Quotes about real
page 41

Donald J. Trump photo
Eugene J. Martin photo
John Major photo

“John Major: What I don't understand, Michael, is why such a complete wimp like me keeps winning everything.
Michael Brunson: You've said it, you said precisely that.
Major: I suppose Gus will tell me off for saying that, won't you Gus?
Brunson: No, no, no … it's a fair point. The trouble is that people are not perceiving you as winning.
Major: Oh, I know … why not? Because…
Brunson: Because rotten sods like me, I suppose, don't get the message clear [laughs].
Major: No, no, no. I wasn't going to say that - well partly that, yes, partly because of S-H-one-Ts like you, yes, that's perfectly right. But also because those people who are opposing our European policy have said the way to oppose the Government on the European policy is to attack me personally. The Labour Party started before the last election. It has been picked up and it is just one of these fashionable things that slips into the Parliamentary system and it is an easy way to proceed.
Brunson: But I mean you … has been overshadowed … my point is there, not just the fact that you have been overshadowed by Maastricht and people don't…
Major: The real problem is this…
Brunson: But you've also had all the other problems on top - the Mellors, the Mates … and it's like a blanket - you use the phrase 'masking tape' but I mean that's it, isn't it?
Major: Even, even, even, as an ex-whip I can't stop people sleeping with other people if they ought not, and various things like that. But the real problem is…
Brunson: I've heard other people in the Cabinet say 'Why the hell didn't he get rid of Mates on Day One?' Mates was a fly, you could have swatted him away.
Major: Yeah, well, they did not say that at the time, I have to tell you. And I can tell you what they would have said if I had. They'd have said 'This man was being set up. He was trying to do his job for his constituent. He had done nothing improper, as the Cabinet Secretary told me. It was an act of gross injustice to have got rid of him'. Nobody knew what I knew at the time. But the real problem is that one has a tiny majority. Don't overlook that. I could have all these clever and decisive things that people wanted me to do and I would have split the Conservative Party into smithereens. And you would have said, Aren't you a ham-fisted leader? You've broken up the Conservative Party.
Brunson: No, well would you? If people come along and…
Major: Most people in the Cabinet, if you ask them sensibly, would tell you that, yes. Don't underestimate the bitterness of European policy until it is settled - It is settled now.
Brunson: Three of them - perhaps we had better not mention open names in this room - perhaps the three of them would have - if you'd done certain things, they would have come along and said, 'Prime Minister, we resign'. So you say 'Fine, you resign'.
Major: We all know which three that is. Now think that through. Think it through from my perspective. You are Prime Minister. You have got a majority of 18. You have got a party still harking back to a golden age that never was but is now invented. And you have three rightwing members of the Cabinet actually resigned. What happens in the parliamentary party?
Brunson: They create a lot of fuss but you have probably got three damn good ministers in the Cabinet to replace them.
Major: Oh, I can bring in other people into the Cabinet, that is right, but where do you think most of this poison has come from? It is coming from the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You and I can both think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. Would you like three more of the bastards out there? What's the Lyndon Johnson, er, maxim?
Brunson: If you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.
Major: No, that's not what I had in mind, though it's pretty good.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Andrew Culf, "What the `wimp' really said to the S-H-one-T", The Guardian, 26 July 1993.
'Off-the-record' exchange with ITN reporter Michael Brunson following videotaped interview, 23 July 1993. Neither Major nor Brunson realised their microphones were still live and being recorded by BBC staff preparing for a subsequent interview; the tape was swiftly leaked to the Daily Mirror.

“If we have real, creative destruction here with Trump, and we have Armageddon or worse, out of the ruins will come new successes. New movements. And eventually, new rackets. And I'll be in on them. I admit it, I'm a racketeer.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard
2010s

Robert Sheckley photo
Jacoba van Heemskerck photo

“I was in Rotterdam, but the exhibition there was horrible. Le Fauconnier has nothing to tell anymore. He has a dirty color now and has become a real academic. Mondrian is completely frozen, no poetry at all anymore. It's terrible that these people can not reach further with great ideals. To my taste Alma paints far too much naturalistic. A big difference, these three, compared to [Franz] Marc, Kandinsky, Filla etc..”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:)Ich war in Rotterdam, aber da war eine schreckliche Ausstellung. Le Fauconnier ist nichts mehr. Er hat jetzt eine schmutzige Farbe uns ist ein richtiger Akademiker. Mondrian ist ganz erstarrt, gar kein Poesie mehr. Es ist doch schrecklich, dass die Leute nicht weiter kommen mit grossen Idealen. Alma ist für meinen Geschmack viel zu viel Naturalist. Ein grösser Unterschied, die drei und [Franz] Marc, Kandinsky, Filla etc..
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 9 Feb. 1915; as cited by Arend H. Huussen Jr. in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 13
1910's

Mitt Romney photo
Anselme Bellegarrigue photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
John McCain photo

“What our enemies have sought to destroy is beyond their reach. It cannot be taken from us. It can only be surrendered.
My friends, we are again met on the field of political competition with our fellow countrymen. It is more than appropriate, it is necessary that even in times of crisis we have these contests, and engage in spirited disagreement over the shape and course of our government.
We have nothing to fear from each other. We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, and promote the general welfare. But it should remain an argument among friends who share an unshaken belief in our great cause, and in the goodness of each other.
We are Americans first, Americans last, Americans always. Let us argue our differences. But remember we are not enemies, but comrades in a war against a real enemy, and take courage from the knowledge that our military superiority is matched only by the superiority of our ideals, and our unconquerable love for them.
Our adversaries are weaker than us in arms and men, but weaker still in causes. They fight to express a hatred for all that is good in humanity.
We fight for love of freedom and justice, a love that is invincible. Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong.
Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand up with our President and fight.
We're Americans.
We're Americans, and we'll never surrender.
They will.”

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

2000s, 2004, Speech at the Republican National Convention (2004)

Bob Dylan photo
Dan Savage photo
Henri Matisse photo

“A picture must possess a real power to generate light.... for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

As quoted in Matisse (1984) by Pierre Schneider
posthumous quotes

Toshio Shiratori photo
Lucy Stone photo

“Fifty years ago the legal injustice imposed upon women was appalling. Wives, widows and mothers seemed to have been hunted out by the law on purpose to see in how many ways they could be wronged and made helpless. A wife by her marriage lost all right to any personal property she might have. The income of her land went to her husband, so that she was made absolutely penniless. If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar. If a woman wrote a book the copyright of the same belonged to her husband and not to her. The law counted out in many states how many cups and saucers, spoons and knives and chairs a widow might have when her husband died. I have seen many a widow who took the cups she had bought before she was married and bought them again after her husband died, so as to have them legally. The law gave no right to a married woman to any legal existence at all. Her legal existence was suspended during marriage. She could neither sue nor be sued. If she had a child born alive the law gave her husband the use of all her real estate as long as he should live, and called it by the pleasant name of "the estate by courtesy."”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

When the husband died the law gave the widow the use of one-third of the real estate belonging to him, and it was called the "widow's encumbrance."
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

William Dalrymple photo
Ernest Mandel photo

“Yes, he does indeed and again this is very positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was therefore labelled as counterrevolutionary. Today people, both in the Soviet Union and in a large part of the international communist movement, understand better where the real counterrevolutionaries were.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Mandel answering the question Is it not true that Mikhail Gorbachev stated that Perestroika is a true new revolution? in an interview in New Times, no. 38/1990, French edition. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, pp. 56.

Iain Banks photo
Ze Frank photo
Hans Arp photo

“A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone.... [but] it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses... [art must be like.. ] fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it's mother's womb.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Notes From a Dada Diary, published in 1932; as quoted by Anna Moszynska, in Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 113
1930s

Vladimir Lenin photo

“For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom — freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp. 107–117.
Collected Works

André Breton photo
Lee Smolin photo

“Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

as quoted by Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (2000)

Camille Paglia photo

“The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 81

“Most of their real innovation comes from the market”

Source: In Search of Excellence (1982), p. 159.

Margaret Atwood photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

As quoted in Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1992) by Paul Dickson; cited in "Game Day in the Majors" at the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/robinson/jrgmday.html

Swami Vivekananda photo

“First get rid of the delusion “I am the body,” then only will we want real knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Jack Osbourne photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
David Hume photo

“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) English writer

"A Conversation Between I. Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain", in R. Lehmann et al. (eds.) Orion (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945) vol. 1, p. 2.

Thomas Arnold photo

“Real knowledge, like every thing else of the highest value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, — studied for, — thought for, — and, more than all, it must be prayed for.”

Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) English headmaster of Rugby School

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 364.

Alain de Botton photo
Philip José Farmer photo
Andrew Solomon photo
Francis Bacon photo
Thomas Gainsborough photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Camille Paglia photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Phillip Guston photo
Heather Brooke photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Theresa May photo

“Some need to be told that what the Government does isn’t a game, it’s a serious business that has real consequences for people’s lives.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Eugène Delacroix photo
Hugo Ball photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Adam Smith photo

“It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter XI, Part III, (Conclusion..) p. 282.

Amir Taheri photo

“So, the bottom line is: if you want to live well and die well, you first have to find out what is really important to you and stick to it. With that, you can get out there and get yourself a life, a real one.”

Gian Domenico Borasio (1962) physician, specialist of palliative medicine

"It's not about dying", TEDxCHUV address (13 November 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5WYNf1td-4

Robert Kuttner photo
James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance photo
Octavius Winslow photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Paul Graham photo
Alan Moore photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
William Hazlitt photo
Joseph Massad photo

“I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ….. but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister.”

Dennis Overbye (1944) American writer

On Albert Einstein, in Sex and Physics : A Talk with Dennis Overbye (2001) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/overbye/overbye_print.html

“Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?… Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework… Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Ulysses S. Grant photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them.Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents; with us — next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal homage — a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence", but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as well as that of their own immediate descendants.”

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Gwendolyn Brooks photo
Bram van Velde photo

“The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, 3 April 1972; p. 86
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

George W. Bush photo

“I watched his interview with her, though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder. 'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

During the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange, Tucker never actually asked to be spared.
1990s
Source: "Devil May Care" by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106.

Carl Lewis photo

“I want to be a millionaire, and I don't ever want a real job.”

Carl Lewis (1961) US track & field athlete

To his University of Houston track coach, Tom Tellez, on his first day of track practice, 1979.
Carl Lewis.com http://www.carllewis.com/index2.shtml (URL accessed on October 21, 2008)

Robert Anton Wilson photo
Tim McGraw photo

“I may be a real bad boy, but baby, I'm a real good man.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Real Good Man
Song lyrics, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors (2002)

Mark Steyn photo
Bernard Mandeville photo
Michel Foucault photo
Alan Blinder photo
Thomas Piketty photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo

“I think it is the ability to tackle difficult problems in a sort of stable and supportive environment. I think that is the real key to it.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

About his work in the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology quoted in [Busi, Marco, Doing Research That Matters: Shaping the Future of Management, http://books.google.com/books?id=J1wdKZ36hwcC&pg=PA133, 2013, Emerald Group Publishing, 978-0-85724-707-0, 133–]

Jeffrey Tucker photo
Bjarne Stroustrup photo

“I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, 2011-02-07 http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/stroustr.html,

Peter Cushing photo
Pat Condell photo
Orson Scott Card photo
John P. Kotter photo

“Great vision communication usually means heartfelt messages are coming from real human beings.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 4, p. 95
The Heart of Change, (2002)

George H. W. Bush photo

“This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U. N.'s founders. We have no argument with the people of Iraq. Indeed, for the innocents caught in this conflict, I pray for their safety.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

WAR IN THE GULF: THE PRESIDENT; Transcript of the Comments by Bush on the Air Strikes Against the Iraqis http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2DF1F3AF934A25752C0A967958260 The New York Times. January 17, 1991 (NYT transcript of Bush speech from the Oval office January 16, 1991, (Eastern time) two hours after air strikes began in Iraq and Kuwait.)

Gerard Bilders photo

“For me Ruisdael is the true man of poetry, the real poet. There is a world of sad, serious and beautiful thoughts in his paintings. They possess a soul and a voice that sounds deep, sad and dignified. They tell melancholic stories, speak of gloomy things and are witnesses of a sad spirit. I see him wander, turned in on himself, his heart opened to the beauties of nature, in accordance with his mood, on the banks of that dark gray stream that rustles and splashes along the reeds. And those skies!... In the skies one is completely free, untied, all of himself.... what a genius he is! He is my ideal and almost something perfect. When it storms and rains, and heavy, black clouds fly back and forth, the trees whiz and now and then a strange light breaks through the air, and falls down here and there on the landscape, and there is a heavy voice, a grand mood in nature; that is what he paints; that is what he [Ruysdael] is imaging.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

(version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Ruisdael is voor mij de ware man der poezië, de echte dichter. Daar is een wereld van droevige, ernstige schone gedachten in zijn schilderijen. Ze hebben een ziel en een stem, die diep, treurig, deftig klinkt. Zij doen weemoedige verhalen, spreken van sombere dingen, getuigen van een treurige geest. Ik zie hem dwalen, in zichzelf gekeerd, het hart geopend voor de schoonheden der natuur, in overeenstemming met zijn gemoed, aan de oevers van die donkere grauwe stroom die ritselt en plast langs het riet. En die luchten!.. .In de luchten is men geheel vrij, ongebonden, geheel zichzelf.. ..welke een genie is hij [Ruisdael]! Hij is mijn ideaal en bijna iets volmaakts.Als het stormt en regent, en zware, zwarte wolken heen en weer vliegen, de bomen suizen en nu en dan een wonderlijk licht door de lucht breekt en hier en daar op het landschap neervalt, en er een zware stem, een grootse stemming in de natuur is, dat schildert hij, dat geeft hij weer.
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), pp. 51+52, - quote from Bilders' diary, 24 March 1860, written in Amsterdam

Cat Stevens photo

“Rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

As quoted in "Cat Stevens Gives Support To Call for Death of Rushdie," by Craig R. Whitney, in The New York Times (23 May 1989), p. C18 http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie-cat.html

Hilda Solis photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo