Quotes about total
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Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Maya Angelou photo

“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Source: Poems

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
James Patterson photo
Libba Bray photo
James Patterson photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Jerry Spinelli photo
Roald Dahl photo
Rick Riordan photo
Holly Black photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Isaac Asimov photo

“In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: Nightfall One

Rick Riordan photo
Rachel Caine photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo
James Patterson photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Jeanette Winterson photo

“Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough”

Gut Symmetries (1997)
Context: They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough.

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

This Is Where I Leave You (2009), 2014-January-15 http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/This_Is_Where_I_Leave_You.html?id=3jVps2Z9LQcC,
Source: This is Where I Leave You

Douglas Coupland photo
Cressida Cowell photo
Rachel Cohn photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Lionel Shriver photo
James Patterson photo

“Awwww, lame, we're not going to disneyworld. (said by the amazing talking dog, Total)”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

Lois Lowry photo
William Gibson photo
David Foster Wallace photo

“That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine…”

Source: The Pale King (2011)
Context: "Maybe it's not metaphysics. Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--... And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have pour in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-- a hundred years? two hundred?-- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and that before maybe three of four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are... The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."

Charles Bukowski photo
Rick Riordan photo
James Patterson photo
Cecily von Ziegesar photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Richelle Mead photo

“Rose lit up. “I’d totally help with that. Sydney’s my friend, and I’ve got experience with—”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Bloodlines: Silver Shadows

Janet Evanovich photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Jürgen Moltmann photo
Joe Haldeman photo
Ram Dass photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“[The information available within a system constitutes what Boulding (1978) calls the noosphere. It is constituted by the collection of plans, of representations, of procedures, of ideas for the construction of objects or of instructions to realize certain interaction patterns, including] the totality of the cognitive content, including values, of all human nervous systems, plus the prostatic devices by which the system is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones, post offices, and so on.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 122, cited in: Jorge Reina Schement, Brent D. Ruben (1993) Information and Behavior - Volume 4. p. 517
Robert A. Solo (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892" commented: "The image appears as crucial in Boulding's treatment of societal evolution. Here the record is in human artifacts, not only in material structures such as buildings and machines, telephones and radios, but also in organizations including the extended family, the tribe, the nation, and the corporation. All such artifacts originate in and are sustained by images in the human mind. Civilization and civilized man, in the language that he knows, the skills he acquires, the whole heritage of tradition and manners he has learned, are human artifacts."

Paul Gauguin photo

“If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art... He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote c. 1902, in Racontars d'un Rapin, Paul Gauguin; as quoted in 'Introduction' of Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro – (translated from the unpublished French letters by Lionel Abel); Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 15
After Paul Cezanne it was Gauguin who came to ask advice and painted landscape at the side of the much elder Pissarro. The traces of this apprenticeship as an impressionist were soon to disappear from Gauguin's works, but shortly before he died, he wrote these sentences about his former teacher
1890s - 1910s

Yves Klein photo
Fernand Léger photo
Wesley Clark photo
Oksana Shachko photo
Mary Abigail Dodge photo

“The total depravity of inanimate things.”

Mary Abigail Dodge (1833–1896) American writer

Epigram, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Ted Budd photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Amir Taheri photo

“[Islamic terrorism] is different from all other forms of terrorism in at least three important respects. First, it rejects all the contemporary ideologies in their various forms; it sees itself as the total outsider with no option but to take control or to fall, gun in hand. It cannot even enter into talks with other terrorist movements which may, in some specific cases at least, share its tactical objectives. Considering itself as an expression of Islamic revival - which must, by definition, lead to the conquest of the entire globe by the True Faith - it bases all its actions on the dictum that the end justifies the means… The second characteristic that distinguishes the Islamic version from other forms of terrorism is that it is clearly conceived and conducted as a form of Holy War which can only end when total victory has been achieved. The term 'low-intensity warfare' has often been used to describe terrorism, but it applies more specifically to the Islamic kind, which does not seek negotiations, give-and-take, the securing of specific concessions or even the mere seizure of political power within a certain number of countries… The third specific characteristic of Islamic terrorism is that it forms the basis of a whole theory of both individual conduct and of state policy. To kill the enemies of Allah and to offer the infidels the choice between converting to Islam or being put to death is the duty of every individual believer as well as the supreme - if not the sole - task of the Islamic state.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Holy Terror: The inside story of Islamic terrorism (1987)

Milton Bradley (baseball) photo

“I really haven't even thought about it," he said. "If I somehow miraculously made it to the All-Star Game, I would be floored. I'd really be totally humbled by that. I'm just happy right now to play, to produce and to be with a good group of guys.”

Milton Bradley (baseball) (1978) Major League Baseball player

Star glows, ballots grow for Texas Rangers' Bradley, The Dallas Morning News, Time Cowlishaw, June 6, 2008, 2009-01-04 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/stories/060608dnspocowlishaw.3022001.html?npc,

Lewis Mumford photo
William James photo
Ernst Kaltenbrunner photo
Satoru Iwata photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“The same society which receives the rewards of technology must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection and development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation. Its concern is not with nature alone, but with the total relation between man and the world around him. Its object is not just man's welfare, but the dignity of man's spirit.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

Message to Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty written to Congress (8 Feb 1965), in Lyndon B. Johnson: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President (1965), Vol.1, 156. United States. President (1963-1969 : Johnson), Lyndon Baines Johnson, United States. Office of the Federal Register — 1970
1960s

Arthur Jensen photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Robert Crumb photo
William Trufant Foster photo
Gottfried Helnwein photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Basshunter photo
Davey Havok photo
Nikolai Gogol photo
Robert F. Kennedy photo

“Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and then the total — all of these acts — will be written in the history of this generation.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)
Variant: Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and then the total — all of these acts — will be written in the history of this generation.

Robert Silverberg photo
Sri Chinmoy photo
Walter Benjamin photo
U.G. Krishnamurti photo
Moshe Dayan photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Mao Zedong photo

“The minority nationalities in our country number more than thirty million. Although they constitute only 6 per cent of the total population, they inhabit extensive regions which comprise 50 to 60 per cent of China's total area. It is thus imperative to foster good relation between the Han people and the minority nationalities. The key to this question lies in overcoming Han chauvinism. At the same time, efforts should also be made to overcome local-nationality chauvinism, wherever it exists among the minority nationalities. Both Han chauvinism and local-nationality chauvinism are harmful to the unity of the nationalities; they represent one kind of contradiction among the people which should be resolved.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

" VI. THE QUESTION OF THE MINORITY NATIONALITIES "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 我国少数民族有三千多万人,虽然只占全国总人口的百分之六,但是居住地区广大,约占全国总面积的百分之五十至六十。所以汉族和少数民族的关系一定要搞好。这个问题的关键是克服大汉族主义。在存在有地方民族主义的少数民族中间,则应当同时克服地方民族主义。无论是大汉族主义或者地方民族主义,都不利于各族人民的团结,这是应当克服的一种人民内部的矛盾。

Donald J. Trump photo
Alex Jones photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Peter Tatchell photo

“Economists can take a good deal of credit for the stabilization policies which have been followed in most Western countries since 1945 with considerable success. It is easy to generate a euphoric and self-congratulatory mood when one compares the twenty years after the first World War, 1919-39, with the twenty years after the second, 1945-65. The first twenty years were a total failure; the second twenty years, at least as far as economic policy is concerned, have been a modest success. We have not had any great depression; we have not had any serious financial collapse; and on the whole we have had much higher rates of development in most parts of the world than we had in the 1920’s and 1930’s, even though there are some conspicuous failures. Whether the unprecedented rates of economic growth of the last twenty years, for instance in Japan and Western Europe, can be attributed to economics, or whether they represent a combination of good luck in political decision making with the expanding impact of the natural and biological sciences on the economy, is something we might argue. I am inclined to attribute a good deal to good luck and non-economic forces, but not all of it, and even if economics only contributed 10 percent, this would amount to a very handsome rate of return indeed, considering the very small amount of resources we have really put into economics.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 9

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Milan Kundera photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Greg Egan photo