Definitions Quotes - Page 4

• Journalism (definition): The art, or science, of representing life as a series of clichés.

  Richard Summerbell

  Art, Journalism, Representing

  "Abnormally Happy: A Gay Dictionary". Book by Richard Summerbell, 1985.

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• That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile - that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.

  E. C. Bentley

  Care, Worthwhile, Damn

  "Trent's Own Case". Book by E. C. Bentley and H. Warner Allen, Chapter XV: "Eunice Makes a Clean Breast of It", 1936.

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• What is the definition of procrastination? It means: I can feel within my Energy sensor that this action is not in perfect alignment at this time.

  Esther Hicks

  Procrastination, Mean, Perfect

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• We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth.

  Kenneth Keniston

  Education, Children, Reading

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• A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the
  art of persuading.

  Blaise Pascal

  Art, Perfection, Proof

  Blaise Pascal, Henry Rogers, Victor Cousin, Charles Louandre (1859). “The Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal”, p.506

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• My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

  John le Carre

  Country, Philosophy, Years

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• A semantic definition of a particular set of command types, then, is a rule for constructing, for any command of one of these types, a verification condition on the antecedents and consequents.

  Robert W. Floyd

  Type, Command, Particular

  "Assigning Meanings to Programs". Proceedings of Symposium on Applied Mathematics, Vol. 19, p. 21, 1967.

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• To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.

  Jean Francois Revel

  Democracy, Principles, Politics

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• It seemed to me the basic definition of mental illness, this persistent, painful inability to simply be with someone else. It might be lifelong, or it might descend like a sudden catastrophe, this blankness between ourselves and the rest of the world. The blankness might not even be obvious to others. But on our side of that severed connection, it was hell, a life lived behind glass. The only difference between mild depression and severe schizophrenia was the amount of sound and air that seeped in.

  Tracy Thompson

  Differences, Glasses, Air

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• A choice is the root of all morality. Without choice, one can have no moral code. In a vacuum bereft of alternatives, there can be no values. And without values, there can be no reason for a code of ethics. What gives our lives meaning is which alternatives we choose. If we have no options, if we can take but one path, we are by definition slaves.

  Dave Galanter

  Roots, Giving, Choices

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• A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.

  Raymond Williams

  Education, Class, Training

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• And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Love, Life, Believe

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.342, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may. This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe.

  Ada Lovelace

  Mean, Two, May

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• Violence or the threat of violence [must] never be permitted to influence the actions or judgments of the university community. Once it does, the community, almost by definition, ceases to be a university. It is for this reason that from time immemorial expulsion has been the primary instrument of university discipline.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Time, Men, Discipline

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• That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion... Everyone are tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god.

  Ridley Scott

  Disappointment, Names, Evil

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Suicidal, Mean, Evil

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The beauty of being black in American society is that black has always been an inclusive definition. White has always been an exclusive definition. I think one of the challenges for white people is to figure out how to have a more inclusive picture of who their families are, of who they are.

  Benjamin Jealous

  Thinking, White, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

  Sigmund Freud

  Views, Facts, Groups

  Sigmund Freud (2008). “General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

  Paulo Freire

  Mean, Violence, Excess

  Paulo Freire (2013). “Education for Critical Consciousness”, p.17, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A person's own definition of leadership defines the glittering crown of his leadership.

  Anuj

  Crowns, Definition Of Leadership, Persons

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• Each precious moment of your life in which you are frozen with fear is a moment when you are not being all you can be. In the end, that hurts more than anything. Succeeding or failing does not determine if we are surviving or living. Rather it is in our ability to reach beyond our present self-imposed definition of who we are, and to risk becoming more, that we are able to feel fully alive.

  Rhonda Britten

  Hurt, Fear, Self

  Rhonda Britten (2002). “Fearless Living: Live Without Excuses and Love Without Regret”, p.98, Penguin

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• Sure, some [teachers] could give the standard limit definitions, but they [the students] clearly did not understand the definitions - and it would be a remarkable student who did, since it took mathematicians a couple of thousand years to sort out the notion of a limit, and I think most of us who call ourselves professional mathematicians really only understand it when we start to teach the stuff, either in graduate school or beyond.

  Keith Devlin

  Teacher, Couple, School

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• There was no real gender definition in the sense of how you treat people in those days with gender differences. You avoided them. My parents always told me that you do not make fun of anybody, and so I didn't see anything funny about it.

  David C. Driskell

  Fun, Real, Differences

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Law, World, Good Christian

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• A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Classification

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