Chimera Quotes - Page 2

• My opinion - nay more, my conviction - is that, in the present state of science, as you rightly say, spontaneous generation is a chimera; and it would be impossible for you to contradict me, for my experiments all stand forth to prove that spontaneous generation is a chimera.

  Louis Pasteur

  Would Be, Generations, Opinion

  "The Life of Pasteur". Book by René Vallery-Radot, translated by R .L. Devonshire, archive.org. 1902.

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• Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

  Karl Kraus

  Men, Language, Endless

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Men, Race

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• Truth and fact are old-fashioned and out-of-date, my friends, fit only for the dull and vulgar to live by. Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Dog, Clever, Home

  Jerome K. Jerome “Clocks”, Library of Alexandria

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• For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Queens, Adequate, Firsts

  Wyndham Lewis (1918). “Tarr”

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• Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

  Edward Bellamy

  Race, Illustration, Civilization

  Edward Bellamy (2016). “Looking Backward 2000-1887”, p.27, Edward Bellamy

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• Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.

  Erica Jong

  Journey, Sea, Cities

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• Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

  Florence King

  Sex, Mean, Race

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• justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

  Carson McCullers

  Justice, Yardsticks, Equal

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Clock Without Hands”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears.
  co-author with Niles Eldridge

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Expectations, Population, Doe

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• Conservatives have long argued, correctly, that 'fine-tuning' the economy is a chimera, but that argument seems to have disappeared from the conservative handbook.

  Alex Tabarrok

  Long, Tuning, Conservative

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• In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Doubt, Gold, Causes

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• It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Ambition, Reality, Views

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Easyread Edition”, p.42, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.

  Naomi Wolf

  Morning, Men, Hands

  Naomi Wolf (1990). “The Beauty Myth”, Vintage

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• There is not any haunt of prophecy,
  Nor any old chimera of the grave,
  Neither the golden underground, nor isle
  Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
  Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
  Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
  As April's green endures; or will endure
  Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
  Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
  By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

  Wallace Stevens

  Spring, Home, June

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.22, Vintage

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• If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera.

  Andrew Bacevich

  War, Iraq, Victory

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• Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Equality, Practice, Abuse

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1791). “An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract; or principles of political right. Translated from the French”, p.147

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• Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

  Germaine Greer

  World, Slavery, Abandonment

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

  Vasily Grossman

  Taken, Responsibility, People

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• No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.

  William Borah

  Heart, Law, Brain

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• It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

  Michel Foucault

  Would Be, Hegemony, Matter

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

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• If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.

  Denis Diderot

  Order, Two, Heaven

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• The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dream, Medicine, Fields

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• Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

  Voltaire

  Expression, Ideas, Wish

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• This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?

  Slavoj Žižek

  Wall, Mean, Fighting

  Slavoj Žižek (2002). “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates”, p.150, Verso

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