Quotes about working
page 41

Clinton Edgar Woods photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“It saddens me that a historic event like this is being misconstrued by a small but vocal group of critics trying to spread the notion that the UN gathering is really the work of radicals and atheists bent on destroying our families.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

"China, UN Seek to Put Conference Back on Track" (Reuters: September 4, 1995)
White House years (1993–2000)

“Colly doing a good, no-frills, manful job for England here, just one from the over. He is to cricket what Jim Taggart is to detective work.”

Ben Dirs journalist

England v Sri Lanka, 2007-04-04, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/6521515.stm,

Will Rogers photo

“There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I don't even have to exaggerate.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

As quoted in Saturday Review (25 August 1962)
Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom (1935)
Variant: People often ask me, 'Will, where do you get your jokes?' I just tell 'em, 'Well, I watch the government and report the facts, that is all I do, and I don't even find it necessary to exaggerate.
Variant: I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Bob Seger photo

“The next witness is a constituent of mine, Rabbi Maurice Davis. He comes from White Plains, a Rabbi of the Jewish Community Center. He is a faculty member at Manhattan College. He has been actively involved with working with young people to deprogram them from cults for over five years. He is responsible for separating some 128 young people from these organizations. I would just like to take the opportunity to welcome a very distinguished constituent.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

Introduction of Rabbi Maurice Davis to Congressional Hearings, by Congressman Richard Ottinger., INFORMATION MEETING ON THE CULT PHENOMENON IN THE UNITED STATES http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Cult_Phenomenon_in_the_United_States_%281979%29/Davis, February 5, 1979, 318 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. P.74-80. of Transcript of Proceedings.
About

Edmund Hillary photo
Joshua Reynolds photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Clay Aiken photo

“I think there is a predisposition among Christians that Hollywood is anti-Jesus or anti-Christianity. I was warned I'd have to fight to maintain the freedom to express my beliefs. It's an unfair stereotype, and so far that's been the farthest from the truth. While everyone I work with may not share my beliefs, I have been surrounded by nothing but support.”

Clay Aiken (1978) singer-songwriter, actor, record producer

—Clay Aiken - Today's Christian Magazine
On Christianity
Source: Today's Christian, November/December 2005 http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2005/006/7.19.html retrieved April 16, 2006

Stephen Harper photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Natacha Rambova photo
Richard Strauss photo

“Why don't people see what is new in my work, how in them, as is found only in Beethoven, the human being visibly plays a part in the work.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

19th June 1949, in Willi Schuh, Strauss the early years, 1982, Cambridge University Press, page xiii.
Other sources

Kendrick Farris photo

“If we ask what it is he [ George Orwell] stands for, … the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have. … He communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do. Or could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance of being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our own lights—he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

“George Orwell and the politics of truth,” The Opposing Self (1950), pp. 156-158
The Opposing Self (1950)

David Garrick photo

“Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us?
Is this the great poet whose works so content us?
This Goldsmith’s fine feast, who has written fine books?
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks?”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Epigram on Goldsmith’s Retaliation. Vol. ii. p. 157. Compare: "God sendeth and giveth both mouth and the meat", Thomas Tusser, A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557); "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks", John Taylor, Works, vol. ii. p. 85 (1630).

Hans Freudenthal photo
Sebastian Vettel photo
Brigham Young photo
Elton Mayo photo
Alexander Maclaren photo

“Our work, abiding, shall bring to us the endless glory with which God at last overpays the toils, even as now He overanswers the poor prayers of His laboring servants.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 131.

Nick Xenophon photo
David Cameron photo
Norman Tebbit photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Ben Witherington III photo
Vitruvius photo
Vilfredo Pareto photo
Bryant Jennings photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Charles Stross photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Van Morrison photo

“What's my line?
I'm happy cleaning windows
Take my time
I'll see you when my love grows
Baby don't let it slide
I'm a working man in my prime
Cleaning windows…”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Cleaning Windows
Song lyrics, Beautiful Vision (1982)

Philip Rosedale photo

“I think the magic of Silicon Valley is not in fostering risk-taking, but instead in making it safe to work on risky things.”

Philip Rosedale (1968) American businessman, founder of Second Life

Interview published in SingularityHub.com http://singularityhub.com/2015/06/15/are-people-in-silicon-valley-just-smarter/. June 15, 2015.

Bert Blyleven photo
Gerard Manley Hopkins photo
Niall Ferguson photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
George Soros photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
Thomas Piketty photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo

“The study of Euler's works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics and nothing else can replace it.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted by Louise Grinstein, Sally I. Lipsey, Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education (2001) p. 235.

Linus Torvalds photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Richard Ford photo
André Maurois photo

“Genius consists of equal parts of natural aptitude and hard work.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

A Time for Silence

Paul Gabriël photo
Patrick Dixon photo
Joanna MacGregor photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“Just observe what you are. What you are is the fact: the fact that you are jealous, anxious, envious, brutal, demanding, violent. That is what you are. Look at it, be aware; don’t shape it, don’t guide it, don’t deny it, don’t have opinions about it. By looking at it without condemnation, without judgement, without comparison, you observe; out of that observation, out of that awareness comes affection. Now, go still further. And you can do this in one flash. It can only be done in one flash — not first from the outside and then working further and deeper and deeper and deeper; it does not work that way, it is all done with one sweep, from the outermost to the most inward, to the innermost depth. Out of this, in this, there is attention — attention to the whistle of that train, the noise, the coughing, the way you are jerking your legs about; attention whereby you listen to what is said, you find out what is true and what is false in what is being said, and you do not set up the speaker as an authority. So this attention comes out of this extraordinarily complex existence of contradiction, misery and utter despair. And when the mind is attentive, it can then give focus, which then is quite a different thing; then it can concentrate but that concentration is not the concentration of exclusion. Then the mind can give attention to whatever it is doing, and that attention becomes much more efficient, much more vital, because you are taking everything in.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIV, p. 301
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

James Tod photo

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Neil Patrick Harris photo
Prem Rawat photo

“Listen to satsang. It is a very good thing. God created day and night. After that He created excellent things to eat, and then he landed us in this world. Isn't this human body beautiful? There is a nose to breathe with. Tell me, could we have survived without it? See what a good job of seeing these eyes do. Look how beautiful are the hands and the feet. If no seva is done, then these hands are of no use. These two ears have been given, if we don’t listen to satsang with them, aren’t they useless? If you do not go to satsang walking with these feet, they are also worthless. God has created all the parts of this body quite well, but if we don't use them properly, it is our fault, not the Creator's. The river flowing over there is the Ganga, but it is not flowing for its own use. It is we who drink its water, wash our clothes in it, and irrigate our fields with it. By bathing in it only the dirt of this body is washed, but by bathing in the Ganga of satsang, all the evils are removed. What I am telling you is also written in the Gita. But Gita cannot make you understand. Only the satguru can make you understand the satnam (true name), so do practice Knowledge. Look at Lord Shiva sitting with eyes closed [pointing towards a fountain with a statue of Shiva]. He always stays in the contemplation of Guru Maharaj. Whenever I see him he doesn’t do any other work. I don’t know whether he doesn’t like doing any other work or what. Therefore, you too should also practice Knowledge like this.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Prem Nagar, Hardwar August 21,1962 (translated from Hindi). Birthday Celebrations, as published in "Hansadesh" magazine, Issue 1, Mahesh Kare, January 1963. (First published address.)
1960s

“I can count on one of my hands, how many competent people are working in the [Hungarian] media today. But the situation is also woeful in the areas of theatre, film production and fine arts. The whole Hungarian culture is in a deep crisis, the putrescence reigning this country – in a cultural, economic, political, moral and mentalecological sense – consumes everything.”

Róbert Puzsér (1974) hungarian publicist

Egy kezemen meg tudom számolni, hány alkalmas ember dolgozik ma a médiában. De siralmas a helyzet a színház, a filmgyártás és a képzőművészet területén is. Az egész magyar kultúra mélységes válságban van, a rothadás, ami uralja az országot – kulturálisan, gazdaságilag, politikailag, etikailag és mentálökológiailag – mindent elemésztő.
Idegen test az RTL Klubon - Puzsér Róbert-interjú, hvg.hu, 2012. március 20.
Quotes from him, Interviews

Thomas Eakins photo
Parker Palmer photo
Akio Morita photo
Mel Brooks photo

“President Skroob: What the hell, it works on Star Trek!”

Mel Brooks (1926) American director, writer, actor, and producer

Spaceballs

Ernst Kaltenbrunner photo
Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Jean Chrétien photo
Robert Hunter (author) photo
Peter Greenaway photo
George S. Patton photo
Roger Wolcott Sperry photo
Bernice King photo
Gerard Batten photo
Paul Krugman photo
Tony Benn photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
B. W. Powe photo

“Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn't work out in theory.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Maxims and Enigmas, p. 29
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

Edward Jenks photo
Howard Cosell photo

“He is working Duran effectively…. and Duran must resolve from pulling in…and he does…WHAT?! DURAN HAS QUIT?! ROBERTO DURAN HAS QUIT!!! There can be no other explanation. Pandemonium in the ring, and Roberto Duran has quit!”

Howard Cosell (1918–1995) American sportscaster

November 25, 1980, calling the fight between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard, which Duran infamously quit during the 8th round of the fight.

C. N. R. Rao photo
Alfred Rosenberg photo
Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
John Banville photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Madonna photo
Christopher Langton photo
Jean-François Millet photo

“[Theophile] Gautier's article is very good. I begin to feel a little more contented. His remarks about my thick colours are also very just. The critics who see and judge my pictures are not forced to know that in painting them I am not guided by a definite intention, although I do my utmost to try and attain the aim which I have in sight, independently of methods. People are not even obliged to know why it is that I work in this way, with all its faults.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote of Millet in his letter of 23 March 1851; as quoted by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 112
the most famous painting of Millet 'The Sower', reviewed in an article then by Gautier, was exhibited for the first time in 'The Salon' of Paris, at the End of 1850
1851 - 1870

Ben Carson photo

“It's a failure only if you don't get anything out of it, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work; yet we have lights today.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 36

Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
Eric Schmidt photo

“Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like [Android 4.0] or not … you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first.”

Eric Schmidt (1955) software engineer, businessman

Source: Google's Schmidt: Android leads the iPhone http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57338276-264/googles-schmidt-android-leads-the-iphone in CNET (7 December 2011).

Anish Kapoor photo