Quotes about requirement
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Jane Jacobs photo
Gustave de Molinari photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Robert Langlands photo
Jeremy Rifkin photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 224

William Pitt the Younger photo
Samuel Butler photo

“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Falsehood, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIX - Truth and Convenience

Ray Harryhausen photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Isaac Asimov photo

“The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Three Numbers" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (September 1974); reprinted in More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
General sources

Charles Simic photo
Brian Leiter photo

“Rosen would still demand, no doubt, an explanation of why the ruling class is so good at identifying and promoting its interests, while the majority is not. But, again, there is an obvious answer: for isn’t it generally quite easy to identify your short-term interests when the status quo is to your benefit? In such circumstances, you favor the status quo! In other words, if the status quo provides tangible benefits to the few—lots of money, prestige, and power—is it any surprise that the few are well-disposed to the status quo, and are particularly good at thinking of ways to tinker with the status quo (e. g., repeal the already minimal estate tax) to increase their money, prestige, and power? (The few can then promote their interests for exactly the reasons Marx identifies: they own the means of mental production.) By contrast, it is far trickier for the many to assess what is in their interest, precisely because it requires a counterfactual thought experiment, in addition to evaluating complex questions of socio-economic causation. More precisely, the many have to ascertain that (1) the status quo—the whole complex socio-economic order in which they find themselves--is not in their interests (this may be the easiest part); (2) there are alternatives to the status quo which would be more in their interest; and (3) it is worth the costs to make the transition to the alternatives—to give up on the bad situation one knows in order to make the leap in to a (theoretically) better unknown. Obstacles to the already difficult task of making determinations (1) and (2)—let alone (3)—will be especially plentiful, precisely because the few are strongly, and effectively (given their control of the means of mental production), committed to the denial of (1) and”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

2
"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Georgy Zhukov photo

“The nature of encounter operations required of the commanders limitless initiative and constant readiness to take the responsibility for military actions.”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

Quoted in "The Military Quotation Book" - Page 49 - by James Charlton - 2002

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Maimónides photo
G. E. M. Anscombe photo

“Certain information is required for adequate role performance, that is, in order for a person to conform to the role expectations held by members of his role set.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Source: Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, 1964, p. 22-23

Antonin Artaud photo
David Eugene Smith photo
Thomas Henry Huxley photo
Vince Lombardi photo

“A game that requires the constant conjuring of animosity.”

Vince Lombardi (1913–1970) American football player, coach, and executive

On football, New York Times (10 Dec 1967).

Jack Gleeson photo
J. Bradford DeLong photo

“The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.
My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Alexander Hamilton photo
Harold Wilson photo
Bill Hybels photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Lysander Spooner photo

“Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section III, p. 7
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Anthony Watts photo
Alain de Botton photo
John Vorster photo

“…the policy of separate development can be tested by any unprejudiced person against the requirements of Christianity and morality, and it will be found to meet all those requirements. … for conditions such as those in South Africa there is no other policy[, for without it] you will have chaos and ultimately bring about the downfall of all population groups here in South Africa. South Africa's problems are unique and South Africa has chosen its solution. …we, the Whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and the Bantu, will work out our own solutions here in South Africa. …we instituted the policy of separate development, not because we considered ourselves better than others, not because we considered ourselves richer or more educated than others. We instituted the policy of separate development because we said we were different from others. We prize that otherness and are not prepared to relinquish it. … We have our land and we and we alone will have author­ity over it. We have our Parliament and in that Parliament we and we alone will be represented; that is why [during] this past session it was my pleasant privilege to … abolish Coloured representation in Parliament; and it has been abolished once and for all. … but one should also put something in its place. That is why the National Party … for the first time [has given] the Coloureds in the Republic a Coloured Persons Representative Council in their own political area [where they] can exercise their political rights in their own way and by their own people. That is morality, that is policy, that is standpoint. … We said you may not attend my university, but we did not leave it at that. We said we shall give you a university of your own. We said you may not attend my school but we said we shall give you a school of your own. That is morality, that is Christianity …”

John Vorster (1915–1983) politician from South Africa and seventh Prime Minister of South Africa

John Vorster in his Heilbron speech http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/extract-speech-made-heilbron-16-august-1968 on 16 August 1968, as quoted in sahistory.org.za

Patrick Fitzgerald photo

“When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth. Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens.”

Patrick Fitzgerald (1960) American lawyer

CIA probe 'not over' after Cheney's top aide indicted on CNN.com (October 28, 2005)

Ishirō Honda photo

“Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.”

Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) Quality guru

Philip B. Crosby (1989), Let's Talk Quality: 96 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask Phil Crosby, p. 47

Calvin Coolidge photo
Gregory Benford photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo

“The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. … Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.”

Problema, numeros primos a compositis dignoscendi, hosque in factores suos primos resolvendi, ad gravissima ac utilissima totius arithmeticae pertinere, et geometrarum tum veterum tum recentiorum industriam ac sagacitatem occupavisse, tam notum est, ut de hac re copiose loqui superfluum foret. … [P]raetereaque scientiae dignitas requirere videtur, ut omnia subsidia ad solutionem problematis tam elegantis ac celebris sedulo excolantur.
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801): Article 329

Napoleon Hill photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo
Bill Fagerbakke photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“I will propose a Highway Safety Act of 1966 to seek an end to this mounting tragedy. We must also act to prevent the deception of the American consumer—requiring all packages to state clearly and truthfully their contents—all interest and credit charges to be fully revealed—and keeping harmful drugs and cosmetics away from our stores. It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention. We must change to master change. I propose to take steps to modernize and streamline the executive branch, to modernize the relations between city and state and nation. A new Department of Transportation is needed to bring together our transportation activities. The present structure—35 government agencies, spending $5 billion yearly—makes it almost impossible to serve either the growing demands of this great nation or the needs of the industry, or the right of the taxpayer to full efficiency and real frugality. I will propose in addition a program to construct and to flight-test a new supersonic transport airplane that will fly three times the speed of sound—in excess of 2,000 miles per hour. I propose to examine our federal system-the relation between city, state, nation, and the citizens themselves. We need a commission of the most distinguished scholars and men of public affairs to do this job. I will ask them to move on to develop a creative federalism to best use the wonderful diversity of our institutions and our people to solve the problems and to fulfill the dreams of the American people. As the process of election becomes more complex and more costly, we must make it possible for those without personal wealth to enter public life without being obligated to a few large contributors. Therefore, I will submit legislation to revise the present unrealistic restriction on contributions—to prohibit the endless proliferation of committees, bringing local and state committees under the act—to attach strong teeth and severe penalties to the requirement of full disclosure of contributions—and to broaden the participation of the people, through added tax incentives, to stimulate small contributions to the party and to the candidate of their choice.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Susan Sontag photo

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Elisabetta Canalis photo
Ahmad Sirhindi photo
Sonia Sotomayor photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“Editorial cartoonists are idealists, of another world. Political, social and moral injustices are perceived as monstrosities [requiring the cartoonist to] sweep aside all the complexities and go to the basic issue; to take suspicions, coincidences and past events and record them larger than life.”

Paul Conrad (1924–2010) German theologian

As quoted in Rainey, J. (2010, September 5). Paul Conrad dies at 86 http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/sep/05/local/la-me-paul-conrad-20100905. Los Angeles Times.

Eben Moglen photo

“The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted.”

Eben Moglen (1959) American law professor and free software advocate

Talk titled The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 26, 2007 http://www.archive.org/details/EbenMoglenLectureEdinburghJune2007text.

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

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“We have carried our quest for peace to many nations and peoples because we share this planet with others whose future, in large measure, is tied to our own action, and whose counsel is necessary to our own hopes. We have found understanding and support. And we know they wait with us tonight for some response that could lead to peace. I wish tonight that I could give you a blueprint for the course of this conflict over the coming months, but we just cannot know what the future may require. We may have to face long, hard combat or a long, hard conference, or even both at once. Until peace comes, or if it does not come, our course is clear. We will act as we must to help protect the independence of the valiant people of South Vietnam. We will strive to limit the conflict, for we wish neither increased destruction nor do we want to invite increased danger. But we will give our fighting men what they must have: every gun, and every dollar, and every decision—whatever the cost or whatever the challenge. And we will continue to help the people of South Vietnam care for those that are ravaged by battle, create progress in the villages, and carry forward the healing hopes of peace as best they can amidst the uncertain terrors of war. And let me be absolutely clear: The days may become months, and the months may become years, but we will stay as long as aggression commands us to battle. There may be some who do not want peace, whose ambitions stretch so far that war in Vietnam is but a welcome and convenient episode in an immense design to subdue history to their will. But for others it must now be clear—the choice is not between peace and victory, it lies between peace and the ravages of a conflict from which they can only lose.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Jacob Maris photo

“When I am tired of long, straight roof lines, why should I not introduce a cupola, especially where the cloud formation requires its support?.. Why should I not build my own towns to suit myself?”

Jacob Maris (1837–1899) Dutch painter

as cited in Landscape Painting and Modern Dutch Artists, E. B. Greenshields https://ia902605.us.archive.org/6/items/landscapepaintin00greeuoft/landscapepaintin00greeuoft.pdf; The Copp, Clark, Co. Limited, Toronto, 1906, p. 150
Jacob Maris painted many 'Dutch City' paintings, in which he combined different parts of the cities Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Delft and Rotterdam

Zbigniew Brzeziński photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Fernand Léger photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“Women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie?
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart

Aron Ra photo
Geoffrey West photo

“Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s
Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Clarence Thomas photo
Samuel Adams photo
David Deutsch photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“To maintain good health requires good nutrition and a healthy dose of exercise.”

DeBarra Mayo (1953) American martial artist

Erie Times, SportsWeek, March 3, 1986

Anthony Kennedy photo
Ernst Bloch photo

“We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh. The inner wealth of brotherhood will be the same ephemeral spectre, rotting into tree bark like the spurious treasure of Rübezahl, the German mountain spirit, unless it shows it has the strength to withstand even death, and conquer death; and thus not only to undergo it but to be strongly above it as an essential part of eternal life.”

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) German philosopher

Denn wir müssen sterben, mit kurzem Verzug, und vielleicht brauchen die Leichen keinen so weiten Faltenwurf, den Weg alles Fleisches zu gehen. Der brüderlich innere Reichtum wird nicht minder kurzer Spuk, verwest zu Baumrinde wie Rübezahls falsche Schätze: zeigt sich in ihm keine Kraft, gar den Tod zu bestehen, zu besiegen, mithin nicht nur von unten an hindurch zu gehen, sondern auch an sich selbst ein kräftig oberer Teil zu sein und das Wesenselement des ewigen Lebens.
Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 41

Milton Friedman photo
Rupert Boneham photo
Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell photo

“Economic history matters. Students of economics should read Charles MacKay and Charles Kindleberger, and should study the history of the Wall Street Crash as well as the theory and the mathematics required to formalize it.”

Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell (1955) British businessman

Source: Economics after the crisis : objectives and means (2012), Ch. 2 : Financial Markets: Efficiency, Stability, and Income Distribution

Robert A. Dahl photo
Mitt Romney photo
Marvin Minsky photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo

“I name next a word that it requires some courage to utter these days—the word of economy. It is like a echo from the distant period of my early life. The wealth of the country, and the vast comparative diffusion of comfort, has, I am afraid, put public economy, at least in its more rigid and severe forms, sadly out of countenance.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Newcastle (2 October 1891), quoted in A. W. Hutton and H. J. Cohen (eds.), The Speeches of The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone on Home Rule, Criminal Law, Welsh and Irish Nationality, National Debt and the Queen's Reign. 1888–1891 (London: Methuen, 1902), p. 377.
1890s

Eduardo Torroja photo
Jerry Fodor photo
Fred Shero photo

“Success requires no explanations, failure presents no alibis.”

Fred Shero (1925–1990) Former ice hockey player and coach

Liebman, Glenn, Hockey Shorts: 1,001 of the games funniest one liners

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Leonid Kantorovich photo

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Different productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for different types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for five machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the first to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientific session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

“Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

The Catholic Fireside Articles November 1924 Gillian Lindsay - The Story of the Lark Rise Writer 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
Literary Observations

Eric Maisel photo
André Maurois photo
Rajendra Prasad photo

“We have got used to relying on precedents of England to such an extent that it seems almost sacrilegious to have a different interpretation even if our conditions and circumstances might seem to require a different interpretation.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

From his speech given on 28 November 1960 at laying the foundation-stone of the building of the Law Institute of India, in: p. 16
Presidents of India, 1950-2003

Robert T. Bakker photo
Everett Dean Martin photo