless and far more dangerous.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference http://www.aipac.org/pc/videos/2012/monday-gala-plenary/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu (March 2012).
2010s, 2012

George E. P. Box photo
Joseph Massad photo
Oliver Goldsmith photo
Julien Offray de La Mettrie photo
Shaun Ellis photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Michel Foucault photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“Though Latin long held sway in Court and bureaucratic circles, the cultural cement of the empire’s core populations was Greek and its education was in the Greek classics and tongue. Imperial tradition, Christian Orthodoxy and Greek culture became even more the bases of Byzantium and her Hellenic community, after she had lost most of her western and Asiatic possessions in the seventh century — to Visigoths and then Arabs m Spain and North Africa, to the Lombards in much of Italy, to the Slavs in the Balkans and to Muslim armies in Egypt and the Near East. Political circumstances, and the resilience of Greek culture and Greek education, made her predominantly Greek in speech and character. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the establishment of a Latin empire under Venetian auspices, the rivalry of the Greek empires based on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond to realize the patriotic Hellenic dream of recapturing the former capital further stimulated Greek ethnic sentiment against Latin usurpation. W1cn in the face of Turkith threats, the fifteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Michael Palaeologus, tried to place the Orthodox Church under the Papacy and hence Western protection; an inflamed Greek sentiment vigorously opposed his policy. The city’s populace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their Hellenic sentiments fanned by monks, priests and the Orthodox party against the Latin policies of the government, actually preferred the Turkish turban to the Latin mitre and attacked the urban wealthy classes. But the Turkish conquest and the demise of Byzantium did not spell the end of the Orthodox Greek community and its ethnic sentiment. tinder its Church and Patriarch, and organized as a recognized milliet of the Ottoman empire, the Greek community flourished in exile, the upper classes of its Diaspora assuming privileged economic and bureaucratic positions in the empire. So Byzantine bureaucratic incorporation had paradoxical effects: as in Egypt, it helped to sunder the mass of the Greek community from the state and its Court and bureaucratic imperial myths and culture in favour of a more demotic Greek Orthodoxy; but, unlike Egypt, the demise of the state served to strengthen that Orthodoxy and reattach to it the old dynastic Messianic symbolism of a restored Byzantine empire in opposition to Turkish oppression.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987)

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
Halldór Laxness photo
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Kirsten Dunst photo
François Englert photo

“At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations.
With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

excerpt[François Englert - Biographical, Nobel Prize in Physics (nobelprize.org), 2013, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/englert-bio.html]

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead photo

“I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes upon the eternity of the Communal situation.”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Letter to Lord Reading (March 1925) on India, as quoted in Lord Reading (1967) by H. Montgomery Hyde, p. 387.

Gillian Anderson photo

“If was a refugee forced to flee my home the most important thing I would take with me would be my brother's Buddhist prayer beads. He passed away a year and a half ago aged 30. Even in the darkest days before he died he never once complained. His faith and practice kept him in a state of grace until the end. May I never complain.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) "What Would You Take? #1family" https://www.pinterest.com/pin/210332245070050537 (June 30, 2013)
2010s

Edwin Lefèvre photo
William Hazlitt photo

“The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 330
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Kit Carson photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Danny Tidwell photo

“This latest skirmish in the high art/low art war has played out most fiercely over Mr. Tidwell, who shocked balletomanes when he left American Ballet Theater in 2005, then added insult to injury by joining the third season of “So You Think You Can Dance.””

Danny Tidwell (1984) American dancer

The New York Times
La Rocco Claudia. "TV Viewers Discover Dance, and the Debate Is Joined" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/arts/dance/21revo.html?ref=dance#, The New York Times, September 21, 2007
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