Quotes about spokesman (38 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology … because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Interview with Julius Lester, "James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-reflections.html in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
Context: Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology … because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

“The professional administrators — especially those at higher levels — serve key roles at the boundary of the organization, between the professionals inside and interested parties — governments, client associations, and so on — on the outside. On the one hand, the administrators are expected to protect the professionals' autonomy, to "buffer" them from external pressures. On the other hand, the administrators are expected to woo these outsiders to support the organization, both morally and financially. Thus, the external roles of the manager—maintaining liaison contacts, acting as figurehead and spokesman in a public relations capacity, negotiating with outside agencies—emerge as primary ones in professional administration.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 326

Support

“Skinner: …it should be placed on record that, according to my hon. Friends who worked tirelessly in the Committee to oppose the provisions of the Bill, including this clause, the Liberal spokesman was not there half the time.”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

1980s

Time

“The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party… loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin http://web.archive.org/web/20130421061108/http://my.opera.com/PRC/blog/?startidx=560

Life , People , World , Literature

“[Darwin’s] inquiry characteristically confines itself to the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as a few more not thought of; but the scope and method given to scientific enquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has substantially not been questioned, except by that diminishing contingent of the faithful”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of Business Enterprise

Source: The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904, p. 370

Faith , Question , Change

“Foreign Spokesman Qin Gang let everyone act as journalists to ask him questions. Professor of Beijing United University Chen Delin got the mic first: “What principles do you follow when you answer questions from Chinese and foreign reporters?””

Qin Gang (1966) politician

Question , Universe

“The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Times
Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet (2001)

Sense , Learning , Reading , Parting

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

Men , Children , People , World

“Davis was winning a position as a leader in the Senate. Successor to Calhoun, he had become the spokesman for southern nationalism… not independence but domination from within the Union. This movement had been given impetus by the Mexican War. Up til then the future of the country pointed north and west, but now the needle trembled and suddenly swung south. The treaty signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo brought into the Union a new southwestern domain, seemingly ripe for slavery and the southern way of life: not only Texas down to the Rio Grande, the original strip of contention, but also the vast sun-cooked area that was to become Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, and California with its new-found gold. Here was room for expansion indeed, with more to follow; for the nationalists looked forward to taking what was left of Mexico, all of Central America down to Panama, and Yucatan and Cuba by extension. Yet the North… had no intention of yielding the reigns. The South would have to fight for this… using States Rights for a spear and the Constitution for a shield. Jefferson Davis, who had formed his troops in a V at Buena Vista and continued the fight with a boot full of blood, took a position, now as then, at the apex of the wedge.”

Shelby Foote book The Civil War: A Narrative

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)

Life , War , Way , Sun

“The leader of the controversial Church of Scientology routinely physically attacked members of his management team, according to former executives, a Florida newspaper has reported. Defectors from the controversial organisation who spoke to the St Petersburg Times told the paper that David Miscavige was "constantly denigrating and beating on people". Mike Rinder, the church's spokesman for decades, said he was attacked by Miscavige some 50 times.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

.
About

People , Time

“A few years ago, a Muslim spokesman [Imam Abdullah Bukhari of Jama Masjid, Delhi] had demanded that 20 percent seats in the Parliament and the State Assemblies should be reserved for members of his community. He also recommended that the remaining 80 percent seats should be filled only by those persons whose selection before elections had been cleared by the same community!”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Communication , Personality

“Appolinaire [spokesman of French Cubism ] told me about a book of his on the Cubists that's about to come out. He divides the Cubists into Physical Cubists, (Gleize) [sic], who add some dramatic elements to their expression of external realities; Scientific Cubists (Picasso, Metzinger) and 'Orphiques' [sic]. (I give you [ Umberto Boccioni ] this last classification in French because I don't know how to translate it); in Appolinaire's opinion the 'Orphiques' [sic] seek new elements of expressing abstract realities; and we Futurists belong with the latter.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Gino Severini, in a letter to Umberto Boccioni, Paris, 29 October 1912; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 55

Books , Reality

“.. and Dr. Isaiah Williams, whose body was recovered from a ravine near San Pablo. Inquiries are being hampered by what an Army spokesman termed the obstinate attitude of the local people. “They won’t admit they know their left hands from their right,” he asserted. Here at home Senator Richard Howell (Rep., Col.) today launched a fierce attack on the quote chlorophyll addicts unquote who, he claims, are hamstringing American business, already staggering under the load of high unemployment and recession, by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition. In Southern Italy rioting continues in many small towns formerly dependent on fishing. Meantime, dust storms in the Camargue...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

.
January “AND IT GOES ON”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People , Quotes , Home , Business

“I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like "Do you know?" Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyes "Do you know?"”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Be Here Now (1971)

People , Game

“Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.”

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

Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 8.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)

Age

“He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: “And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, ‘I changed my mind about insects!’ “”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

September “MINE ENEMIES ARE DELIVERED INTO MY HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

God , People , Quotes , Change

“The world and Christianity have completely opposite conceptions. The world says of the apostles, of the Apostle Peter as their spokesman, "He is drunk,"-and the Apostle Peter admonishes, "Become sober." Consequently the secular mentality considers Christianity to be drunkenness, and Christianity considers the secular mentality to be drunkenness. "Do become reasonable, come to your senses, try to become sober"-thus does the secular mentality taunt the Christian. And the Christian says to the secular mentality, "Do become reasonable, come to your senses, become sober." The difference between secularity and Christianity is not that one has one view and the other another-no, the difference is always that they have the very opposite views, that what one calls good the other calls evil, what the one calls love the other calls selfishness, what the one calls piety the other calls impiety, What the one calls being drunk the other calls being sober. it is precisely the drunken man, the apostle, who finds it necessary to bring home to the sober (I assume) world the admonition: "Become sober!"”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

This very admonition may, as intended, most severely wound the callous secular mentality, which as a rule cannot be wounded very easily or disconcerted.
Judge for Yourself, p. 96-97 1851
1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)

Love , World , Home , Sense

“The office of Speaker is almost as ancient as Parliament itself. It emerged in the Middle Ages when the Commons - the ordinary people - of England needed a spokesman in their dealings with the King, someone who would voice their grievances and present their petitions. This was by no means a safe or easy thing to do at that time, and potential spokesman generally had to be pressured into accepting the responsibility.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 4, The Office of Speaker of the House of Commons, p. 46

People , Age , Time

“Shortly after 9/11 a French spokesman for the activist group ATTAC quoted the adage: "He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind." French prime minister Lionel Jospin seemed to be pointing in this direction when he asked, "What lesson are the Americans going to draw from what has happened?" The lesson, Jospin indicated, should be for the U. S. to moderate her unilateralism. For Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops' Conference, the lesson to be drawn from terrorism was that "the West must not seek to dominate the rest of the world."”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

World , Quotes , Drawing

“There was the populist extreme left, whose main spokesman was the journalist Curzio Malaparte, who wanted to see Fascism make a ‘revolution of the people’ that would reflect what the populist left considered true Italian popular culture, both intellectually and socially. There were small sectors of a dissident extreme left or ‘free Fascism’ that promoted a progressivist and leftist revolution of ‘liberty’ under the Fascist banner.”

Stanley G. Payne (1934) American historian

Source: Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980), A History of Fascism, 1914—1945 (1995), pp. 112-113

People

“I was totally amazed. This little home made underground comix thing was turning into a business before my eyes. It went from us going around Haight Street trying to sell these things we had folded and stapled ourselves to suddenly being a business with distributors, lawyers, contracts, and money talk. … The whole thing began to take on a heaviness that I believe had a negative effect on my work. I was only twenty-five years old when all this happened. It was a case of "too much too soon," I think. I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! … Take Keep On Truckin'… for example. Keep on Truckin'… is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. … I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being "America's Best Loved Hippie Cartoonist."”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 163

Love , Life , Money , Stupidity

“.. that the Army is using defoliants in Honduras to create fire-free zones. This charge has been strongly denied by the Pentagon. Asked to comment just prior to leaving for Hawaii, where he will convalesce for the next two or three weeks, Prexy said, quote, Well, if you can’t see them you can’t shoot them. End quote. Support has been growing for a bill which Senator Richard Howell will introduce at the earliest opportunity, forbidding the issue of a passport to any male between sixteen and sixty not in possession of a valid discharge certificate or medical exemption. Welcoming the proposal, a Pentagon spokesman today admitted that of the last class called for the draft more than one in three failed to report. Your steaks are going to cost you more. This warning was today issued by the Department of Agriculture. The price of animal fodder has quote taken off like a rocket unquote, following the mysterious...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

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June “IF IT MOVES, SHOOT IT”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Quotes , Support , Animals

“It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, 'if this is what it takes to win, it's not worth it.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Home , Game

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

Death , Fate , World , Birth

“As UKIP’s health spokesman at the last General Election, I can say with gladness that now we have voted to leave, our treasured NHS will now be safe from the clutches of the EU/US TTIP agreement that would have seen American drug and insurance companies elbow their way into our healthcare. I would have thought that the local Green Party would at least join me in celebrating on this issue.”

Louise Bours (1968) British politician

Accept the Will of the People http://www.louiseboursmep.co.uk/accept-will-of-the-people/ (July 5, 2016)

Health , Way

“At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 27.

Understanding , Appearance

“Much has been written about Jefferson himself being laggard, later in life, in his efforts against slavery. But in Jefferson the draftsman and spokesman for the American people in the American Revolution, the man of whom Lincoln would say that he 'was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician of our history', there was never the least equivocation as to slavery's injustice and immorality.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 23

Life , People , History , Effort

“If you can't have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who "accepts the necessity of Jacobinism" wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Edgar Quinet', p. 587
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

People , Books

“I am delighted to be named the first UKIP spokesman for Women and Equalities These important issues need to be promoted without patronising tokenism, virtue-signalling and political correctness.”

Margot Parker (1943) UK politician

Margot Parker MEP appointed Equalities and Womens Issues Spokesman http://www.ukip.org/margot_parker_mep_appointed_equalities_and_womens_issues_spokesman (December 2, 2016)

Women

“He reacts to many things bitterly, this pleasant, smiling young man, who is 32 years old, married now, with two sons, a sports hero here and back home in Puerto Rico. Clemente reacts to things bitterly because he is an honest man, and a feeling one. Baseball has become a game of automatons performing in mechanical ways. Scoreboards now tell you when to cheer. The words "Go-go-go" light up, and you obediently recite, "Go-go-go." A bugle sounds, and reflexively you murmur, "Charge!" Roberto Clemente is a throwback, as are many of his Latin cohorts—which means he has his flaws. Anger can twist him almost helpless with rage. But it has also made him not only a leader of men—automatons are poor leaders—but also a spokesman for his people. He spoke out, during 1966, in an Associated Press dispatch of August 23…”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Roberto Clemente: A Flame in Pittsburgh," in Baseball Stars of 1967 (April 1967), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 51
Other Topics

Men , People , Smile , Way

“Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which he himself belongs—who toil not, neither do they spin—whose fortunes, as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such services as courtiers render to kings—and have since grown and increased while they have slept, by the levy of an unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country of which they form a part.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Birmingham (30 March 1883), quoted in H. W. Lucy (ed.), Speeches of the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. (London, George & Routledge & Sons, 1885), p. 41.
1880s

Men , Parting , Country , Wealth

“A group from Glasgow sought in 1891 to purchase his portrait of w:Thomas Carlyle was shocked that Whistler's price was 1000 guineas. A spokesman countered that the portrait was not even life size. Whistler replied, 'But, you know, few men are life size.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Tom Prideaux and Time-Life Books, The World of Whistler (1970)
posthumous published

Life , Men

“He is truly one of the most revolting humans (minions) I have ever seen. In a way, there is no more fitting spokesman for the Trump administration than an entitled, elitist arsehole who refuses to take responsibility for the messes he makes, and who can somehow pick a fight with the Statue of Liberty.”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

" Stephen Miller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ2noQY5kRQ" (ff. 0:02:45), August 4, 2017; on Stephen Miller.
Last Week Tonight (2014–present)

Way , Fight

“The temptation to become the spokesman of all religions was irresistible for him, as for many Hindu gurus before and after. He ended by being the spokesmen of none, and made a mess of whatever religion he touched. He never evolved a criterion for distinguishing dharma from adharma.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)
Context: So we are left with Mahatma Gandhi as the first and real prophet of sarva-dharma-samabhâva. (...) The explanations for [Gandhi's] pervert behaviour can be many... Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that he bound the Hindus hands and feet with the shackles of his sarva-dharma-samabhâva, and made them helpless in the face of Islamic gangsterism. At the same time, [Gandhi] gave full freedom to Muslims to deal with Hindus as they pleased. The record of what Muslim did under the leadership of the mullahs and the Muslim League exists in cold print. It never occurred to him to appeal to Muslims even once to practise sarva-dharma-samabhâva vis-à-vis Hinduism. That he thought was against their religion with which he could not interfere. The dope was meant only for Hindus. (...) The temptation to become the spokesman of all religions was irresistible for him, as for many Hindu gurus before and after. He ended by being the spokesmen of none, and made a mess of whatever religion he touched. He never evolved a criterion for distinguishing dharma from adharma.

Religion

“Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise.”

Karl Shapiro (1913–2000) Poet, essayist

Paris Review interview (1986)
Context: Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been “out of the country” in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don’t.

“It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Cibola Burn (2014), Chapter 34 (p. 345)

God

“Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation… If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me…”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Defending the re-segregation of federal offices, in Conference with members of the National Association for Equal Rights https://web.archive.org/web/20150315002852/http://friesian.com/presiden.htm#43 (November 1914)
1910s

Color , Thinking , People , Country

“But a leading nation, a nation upon which all depend not only in this country but around the world, cannot afford to be satisfied, to look back or to pause. On our strength and growth depend the strength of others, the spread of free world trade and unity, and continued confidence in our leadership and our currency. The underdeveloped countries are dependent upon us for the sale of their primary commodities and for aid to their struggling economies. In short, a prosperous and growing America is important not only to Americans--it is, as the spokesman for 20 Western nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as he stressed this week, of vital importance to the entire Western World.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Confidence , Dependency , Country , Self-confidence