Quotes about point
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Gerard O'Neill photo
Steve Sailer photo

“Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Checking Iron Age Barbarian Prejudice http://takimag.com/article/checking_iron_age_barbarian_prejudice_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4A7r77jkG, Taki's Magazine, April 22, 2015

Douglas MacArthur photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“The Muslim Majilis Mushawarat, which is the united front of Muslim organizations in India, includes… educated Muslims… and orthodox Muslims… The election manifesto of the Mushawarat … contained a 9-point charter of demands which can only be interpreted as asserting that Muslim Indians constituted a 'sovereign' society.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

Muslim politics, p.80, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 364-6

Paul Cézanne photo
Colin Wilson photo
Gerald Durrell photo
Yves Klein photo

“Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), "Jesus' fraternal relocation of God", p. 73.

Hillary Clinton photo
Maimónides photo
Colley Cibber photo

“Possession is eleven points in the law.”

Colley Cibber (1671–1757) British poet laureate

Woman's Wit, Act I (1697).

Charles Krauthammer photo
Heather Brooke photo
Gerhard Richter photo

“Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter's aunt had been murdered by the Nazis in the name of euthanasia, a crime for which his father-in-law from his first marriage, a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Eufinger, had been partially responsible. Richter painted a portrait of his aunt in 1965, based on an old photo. It was called 'Tante Marianne' / 9Aunt Marianne).
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Antonin Artaud photo
Pauline Kael photo

“If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Interview with Hal Espen, The New Yorker (1994-03-21); reprinted in Espen's Conversations with Pauline Kael (University of Mississippi Press, 1996, ISBN 0-878-05899-0), p. 162.
Interviews

Margaret Thatcher photo

“The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter a war of any kind. They have succeeded in doing so for the past 37 years. To be an effective deterrent a potential aggressor must believe that under certain circumstances such weapons will be used.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Prime Minister's Questions (1 February 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105246
First term as Prime Minister

Voltairine de Cleyre photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“Development of an organism from a single germ cell into a multicellular entity is a self-organizing system from any point of view and I wish to contend that this self-organizing system is a subsystem of the self-organizing system called 'evolution.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 103-104, partly cited in: Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (2004) Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History.

Stephen Shen photo

“From a scientific point of view, the risks from climate change are more serious than from nuclear power. Climate change is hard to control, but nuclear power can be controlled to an extent..”

Stephen Shen (1949) Taiwanese politician

Stephen Shen (2013) cited in " No nuclear power, more carbon: minister http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/03/21/2003557614" on Taipei Times, 21 March 2013

André Maurois photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Paul Klee photo

“I am God / So much of the divine / is heaped in me / that I cannot die.
My head burns to the point of bursting.
One of the worlds / hidden in it / wants to be born. / But now I must suffer / to bring it forth.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1901), # 155, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Tom Rath photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Bernhard Riemann photo

“Let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest lines going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin. It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. …the square of the line-element is \sum (dx)^2 for infinitesimal values of the x, but the term of next order in it is equal to a homogeneous function of the second order… an infinitesimal, therefore, of the fourth order; so that we obtain a finite quantity on dividing this by the square of the infinitesimal triangle, whose vertices are (0,0,0,…), (x1, x2, x3,…), (dx1, dx2, dx3,…). This quantity retains the same value so long as… the two geodesics from 0 to x and from 0 to dx remain in the same surface-element; it depends therefore only on place and direction. It is obviously zero when the manifold represented is flat, i. e., when the squared line-element is reducible to \sum (dx)^2, and may therefore be regarded as the measure of the deviation of the manifoldness from flatness at the given point in the given surface-direction. Multiplied by -¾ it becomes equal to the quantity which Privy Councillor Gauss has called the total curvature of a surface. …The measure-relations of a manifoldness in which the line-element is the square root of a quadric differential may be expressed in a manner wholly independent of the choice of independent variables. A method entirely similar may for this purpose be applied also to the manifoldness in which the line-element has a less simple expression, e. g., the fourth root of a quartic differential. In this case the line-element, generally speaking, is no longer reducible to the form of the square root of a sum of squares, and therefore the deviation from flatness in the squared line-element is an infinitesimal of the second order, while in those manifoldnesses it was of the fourth order. This property of the last-named continua may thus be called flatness of the smallest parts. The most important property of these continua for our present purpose, for whose sake alone they are here investigated, is that the relations of the twofold ones may be geometrically represented by surfaces, and of the morefold ones may be reduced to those of the surfaces included in them…”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Paul Cézanne photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Maithripala Sirisena photo
Aldo Leopold photo
André Maurois photo
Roger Joseph Boscovich photo

“At one point Portillo was polishing his jackboots and planning the next advance. And the next thing is he shows up as a TV presenter. It is rather like Pol Pot presenting the Teletubbies.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

Tribune Rally, September 1997; The Right Hon wag http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1682818,00.html, The Guardian, 10 January 2006.
on Conservative politician Michael Portillo.

William Lane Craig photo

“Hitchens: I've got another question for you, which is this: How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?
Craig: I don't know how many religions in the world there are, so I can’t answer.
Hitchens: Well, could you name... fair enough. I'll see if I can't narrow that down. That was a clumsily asked question, I admit. Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false?
Craig: Excuse me?
Hitchens: Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false preaching?
Craig: Yes, I think—yes, certainly.
Hitchens: Would you name one, then?
Craig: Islam.
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Pardon me?
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Yes.
Hitchens: Do you, therefore—do you think it's moral to preach false religion?
Craig: No.
Hitchens: So religion is responsible for quite a lot of wickedness in the world right there?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Right.
Craig: I'd be happy to concede (laughs) that. I would agree with that.
Hitchens: So if I was a baby being born in Saudi Arabia today, would you rather it was me or a Wahhabi Muslim?
Craig: Would I be—you rather be what?
Hitchens: Would you rather it was me—it was an atheist baby or a Wahhabi baby?
(Audience and Dr. Craig laugh):
Craig: I-I don't have any preference as to whether you would be... (laughing)
Hitchens: You don’t? As bad as that, O. K. Are there any—I'm sorry. I've only got a few seconds. It's a serious question. I shouldn't squander it. Are there any Christian denominations you regard as false?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Could I know what they are?
Craig: Well, I am not a Calvinist, for example. I think that certain tenets of Reformed Theology are incorrect. I would be more in the Wesleyan Camp myself. But these are differences among brethren. These are not differences on which we need to put one another in some sort of a cage. So within the Christian camp, there's a large diversity of perspectives. I'm sure there are views that I hold that are probably false, but I'm trying my best to get my theology straight, trying to do the best job. But I think all of us would recognize that none of us agree on every point of Christian doctrine, on every dot and tittle.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Craig vs Christopher Hitchens debate, Biola University, La Mirada, California, 4th April 2009 http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-craig-vs-hitchens-apr-2009#section_6

Jonah Goldberg photo

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml)
2000s, 2001

Mitt Romney photo
Robert Erskine Childers photo

“The treaty, though it has good points, is a vast trap.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

The Illustrated London News, 31 December 1921.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)

Sam Harris photo
Margrethe II of Denmark photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Charles Henry Fowler photo
Wilhelm Backhaus photo
Hugh Plat photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Doug McIlroy photo

“The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.”

Doug McIlroy (1932) American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and programmer

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Andrew Sullivan photo
Maxwell D. Taylor photo
Naum Gabo photo
R. G. Collingwood photo
Mircea Eliade photo
Joseph Fourier photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Samuel Bowles photo
Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross photo

“There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.”

Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross (1902–2003) British politician

Statement as UK prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials (1945), as quoted in The Nuremberg Trials (1983) by Ann Tusa and John Tusa, ISBN 0815412622

Umaru Yar'Adua photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Carl Ludwig Siegel photo
Charles Sanders Peirce photo

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Lawrence H. Summers photo

“No free country will ever again have anything like the 90 percent tax rates that we had in this country. Past a certain point, high marginal tax rates are, indeed, terribly destructive.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal (April 5, 1998) "Rich now pay more in taxes", Mobile Register, p. F1.
1990s

Mary Midgley photo
Fritjof Capra photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“blockquote>Quien Soy? (Who Am I?)I am a small point in the eye of the full moon.
I only need one ray of the sun to warm my face.
I need only one breeze from the Alisios to refresh my soul.
What else can I ask if I know that my sons love really love me?.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Written on Father's Day at Three Rivers Stadium, 1971 or 1972, reproduced in "A Rematch With the Machine" https://books.google.com/books?id=03XsO25A3I8C&pg=PA302 from Roberto Clemente: The Great One (1998) by Bruce Markusen, p. 302
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Muhammad photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“In this great problem which is facing the country in years to come, it may be from one side or the other that disaster may come, but surely it shows that the only progress that can be obtained in this country is by those two bodies of men—so similar in their strength and so similar in their weaknesses—learning to understand each other, and not to fight each other…we are moving forward rapidly from an old state of industry into a newer, and the question is: What is that newer going to be? No man, of course, can say what form evolution is taking. Of this, however, I am quite sure, that whatever form we may see…it has got to be a form of pretty close partnership, however that is going to be arrived at. And it will not be a partnership the terms of which will be laid down, at any rate not yet, in Acts of Parliament, or from this party or that. It has got to be a partnership of men who understand their own work, and it is little help that they can get really either from politicians or from intellectuals. There are few men fitted to judge, to settle and to arrange the problem that distracts the country to-day between employers and employed. There are few men qualified to intervene who have not themselves been right through the mill. I always want to see, at the head of these organisations on both sides, men who have been right through the mill, who themselves know exactly the points where the shoe pinches, who know exactly what can be conceded and what cannot, who can make their reasons plain; and I hope that we shall always find such men trying to steer their respective ships side by side, instead of making for head-on collisions.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925).
1925

Robert Rauschenberg photo
Robert P. George photo
Asger Jorn photo
Larry Wall photo

“It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip…”

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

[199710161546.IAA07885@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Tibor Fischer photo
Michael Moore photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“What is our ideology? If l were asked whether our revolution is Communist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its methods the paths that Marx pointed out.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

As quoted in Cuba: A Dissenting Report (1960) by Samuel Shapiro, New Republic

Patrick Dixon photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“3902. Possession is eleven Points in the Law.”

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

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

Javier Marías photo

“This is just a stopping-off point for me but I'll be stopping long enough to make it worth my while finding what people call 'someone to love.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

Para mí este territorio es territorio de paso, pero se trata de un paso lo bastante dilatado para que deba procurarme lo que se llama un amor mientras estoy aquí.
Source: Todas las Almas [All Souls] (1989), p. 69

Jeremy Corbyn photo

“In eight simple ways, my Bill seeks to provide a framework for giving pensioners a decent living standard. First, it would fix old-age pensions for couples at half average industrial earnings, and for single people it would be a third…Secondly, my Bill would require central Government to appoint a Minister responsible for the co-ordination of policy on pensioners. Thirdly, it would require local authorities to produce a comprehensive annual report about their policies on pensioners and on the conditions of pensioners in their communities. Fourthly, every health authority would also be asked to do that. Fifthly, the present anomalous system means that in some parts of the country where there are foresighted Labour local authorities there are concessionary transport schemes — free bus passes. They do not exist in some parts of Britain and the Bill would make them a national responsibility and they would be paid for nationally…My sixth point is one of the most important. It is about the introduction of a flat-rate winter heating allowance instead of the nonsensical system of waiting for the cold to run from Monday to Sunday, and then if it is sufficiently cold a rebate is paid in arrears. Last winter that resulted in many old people living in homes that were too cold because they could not afford to heat them. If they did get any aid, it was far too late. My seventh point concerns the abolition of standing charges on gas, electricity and telephones for elderly people. They are paying about £250 million a year towards the profits of the gas industry and those profits will be about £1.5 billion. Standing charges should be cancelled, unit prices maintained and the cost of the standing charge should be taken from the profits of the gas board or the electricity board — if it ends up being privatised. They could well afford to pay for that rather than forcing old people to live in cold and misery throughout the winter. Finally, the Bill would prohibit the cutting off of gas and electricity in any pensioner household.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/dec/01/elimination-of-poverty-in-old-age-etc in the House of Commons (1 December 1987).
1980s

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo
Kent Hovind photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Alexander Pope photo

“What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 1. Compare: "What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?", Ben Jonson, Elegy on the Lady Jane Pawlet.

Ivan Turgenev photo

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

Frances Kellor photo
James Joseph Sylvester photo

“It seems to be expected of every pilgrim up the slopes of the mathematical Parnassus, that he will at some point or other of his journey sit down and invent a definite integral or two towards the increase of the common stock.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester, Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), p. 214.
Bigeometric Calculus: A System with a Scale-Free Derivative by Michael Grossman, p. 31.

George Sarton photo
John Buchan photo

“Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.”

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", II