Concrete Quotes - Page 4

• The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

  Arthur Scargill

  Party, Giving, Support

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• If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

  Chauncey Wright

  Giving, Experience, Research

  Chauncey Wright (2000). “The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey Wright”, p.109, A&C Black

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• The irony of the Supreme Court hearing on these cases last week and of the outright hostility that the Court has displayed against religion in recent years is that above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a concrete display of the Ten Commandments.

  Cliff Stearns

  Years, Justice, Religion

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• So we in Congress have a very clear choice. We can take largely symbolic action and sit back and fiddle while Americans burn more gasoline. Or we can pass concrete, effective legislation that will save consumers money while significantly reducing U.S. oil consumption.

  Sherwood Boehlert

  Oil, Choices, Gasoline

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• For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown

  A. R. Ammons

  Needs, Unlimited, Certain

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Ideas, Action, Unworthy

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• Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood.

  Peter Kreeft

  Love, Scripture, Realizing

  Peter Kreeft (2009). “The God Who Loves You: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”, p.108, Ignatius Press

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• I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds, and in our case, the realities we create can be as real as concrete. These kinds of ideas, of wild imagination, go into the question of how you make a world.

  Jimenez Lai

  Real, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

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• Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous.

  Thomas Sowell

  Dwarves, Creating, Justice

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• Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied, "Then what good is God?

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Men, Talking, Heaven

  Miguel de Unamuno (1977). “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

  Antonio Gramsci

  Expression, Practice, Political

  "Selections from the Prison Notebooks". Book by Antonio Gramsci, 1971.

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• Journal what you love, what you hate, what's in your head, what's important. Journaling organizes your thoughts; allows you to see things in a concrete way that otherwise you might not see. Focus on what you think you need to find in your art.

  Kay WalkingStick

  Art, Hate, Thinking

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• It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

  Bill Bryson

  Beautiful, Australia, Light

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• Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.

  Aldous Huxley

  Girl, Being In Love, Illustration

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• The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Made, Elsewhere

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Remembering”, p.96, Counterpoint Press

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• Thanks to the euro, our pockets will soon hold solid evidence of a European identity. We need to build on this, and make the euro more than a currency and Europe more than a territory... In the next six months, we will talk a lot about political union, and rightly so. Political union is inseparable from economic union. Stronger growth and Euorpean integration are related issues. In both areas we will take concrete steps forward.

  Laurent Fabius

  Europe, Issues, Political

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• In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it's finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.

  Kevin Drum

  Real, America, Looks

  "Our Obsession With Mass Incarceration May Finally Be Ebbing" by Kevin Drum, www.motherjones.com. January 2, 2015.

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• [T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Block, Struggle, Men

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• I'm quite lucky, because I've got a small, decorative concrete pig.

  Bill Bailey

  Funny, Humor, Pigs

  "Cosmic Jam". Bill Bailey's live at London's Bloomsbury Theatre, 1995.

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• I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Book, Writing

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.8, Beacon Press

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• A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. … I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.

  William Powell

  Clothes, Revolution, Oppression

  "The Anarchist Cookbook". Book by William Powell, Chapter Two: "Electronics, Sabotage, and Surveillance", 1971.

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• The way you confront an organization like that is twofold. No. 1, you kill their militants. There is no room for discussion or negotiation when it comes to an ISIS or an Al Qaeda militant. They don’t want anything concrete. And if you want nothing that’s measurable or concrete, there is nothing to talk about. You must be destroyed.

  Reza Aslan

  Isis, Organization, Want

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• I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Dream, Business, Believe

  Muhammad Yunus (2001). “Banker to the Poor: The Autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, Founder of the Grameen Bank”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. . . as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.

  Margaret Sanger

  Mean, Eugenics, Giving

  Margaret Sanger, Michael W. Perry, H. G. Wells (2003). “The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic”, p.372, Inkling Books

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