Quotes about text
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Angelique Rockas photo

“English translation of the Spanish language text.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

Vogue, Mexico Interview: Una Actirz Multiplicada (July 1992)

Coraline Ada Ehmke photo

“Plays are events in time and space. Plays are music. Word music. Visual music. I’ve always thought of plays as a form of composition—of text and the architecture of the experience of the full-length evening…”

Caridad Svich (1963) American writer

On how she describes plays in “Making Invisible Stories Seen, Heard and Felt Interview with Caridad Svich” http://www.critical-stages.org/3/making-invisible-stories-seen-heard-and-felt-interview-with-caridad-svich/ in The IATC webjournal/Revue web de l'AICT – Autumn 2010: Issue No 3

Thomas Jefferson photo

“About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people -- a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”

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

1800s, First Inaugural Address (1801)

Charles Stross photo

“Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.”

“But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 11, “The Apocalypse Codex” (p. 209)

“A translator has divided loyalties. He has a duty to his author, a duty to his reader and a duty to the text. The three are by no means identical and are often hard to reconcile.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

Preface to The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: 'The Crab-Flower Club' (1979), p. 20

Sergey Lavrov photo
Michael Witzel photo
Vātsyāyana photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“Swami Chinmayananda being the first person to have translated the Gita in English, played an important role in propagating this text across the world to all age groups.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Sri Jayendra Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, in Chinmayananda spread the message of `Gita' http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2001-12-25/mumbai/27232673_1_gita-shankaracharya-swami
About Chinmayananda

Dennis Prager photo
Michel Henry photo

“Certainly, Marx was atheist, "materialist", etc. But for a philosopher also, it's advisable to distinguish between what he is and what he thinks to be. The most important, this is not what Marx thought and that we ignore, but what think the texts he has written. What appears in them, in a way as obvious as exceptional in the history of philosophy, this is a metaphysics of the individual. Marx is one of the first Christian thinkers of Occident.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Marx II. Une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 445
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Marx certes était athée, « matérialiste », etc. Mais chez un philosophe aussi, il convient de distinguer ce qu’il est de ce qu’il croit être. Ce qui compte, ce n’est d’ailleurs pas ce que Marx pensait et que nous ignorons, c’est ce que pensent les textes qu’il a écrits. Ce qui paraît en eux, de façon aussi évidente qu’exceptionnelle dans l’histoire de la philosophie, c’est une métaphysique de l’individu. Marx est l’un des premiers penseurs chrétiens de l’Occident.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
Arun Shourie photo

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

William Kingdon Clifford photo

“No mathematician can give any meaning to language about matter, force, inertia, used in text-books of mechanics.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

"Energy and Force" (Mar 28, 1873)

Rawi Hage photo

“…When I recall the war, I recall it in images, not verbally or by text. That’s what really comes to me: fragmented images, much like photographs…”

Rawi Hage (1964) Canadian writer

On how memory plays into his works in “‘What I Fear Most is Homogeneity’: An Interview with Rawi Hage” https://hazlitt.net/feature/what-i-fear-most-homogeneity-interview-rawi-hage in Hazlitt (2018 Sep 12)

Arun Shourie photo
Arun Shourie photo
Alain Daniélou photo
Opal Tometi photo

“One thing I just want to underscore is that the world is watching us. We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe, and I have friends texting me with their images in France and the Netherlands and Costa Rica, and people are showing me that they are showing up in solidarity.”

Opal Tometi (1984) Nigerian–American writer, strategist and community organizer

A Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Explains Why This Time Is Different, By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, (3 June 2020)

Adunis photo

“I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought.”

Adunis (1930) Essayist, poet

Adunis, in: " https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/books/18adonis.html" at nytimes, October 17, 2010

Bill Moyers photo

“Bullies — political bullies, economic bullies, and religious bullies — cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with courage, clarity, and conviction. This is never easy. These Fanaticism|true believers don't fight fair. Robert's Rules of Order is not one of their holy texts.”

Bill Moyers (1934) American journalist

"The Sport of God https://www.commondreams.org/views/2005/09/09/911-and-sport-god", speech accepting the Union Medal of the Union Theological Seminary (7 September 2005), as quoted Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 375

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Catherine Rowett photo

“If we are to understand what is going on in Empedocles’s writings, we need to think about the philosophical motives that drive him, and we need to make use of the bits of text we already had before the papyrus turned up.”

Catherine Rowett (1956) Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (born 1956)

Source: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2004), Ch. 1 : Lost words, forgotten worlds

Laurence Tribe photo

“[W]e should beware of "hearing" silences where nearly all readers, setting aside how they would like a particular controversy to end, identify determinative text... "The heart has its reasons," as Pascal famously said, "that reason does not know."”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Good enough. And those heartfelt reasons deserve a hearing. But when they defy reason, the meaning of living by the rule of law is that reason should prevail.
Soundings and Silences (2016)