Quotes about qualification
            
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                                        Letter 1 
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)
                                    
“Merit is no qualification for freedom.”
                                        
                                         "Letter to the Editor" The Times (22 July 1920) http://www.telstudies.org/writings/letters/1919-20/200722_the_times.shtml 
Context: Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitans have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour's occupying you is greater than the profit.
                                    
                                        
                                        § I 
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
                                    
                                        
                                        For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy. 
Book I, 1098a; §7 as translated by W. D. Ross 
Variants: 
One swallow does not a summer make. 
As quoted in A History of Ancient Philosophy: From the Beginning to Augustine (1998) by Karsten Friis Johansen, p. 382 
One swallow (they say) no Sommer doth make. 
John Davies, in The Scourge of Folly (1611) 
One swallow yet did never summer make. 
As rendered by William Painter in Chaucer Newly Painted (1623) 
One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one sunny day; similarly, one day or a short time does not make a man blessed and happy. 
As translated in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (1988), by Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner, p. 483 
Nicomachean Ethics
                                    
                                        
                                        Statement (September 1961), as quoted in Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (1999) by Ed Sikov, p. 168 
Context: Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how.
                                    
On Allah (God), as quoted in Doctrine of Sufis (1977) by Abû Bakr al- Kalâbâdî, as translated by A. J. Arberry, Ch. 5 p. 16
                                        
                                        No. 78 
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788) 
Context: There is yet a further and a weightier reason for the permanency of the Judicial offices, which is deducible from the nature of the qualifications they require. It has been frequently remarked, with great propriety, that a voluminous code of laws is one of the inconveniences necessarily connected with the advantages of a free Government. To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the Courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them; and it will readily be conceived from the variety of controversies which grow out of the folly and wickedness of mankind, that the records of those precedents must unavoidably swell to a very considerable bulk, and must demand long and laborious study to acquire a competent knowledge of them. Hence it is, that there can be but few men in the society, who will have sufficient skill in the laws to qualify them for the stations of Judges. And making the proper deductions for the ordinary depravity of human nature, the number must be still smaller of those who unite the requisite integrity with the requisite knowledge. These considerations apprize us, that the Government can have no great option between fit characters; and that a temporary duration in office, which would naturally discourage such characters from quitting a lucrative line of practice to accept a seat on the Bench, would have a tendency to throw the administration of justice into hands less able, and less well qualified, to conduct it with utility and dignity.
                                    
                                        
                                        § IV 
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911) 
Context: Of all the Qualifications, Love is the most important, for if it is strong enough in a man, it forces him to acquire all the rest, and all the rest without it would never be sufficient. Often it is translated as an intense desire for liberation from the round of births and deaths, and for union with God. But to put it in that way sounds selfish, and gives only part of the meaning. It is not so much desire as will, resolve, determination. To produce its result, this resolve must fill your whole nature, so as to leave no room for any other feeling. It is indeed the will to be one with God, not in order that you may escape from weariness and suffering, but in order that because of your deep love for Him you may act with Him and as He does. Because He is Love, you, if you would become one with Him, must be filled with perfect unselfishness and love also.
In daily life this means two things; first, that you shall be careful to do no hurt to any living thing; second, that you shall always be watching for an opportunity to help.
First, to do no hurt. Three sins there are which work more harm than all else in the world — gossip, cruelty, and superstition — because they are sins against love. Against these three the man who would fill his heart with the love of God must watch ceaselessly.
                                    
                                        
                                        1860s, The Good Fight (1865) 
Context: But the spirit of caste, if naturally more malignant in a region where personal slavery has been abolished against the will of the dominant class, is not confined to it. We are apt to draw the line geographically, but it will not run so. They may be sad goats on the other side of the line, but we sheep may find an occasional speck in our virtuous wool. 'Caste must be maintained', say the governors and legislatures of Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and North and South Carolina and Georgia.' 'Amen', says Connecticut, 'that is a political wooden nutmeg for this market'. 'Amen', says New York, which prefers to pour political power into a foreign white whiskey-skin rather than into a native sound and serviceable vessel of a darker hue. 'Amen', says Indiana, which asks her colored children to fight and die for her upon the battle-field, and refuses by her laws to permit the survivors to return to their homes. 'Amen', say Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and West Virginia, which forbid an entire class of their citizens to vote upon equal qualifications with others. And why? Because the party of hostility to human rights, which is 'conservative' in this growing, aspiring, expanding country, exactly as sheet-iron swaddling-clothes are conservative of a new-born babe, pursued by the pitiless logic of the sublime American principle and driven from one absurdity to another, now claims that ours is 'a white man's government'. Oh, no! Gentlemen, you may wish to make it so, but it was not made so. The false history of Judge Taney was promptly corrected from Judge Taney's bench by Justice Curtis.
                                    
                                        
                                        Preface. 
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717) 
Context: I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.
                                    
                                        
                                        As quoted in Physics by Aristotle, as  translated by John Burnet http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/burnet/egp.htm?pleaseget=14 
Context: There cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, nor without this qualification. For there are some who make this (i. e. a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another — air is cold, water moist, and fire hot—and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise.
                                    
                                        
                                         "Freedom from Religion", The Nation (19 February 2001) http://www.thenation.com/article/freedom-religion/ 
Context: A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law.
                                    
                                        
                                        Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy" 
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
                                    
                                        
                                        Speech given to the Imperial Institute (11 November 1895), quoted in "Mr. Chamberlain On The Australian Colonies", The Times (12 November 1895), p. 6 
1890s
                                    
Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics
Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch. 2
                                        
                                         Congressional Records https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1944-pt1/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1944-pt1-17-1.pdf#page=9 (January 31, 1944) 
1940s
                                    
                                        
                                        Quote from The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) e.d. Michel Sanouille and Elmer Peterson, New York 1973, pp. 139-140 
posthumous
                                    
                                        
                                        Preface 
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717)
                                    
Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man, 1923, p. 83
Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)
Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923), p.63
Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)
                                        
                                        The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can’t handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page. 
Foreword: Playgrounds for the Mind (pp. 26-27) 
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)
                                    
“In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.”
                                        
                                        [2013, From the Divine to the Human, World Wisdom, 71, 978-1-936597-32-1] 
Spiritual life, Faith
                                    
“Freedom from lower qualities is an essential qualification required for spiritual progress.”
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 95
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 263
                                        
                                        Book IV, 1005 
Metaphysics 
Original: (el) τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό (καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα προσδιορισαίμεθ᾽ ἄν, ἔστω προσδιωρισμένα πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείας): αὕτη δὴ πασῶν ἐστὶ βεβαιοτάτη τῶν ἀρχῶν: ἔχει γὰρ τὸν εἰρημένον διορισμόν. ἀδύνατον γὰρ ὁντινοῦν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνειν εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι, καθάπερ τινὲς οἴονται λέγειν Ἡράκλειτον. 
Source: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0051%3Abook%3D4%3Asection%3D1005b
                                    
Revolution in Laos: Practice and Prospects (1981) (excerpts)