Agents Quotes - Page 17

• The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan's principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Vegetables, Roots, Branches

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• I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Light, Two, Connections

  "Talks with Edison". Harper's Magazine, Volume 80, February 1890.

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• Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

  Stanley Milgram

  Jobs, People, Ordinary

  Stanley Milgram (2017). “Obedience to Authority”, p.6, HarperCollins

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• That every will must consider every other will its equal would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Secret, Principles

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo”, p.76, Vintage

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• If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.

  Raymond Chandler

  People, Needs, Honestly

  1952 'Ten Per Cent of Your Life', in Atlantic Monthly, Feb.

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• But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?

  George Steiner

  Morning, Men, Thinking

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.191, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• I don't like the idea of agents in a typical form. The idea of agents, to me, brings up the idea of a man in a very boring suit who's not very good looking and doesn't have much attention to style.

  Guy Ritchie

  Men, Ideas, Style

  Source: collider.com

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• For me, when my agents and reps send me a script, I read it through, just for the story purpose of it, and then I read it again to think of my character and see if it's something that I'm interested in bringing to life.

  Dania Ramirez

  Character, Thinking, Scripts

  Source: collider.com

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• By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

  Thomas Szasz

  Practice, Medical, Illness

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.167, Syracuse University Press

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• Man is a free agent; but he is not free if he does not believe it.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Believe, Men, Doe

  "History of My Life". Book by Giacomo Casanova, 1997.

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• After Ive sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

  Margaret Haddix

  Editors, Phases, Revision

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• I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.

  Karl Marlantes

  Writing, Years, Spare Time

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• I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

  Karl Marlantes

  Character, Long, Literature

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• Among the lessons learned in my lifetime is the ease with which corruption can enter high places in the mask of friendship. Sometimes the recipient is not aware of the barbed hook under the gift; often, he who gives may not know but be the unwitting agent of a craftier mind.

  Carlos P. Romulo

  Giving, Lesson Learned, Mind

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• The perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by Him obtain perfection from Him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Perfect, Causes, Divine Power

  Saint Thomas (Aquinas) (1955). “On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: God”

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• The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses -- all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Character, Soul, Utterance

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1971). “Hegel's Philosophy of Mind”, p.265, Library of Alexandria

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• Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Country, Childhood, Return

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• There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

  Erving Goffman

  Reality, Alive, World

  "Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction". Book by Erving Goffman, p. 38, 1971.

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• I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman, -- but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.

  Patrick Henry

  Government, Giving, People

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• My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell.

  Anne Lamott

  Sweet, Father, Reading

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

  William Winwood Reade

  Men, Atoms, Problem

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.186

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• The Mutakallemim... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e.g. , blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced.

  Maimonides

  Sight, Opposites, Two

  Moses Maimonides (2016). “Guide for the perplexed”, p.1023, Moses Maimonides

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• The being which has absolute existence, which has never been and will never be without existence, is not in need of an agent.

  Maimonides

  Needs, Existence, Absolutes

  Moses Maimonides, Aeterna Press (1948). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.440, Aeterna Press

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• Now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that's what pleases me.

  James Blish

  Mean, Please Me, Choices

  James Blish (2017). “A Case of Conscience”, p.124, Open Road Media

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• As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being.

  James Bovard

  Children, Gun, Media

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