Quotes about tenth

A collection of quotes on the topic of tenth, time, timing, people.

Quotes about tenth

Justin Bieber photo

“If I can do just one-tenth of the good Michael Jackson did for others, I can really make a difference in this world.”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

First Step 2 Forever: My Story (2010), p. 177

George Orwell photo
H.L. Mencken photo

“The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Baltimore Evening Sun (12 February 1923)
1920s
Context: The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

George Orwell photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Bjarne Stroustrup photo

“I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.”

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

[Federico Biancuzzi, Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages, https://books.google.com/books?id=yB1WwURwBUQC&pg=PA14, 21 March 2009, "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 978-0-596-55550-4, 14]

Jules Verne photo

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion.”

La mer est tout! Elle couvre les sept dixièmes du globe terrestre. Son souffle est pur et sain. C'est l'immense désert où l'homme n'est jamais seul, car il sent frémir la vie à ses côtés. La mer n'est que le véhicule d'une surnaturelle et prodigieuse existence; elle n'est que mouvement et amour.
Part I, ch. X: The Man of the Seas
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Mark Twain photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo

“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine- tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870), Ch. 29.

Bertrand Russell photo

“Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
1920s

Robert Sheckley photo
Mark Twain photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want. In his tenth year he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)
Context: Abraham now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or academy as a student, and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law license. What he has in the way of education he has picked up. After he was twenty-three and had separated from his father, he studied English grammar — imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does. He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want. In his tenth year he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time.<!--pp. 9-10

Miyamoto Musashi photo

“I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), Introduction
Context: When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools' strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realise the Way of strategy when I was fifty.
Since then I have lived without following any particular Way. Thus with the virtue of strategy I practise many arts and abilities — all things with no teacher. To write this book I did not use the law of Buddha or the teachings of Confucius, neither old war chronicles nor books on martial tactics. I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger.

Abraham Lincoln photo

“My parents were both born in Virginia of undistinguished families... My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks...”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859), p.32

Michael Faraday photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“Dear Sir: Yours of the tenth received. I am well acquainted with Mr. __, and know his characteristics. First of all, he has a wife and baby; together they ought to be worth $50,000 to any man. Then he has an office, in which there will be a table worth $1.50, and three chairs worth, say, $1. Last of all, there is in one corner a rat-hole which will bear looking into.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Attributed at an unspecified date when Lincoln was a young lawyer, apparently first reported in the Prairie Farmer (March 13, 1886), Volume 58, p. 176. The quote, taken as a whole, has been explained to mean that Lincoln was giving a negative character reference, implying that the subject of that reference was not financially stable, and prone to let details slip.
Posthumous attributions

Karl Marx photo

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 2, paragraph 25.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
Theodore Roosevelt photo

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1880s
Source: Ibid, January 1886 https://www.history.com/news/teddy-roosevelt-race-imperialism-national-parks

Diana Gabaldon photo
Anthony Doerr photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.”

Variant: People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you can forget, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Jerry Spinelli photo
Terry Goodkind photo
Henry James photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Carl Sagan photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Warren Farrell photo

“If my parents had made love a tenth of a second earlier or later, I wouldn’t exist. What an enormous miracle, just being given life.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994), p. 163.

Peter Kropotkin photo
Richard von Mises photo

“Consider for instance, the facts that Jose Canseco was picked in the fifteenth round of the amateur draft, Roger Clemens the twelfth, Ryne Sandberg the twentieth, and Nolan Ryan the tenth.”

Andrew Zimbalist (1947) American economist

Source: Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992), Chapter 5, The Minors, p. 111.

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
Michael T. Flynn photo

“Lock her up, that's right. Yeah, that's right, lock her up! I'm going to tell you what, it's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. If I did a tenth, a tenth, of what she did, I would be in jail today.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Speaking at the Republican National Convention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx94428MYcc (18 July 2016)
Public Statements

Ayn Rand photo
Benjamin Franklin photo
Yoel Esteron photo
Henry Adams photo

“The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists…. The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em. ] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.'
The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

, Marcellin Berthelot, Ch. Em. Ruelle, "The Alchemists of Egypt and Greece," Art. VIII. (Jan. 1893) in The Edinburgh Review (Jan.-Apr. 1893) Vol. 177, pp. 208-209. https://books.google.com/books?id=GuvRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA208

A.W. Bickerton photo
Algernon Charles Swinburne photo
Will Eisner photo

“Dialogue in Hell:
Tenth Dialogue”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)
Variant: Dialogue in Hell:
Fourth Dialogue

Simon Kuznets photo

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

Josip Broz Tito photo
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo
Anthony Trollope photo

“The tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press.”

Source: The Warden (1855), Ch. 14

Douglas Adams photo
Kin Hubbard photo
James Harvey Robinson photo

“If everyone gave a tenth of his worldly goods to the person he most admired, the rich would just get richer.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Henry Adams photo
Milton Friedman photo

“Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Speaking at a meeting of the American Economic Association, as quoted by Walter Block in "Milton Friedman RIP" in Mises Daily (16 November 2006) http://mises.org/story/2393

R. H. Tawney photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo

“Nine-tenths the calamities of the human race are due to the union of high intelligence with low desires.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

"Lord Bacon", (1837) in Essays 2:183
Attributed

Alastair Reynolds photo
Kin Hubbard photo

“Don't knock th' weather. Nine-tenths o' th' people couldn' start a conversation if it didn' change once in a while.”

Kin Hubbard (1868–1930) cartoonist

Abe Martin's Primer : The Collected Writings of Abe Martin and his Brown County, Indiana, Neighbors (1914).

Sinclair Lewis photo
PewDiePie photo
Aisha photo

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is appreciation. Go find somebody's hand and squeeze it, while there's time.”

Dale Dauten (1950) American writer

Cited in: Colleen Zuck etal. (2002) Daily Word for Families, p. 167

Miklós Horthy photo
Reggie Fils-Aimé photo
Ali al-Rida photo

“Time will come when one's safety lies in ten things: nine of which are in staying aloof from men, and the tenth in staying silent.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 446-450.
General Quotes

Nate Diaz photo
Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
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.

H.L. Mencken photo
John Fante photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“The wife is a piece of property, acquired by contract; she is part of your furniture, for possession is nine-tenths of the law; in fact, the woman is not, to speak correctly, anything but an adjunct to the man; therefore abridge, cut, file this article as you choose; she is in every sense yours.”

La femme est une propriété que l'on acquiert par contrat, elle est mobilière, car la possession vaut titre; enfin, la femme n'est, à proprement parler, qu'une annexe de l'homme; or, tranchez, coupez, rognez, elle vous appartient à tous les titres.
Part II, Meditation Number XII: The Hygiene of Marriage.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)

Bob Costas photo
John Bright photo
W. W. Rouse Ball photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Anish Kapoor photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.”

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

The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)

Simon Stevin photo
Bernie Sanders photo
Blake Schwarzenbach photo

“The records I end up liking I don't like right off the bat. I want to call our next record Tenth Listen. That's the test.”

Blake Schwarzenbach (1967) American singer

[Parker, Jeff, http://www.hypertxt.com/parker/clips/jawbreak/jawbrk4.html, "Interview with Blake Schumacher", p. 4, Jawbreaker http://www.hypertxt.com/parker/clips/jawbreak/jawbrk.html, Hypertext.com, 2006-09-06]
Interviews

John Maynard Keynes photo

“The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 20

Richard Savage photo

“He lives to build, not boast, a generous race;
No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.”

Richard Savage (1697–1743) English poet

The Bastard (1728), line 7, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).