Quotes about special
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Joss Whedon photo
Grant Morrison photo

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Roald Dahl photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything”

Variant: Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. As long as you have a soul and free will, you can be anything, do anything, choose anything.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Thomas Jefferson photo

“The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bill for Establishing a National Bank., 1791. http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/natbank.html ME 3:146
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

James Patterson photo
Ryū Murakami photo
Miep Gies photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Scott Westerfeld photo
Richelle Mead photo
Marilyn Monroe photo
Karen Joy Fowler photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
George Lucas photo

“A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykmZp5cgbkU
Context: One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Alan Moore photo
Jonathan Franzen photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Nancy Mitford photo
Stephen King photo
Derek Landy photo
Lee Child photo

“You do not mess with the special investigators.”

Source: Bad Luck and Trouble

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Jenny Han photo
David Levithan photo
Erving Goffman photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.”

Ed Gorman (1941–2016) American writer

Source: Everybody's Somebody's Fool

Albert Einstein photo
Scott Westerfeld photo
Stephen Chbosky photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Dolly Parton photo

“Wouldn't it be something if we could have things we love in abudance without their losing that special attraction the want of them held for us.”

Dolly Parton (1946) American singer-songwriter and actress

Source: Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business

Jim Butcher photo
Alexander McCall Smith photo

“Special things have a way of surviving.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Source: The World According to Bertie

Pat Conroy photo

“Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Losing Season: A Memoir

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.”

Part 9, Chapter 4 (p. 206)
Source: Fiction, The Female Man (1975)
Context: Remember: I didn’t and don’t want to be a “feminine” version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.
What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?

Miranda July photo
Anne Sexton photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Janet Evanovich photo
Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Jodi Picoult photo

“We Pisces, we're a special breed.”

Source: Sing You Home

Haruki Murakami photo
Anne Sexton photo
Rick Riordan photo
Anne McCaffrey photo
Rachel Caine photo
Shmuley Boteach photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Sarah Dessen photo
James Patterson photo

“Is dere anysing special about you? Anysing vorth saving?"

Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Cassandra Clare photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Anthony Giddens photo

“This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.

John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Douglas Coupland photo
Hugo Diemer photo
Haruo Nakajima photo
Robert A. Dahl photo
David Brin photo

“Like proselytization, desecrating and demolishing the temples of non-Muslims is also central to Islam…. India too suffered terribly as thousands of Hindu temples and sacred edifices disappeared in northern India by the time of Sikandar Lodi and Babur. Will Durant rightly laments in the Story of Civilization that "We can never know from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty it once possessed". In Delhi, after the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the materials of which were utilized to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam masjid, it was after 700 years that the Birla Mandir could be constructed in 1930s. Sita Ram Goel has brought out two excellent volumes on Hindu Temples: What happened to them. These informative volumes give a list of Hindu shrines and their history of destruction in the medieval period on the basis of Muslim evidence itself. This of course does not cover all the shrines razed. Muslims broke temples recklessly. Those held in special veneration by Hindus like the ones at Somnath, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, were special targets of Muslims, and whenever the Hindus could manage to rebuild their shrines at these places, they were again destroyed by Muslim rulers. From the time of Mahmud of Ghazni who destroyed the temples at Somnath and Mathura to Babur who struck at Ayodhya to Aurangzeb who razed the temples at Kashi Mathura and Somnath, the story is repeated again and again.”

Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Elton Mayo photo

“They don't know my head's full of me
And that I have my own special thing,
And there's no hole in my head.
Too bad.”

Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978) American folk singer

Song No Hole In My Head

Talcott Parsons photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up Islam, they are in particular danger.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

In an interview to The Times — Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-atheist-academic-calls-for-religion-to-be-offended-at-every-opportunity-a7043226.html (23 May 2016)

James Otis Jr. photo

“ALL PRECEDENTS ARE UNDER THE CONTROUL OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW … No Acts of Parliament can establish such a writ [writ of assistance enabling British search of homes for no reason]: … it would be void, "AN ACT AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION IS VOID." Vid. Viner. But … special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion.”

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) Lawyer in colonial Massachusetts

Massachusetts Spy (April 29, 1773)(Principle of judicial review. In addition, much like the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution).

Bruce Palmer Jr. photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Chris Cornell photo
Eric S. Raymond photo

“And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Archived NedaNet page http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/

L. David Mech photo

“The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer