Edifice Quotes - Page 5

• We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Agony, Giving, Society

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• I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. They amuse me, excite my blood. Being always on one’s guard, catching every glance, the significance of every word, guessing at intentions, frustrating their plots, pretending to be tricked, and suddenly, with a shove, upturning the whole enormous and arduously built edifice of their cunning and schemes—that’s what I call life.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Christian, Blood, Enemy

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• Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Culture, Built

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.23, Penguin

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• Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

  Rene Descartes

  Numbers, Years, Childhood

  Meditationes "Meditation I" (1641)

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• No, I can't admit it. Brother,' said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing eyes, 'you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could firgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, "Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Art, Brother, Eye

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• And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.

  Arundhati Roy

  Mind, Human Nature, Humans

  Jaydipsinh Dodiya, Joya Chakravarty, Arundhati Roy (1999). “The Critical studies of Arundhati Roy's The God of small things”

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• Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.

  Arundhati Roy

  People, Evil, Style

  Arundhati Roy (2006). “Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire”, p.44, Penguin Books India

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• His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

  Margaret Atwood

  Mother, Father, Self

  Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.56, Anchor

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• The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.

  A. Hunter Dupree

  Hard Work, Science, Government

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• The temple is a sacred edifice, a holy place, where essential saving ceremonies and ordinances are performed to prepare us for exaltation. It is important that we gain a sure knowledge that our preparation to enter the holy house and that our participation in these ceremonies and covenants are some of the most significant events we will experience in our mortal lives.

  Robert D. Hales

  Blessing, House, Preparation

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• What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.

  Benjamin Franklin

  War, Bridges, Rivers

  Benjamin Franklin (2006). “The Portable Benjamin Franklin”, p.332, Penguin

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• And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Criticism

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• To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. It is only a matter of time before the whole edifice crumbles.

  George Porter

  Foundation, May, Matter

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• For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? ...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Character, Sacrifice

  "Mein Kampf". Book by Adolf Hitler, Volume II, Chapter 5 - Philosophy and Organization, 1926.

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• The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air-a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useless matter.

  Dmitri Mendeleev

  Science, Air, Castles

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• Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Style, Bricks

  Mark Twain (1992). “Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays: 1852-1890”

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• The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

  George Santayana

  Commitment, Foundation, Needs

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2013). “The The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two”, p.20, MIT Press

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• Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

  Rick Yancey

  Real, Mind, Temples

  Rick Yancey (2010). “The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath”, p.300, Simon and Schuster

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• Whatever may be the judgement pronounced on the competency of the architects of the Constitution, or whatever may be the destiny of the edifice prepared by them, I feel it a duty to express my profound and solemn conviction . . . that there never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them.

  James Madison

  Destiny, Men, Profound

  James Madison, E. H. Scott (1898). “Journal of the Federal Convention”, p.51, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• Our model of Nature should not be like a building-a handsome structure for the populace to admire, until in the course of time some one takes away a corner stone and the edifice comes toppling down. It should be like an engine with movable parts. We need not fix the position of any one lever; that is to be adjusted from time to time as the latest observations indicate. The aim of the theorist is to know the train of wheels which the lever sets in motion-that binding of the parts which is the soul of the engine.

  Arthur Eddington

  Knowledge, Science, Soul

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• Just take one thing out and the whole palace, the whole edifice of the human mind collapses. Take effort out of it and desiring disappears, imagination disappears, past and future disappear, or take desire out and effort disappears and time disappears and ego disappears. Just take one thing out of the gestalt and the whole gestalt simply disappears; it cannot exist without certain things. Those are the very essentials of it - effort is one of the essentials. Hence all the great Masters of the world have taught about grace.

  Rajneesh

  Past, Imagination, Effort

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• There is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal that is not subject to ordinary theories of art ... The tower will be the tallest edifice ever raised by man. Will it therefore be imposing in its own way?

  Gustave Eiffel

  Art, Science, Men

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• Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Childhood, Victory

  "Imaginary Homelands". Book by Salman Rushdie, 1991.

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• My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

  Diane Setterfield

  Mother, Father, Moving

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• In many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism--the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism--is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Facts, Century, Fascism

  Jonah Goldberg (2009). “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning”, p.9, Penguin UK

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