Quotes about set
page 43

Diane Abbott photo

“I think the public sector cuts have the potential to set back race relations and black and ethnic minority communities by a generation.”

Diane Abbott (1953) British Labour Party politician

Cuts could damage race relations, warns Diane Abbott https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11295557 BBC News (14 September 2010)
2010s, 2010

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Poul Anderson photo
Tipu Sultan photo

“Well, like they say, nothing can set a precedent until it happens for the first time.”

Source: Timescoop (1969), Chapter 19 (p. 122)

Rocco Siffredi photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things. First, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mister Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Though Mister Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The man who could say, 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether', gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the south was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go.
About Abraham Lincoln https://web.archive.org/web/20150302203311/http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4071#_ftnref57.
1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

David Lloyd George photo
David Lloyd George photo
Stephen King photo
Joseph Heller photo
Hendrik Verwoerd photo
Annie Besant photo

“It is patent to every student of the closing forty years of the last century, that crowds of thoughtful and moral people have slipped away from the churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the widespread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular Christianity was due to the awakening and the growth of conscience; it was the conscience that revolted, as well as the intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining salvation by slavish submission.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Esoteric Christianity (The Lesser Mysteries) (1914)

Leanne Wood photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Edward Bellamy photo
Elizabeth Warren photo
Cheng Li-chun photo

“We hope people can set aside their fears and partisan biases and stop thinking that learning from the mistakes of the past means causing animosity.”

Cheng Li-chun (1969) Taiwanese politician

Cheng Li-chun (2019) cited in " Transitional justice not aimed at spurring animosity: culture minister http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201901310014.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 31 January 2019.

Chris Rea photo

“On his refusal of a set for MTV Unplugged: It’s one of the biggest career mistakes I’ve ever made. I’d be so much more wealthy, because of America. I was offered one of the first ones. But I saw Eric Clapton on it, and it reminded me of Pebble Mill At One.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

I thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want anything to do with this’. Because he’s like God to me. [...] So I turned it down. I should have had an older brother who said, ‘Fucking do it’.
2015

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.
Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

George Jones photo
Jacques Lacan photo

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

B.K.S. Iyengar photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo
Alex Salmond photo
Jeet Thayil photo
Jayant Narlikar photo

“During his distinguished public life he set an example of selfless service and stood for value-based politics. He set high standards of moral rectitude and political sagacity as Vice-President and guided the nation successfully.”

Basappa Danappa Jatti (1912–2002) Indian politician

The Hindu Reporter in: Governor, CM condole Jatti's death http://www.thehindu.com/2002/06/08/stories/2002060804340400.htm, The Hindu, 8 June 2002.

Morarji Desai photo
Gulzarilal Nanda photo
Gulzarilal Nanda photo
James Braid photo
Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma photo

“He was educated by 14 palace tutors. He remembered a childhood stay with his mother in London, when he folded up as a paper boat a doctors’ report about his being too fat, and set it adrift on the Thames, so that she would not see it. He studied economics at Travancore University, and was a Sanskrit scholar.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

Anne Keleny, in Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma: The Maharajah of Travancore 4 March 2014 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/uthradom-thirunal-marthanda-varma-the-maharajah-of-travancore-9169048.html

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Dadasaheb Phalke photo
Waheeda Rehman photo
Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo
Naguib Mahfouz photo
Lotfi A. Zadeh photo

“A frequent source of misunderstanding has to do with the interpretation of fuzzy logic. The problem is that the term fuzzy logic has two different meanings. More specifically, in a narrow sense, fuzzy logic, FLn, is a logical system which may be viewed as an extension and generalization of classical multivalued logics. But in a wider sense, fuzzy logic, FLw is almost synonymous with the theory of fuzzy sets.”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

In this context, what is important to recognize is that: (a) FL<sub>w</sub> is much broader than FL<sub>n</sub> and subsumes FL<sub>n</sub> as one of its branches; (b) the agenda of FL<sub>n</sub> is very different from the agendas of classical multivalued logics; and (c) at this juncture, the term fuzzy logic is usually used in its wide rather than narrow sense, effectively equating fuzzy logic with FL<sub>w</sub>
Zadeh (1995) in Foreword of George J. Klir Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic: theory and applications.
1990s

Satyajit Ray photo
Andy Griffith photo
Rajinikanth photo
Kamal Haasan photo
Derren Brown photo
Paul Scholes photo

“He is one of the top three to five players to have ever played in the Premier League - his passing, movement and technique set examples to everyone, not just younger players.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/8922460.stm
Alan Hansen, 2010

Pedro Albizu Campos photo
John Banville photo

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.
Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

John Brown (abolitionist) photo

“Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens against another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude, or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.”

John Brown (abolitionist) (1800–1859) American abolitionist

Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme' Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.
Preamble.
Provisional Constitution and Ordinances (1858)

Richard Rodríguez photo

“His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told… I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write… When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...
"Time Of Our Lives" (26 May 1997) http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_6.html

Cormac McCarthy photo
Octavio Paz photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be. The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us. In this matter we only possess a negative freedom of will, a noluntas.”

We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of our destiny. … Theoretic truths not only are disputable, but their whole meaning and force lie in their being disputed, they spring from discussion. They live as long as they are discussed, and they are made exclusively for discussion. But destiny — what from a vital point of view one has to be or has not to be — is not discussed, it is either accepted or rejected. If we accept it, we are genuine; if not, we are the negation, the falsification of ourselves. Destiny does not consist in what we feel we should like to do; rather is it recognised in its clear features in the consciousness that we must do what we do not feel like doing.
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

Greta Garbo photo
Margaret Mead photo

“With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.
Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 107

John Muir photo
Tristan Tzara photo
Harlan Ellison photo
John Keats photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;—and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Walker Percy photo
Henry Miller photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Helen Keller photo

“Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a consummation devoutly to be wished."”

But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who has escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?
Optimism (1903)

James McBride (writer) photo

“I tell them that a simple story is the best story, and that time and place is really crucial to good storytelling. Establish your stories in a specific time and place and get your characters set solidly within that framework before you let them start moving from one room to the next...”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On the writing advice he gives to his students in "James McBride's Advice For New Writers: 'A Simple Story Is The Best Story'" https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810052791/james-mcbrides-advice-for-new-writers-a-simple-story-is-the-best-story in NPR (2020 Feb 29)

Alexander Hamilton photo
David Sedaris photo

“I Photo Elfed all day for a variety of Santas and it struck me that many of the parents don't allow their children to speak at all. A child sits upon Santa's lap and the parents say, 'All right now, Amber, tell Santa what you want. Tell him you want a Baby Alive and My Pretty Ballerina and that winter coat you saw in the catalog.'
The parents name the gifts they have already bought. They don't want to hear the word 'pony' or 'television set,' so they talk through the entire visit, placing words in the child's mouth. When the child hops off the lap, the parents address their children, each and every time, with, 'What do you say to Santa?'
The child says, 'Thank you, Santa.'”

It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to the fingerprints.
Essay, "Santaland diaries" - p.233-234, 235
Barrel Fever (1994)

Donald J. Trump photo

“No, I don't take responsibility at all, because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations and specifications from a different time.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Asked if he took responsibility for the lag in coronavirus testing
White House press conference, , quoted in * 2020-03-13
'I don't take responsibility at all': Trump pushes back on complaints about coronavirus testing
Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/i-dont-take-responsibility-at-all-trump-pushes-back-on-complaints-about-coronavirus-testing
2020s, 2020, March

Dana Arnold photo

“If style is anything more than formal analysis or a description of the ornamentation of a building it must surely offer or represent a specific set of ideals from the moment of its production.”

Dana Arnold (1961) Middlessex uni prof

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 3 : On classical ground : Histories of style

Paul Romer photo

“Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem. I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something.”

Paul Romer (1955) American economist

At a news conference following the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics announcement, as quoted in "2 Americans win econ Nobel for work on climate and growth" https://www.apnews.com/c3e7552c033748e683d502d890613b8b Associated Press. October 8, 2018.

Robert Skidelsky photo

“All epoch-defining events are the result of conjunctures - the correlation of normally unconnected happenings which jolts humanity out of its existing rut and sets it on a new course.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

Source: John Maynard Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009), Ch. 1 : What Went Wrong?

Victor Hugo photo
Emmanuel Levinas photo

“The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. In Greek, mathematics simply meant learning, and we have adapted this... to define the term as "learing to decide."”

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

Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa.

C. West Churchman, Leonard Auerbach, Simcha Sadan, Thinking for Decisions: Deductive Quantitative Methods (1975) Preface.
1960s - 1970s

Richard Dawkins photo

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

Source: Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Ch. 1 : The Anaesthetic of Familiarity; Dawkins is reported to have stated that this passage will be read at his funeral; it is often quoted with an extension which does not occur in any thus-far-checked editions of the book: "We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Jacinda Ardern photo
Alfred von Waldersee photo

“How I despise the liberal gang that has captured the Chamber! They are prisoners of their own verbose unrealism, and are setting the country back further from year to year.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, quoted in Walter Görlitz, History of the German General Staff, 1657-1945 https://ia801907.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.285159/2015.285159.The-_text.pdf

Dana Arnold photo
Dana Arnold photo
John Allen Paulos photo

“All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.””

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 3, “Self-Reference and Paradox” (p. 53)

Donald J. Trump photo

“We have an invisible enemy. We have a problem a month ago nobody ever thought about. [...] This is a bad one, this is a very bad one. This is bad in the sense that it's so contagious. It's just so contagious. Sort of record-setting type contagion.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Coronavirus task force press briefing, , quoted in * 2020-03-17

The Last Great Pandemic

Jarrett Stepman

The Daily Signal

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/17/the-last-great-pandemic/
2020s, 2020, March

Jacinda Ardern photo
William Wordsworth photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo

“Bucky: "The last time I cooked you complained."
Rob: "Setting a bologna sandwitch on fire is not 'cooking'."”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

Satchel: "It was pretty good, though."

Groovitude, page 166 and daily strip for September 1, 2000
Dialogue

“I’ve found that if I can't come up with even an inkling of how my mind might be changed, then I'm not really thinking at all; I'm just set on holding on to my current beliefs.”

Greg Craven American teacher and writer

Source: What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009), Chapter 1 "The Decision Grid" (p. 18)

“I figure there's two things in a movie: that you are looking at something, you are listening to something. So I like to put a lot of attention into the music and into the recording of the dialogue and into the sets.”

Anna Biller (1965) film director

FrightFest 2016 - The Love Witch Interview with Anna Biller - 4 Sep 2016, at 0 Min 30 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x4awb_fS84
From interview with FrightFest

Donald J. Trump photo
Immanuel Kant photo

“What vexations there are in the external customs which are thought to belong to religion, but which in reality are related to ecclesiastical form! The merits of piety have been set up in such away that the ritual is of no use at all except for the simple submission of the believers to ceremonies and observances, expiations and mortifications (the more the better). But such compulsory services, which are mechanically easy (because no vicious inclination is thus sacrificed), must be found morally very difficult and burdensome to the rational man. When, therefore, the great moral teacher said, 'My commandments are not difficult,' he did not mean that they require only limited exercise of strength in order to be fulfilled. As a matter of fact, as commandments which require pure dispositions of the heart, they are the hardest that can be given. Yet, for a rational man, they are nevertheless infinitely easier to keep than the commandments involving activity which accomplishes nothing... [since] the mechanically easy feels like lifting hundredweights to the rational man when he sees that all the energy spent is wasted.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View https://books.google.com/books?id=TbkVBMKz418C. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 9780809320608. Page 33.
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Karl Kautsky photo

“Our duty is not merely to abolish the capitalist order but to set up a higher order in its place. But we must oppose those forces aiming to destroy capitalism only in order to replace it with another barbarous mode of production.”

Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician

Chap. V, The Period of Dictatorship
"Hitlerism and Social Democracy" (1934) https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/hitler/index.htm

Daniel Hannan photo
Taiichi Ohno photo