Facts Quotes - Page 21

• My advice to African leaders is to make sure that if, in fact, China is putting in roads and bridges, number one, that they are hiring African workers; number two, that the roads don't just lead from the mine to the port to Shanghai.

  Barack Obama

  Bridges, Two, Numbers

  "An interview with the president". Interview with John Micklethwait and Edward Carr, www.economist.com. August 2, 2014.

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• As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that make an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Beautiful, Spring, Real

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• The fact that a trick fooled you is not enough reason to perform it.

  Darwin Ortiz

  Reason, Enough, Tricks

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• We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

  Patrick Soon-Shiong

  Cancer, Thinking, Epidemics

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• If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Games, Matter

  Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

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• The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

  Jonathan Schell

  Hair, Years, Fire

  Jonathan Schell (2000). “The Fate of the Earth: And, The Abolition”, p.182, Stanford University Press

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• The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immobility of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to conservate corals on the North Pole.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Believe, Mean, Axes

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• A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

  Walter Lippmann

  Cutting, Useless, Income

  Walter Lippmann, Julien C. Sprott (2015). “Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest”, p.74, University of Wisconsin Pres

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• Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

  Walter Lippmann

  Looks, Sap, Opponents

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.69, Courier Corporation

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• The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

  George Eliot

  Honesty, Attitude, Spring

  George Eliot (1863). “Romola”, p.112

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• It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.

  George Eliot

  Memories, Powerful, Passion

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• Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Philosophy, Inspiration

  "Beyond Good and Evil". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5., 1886.

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• Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

  Willa Cather

  Drama, Emotional, Giving

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.50, U of Nebraska Press

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• Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

  Aldous Huxley

  Taste, Mass, Interest

  Aldous Huxley (2008). “Brave New World Revisited”, p.57, Random House

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• Addiction is not a fact of life but a description about how we are choosing to live.

  Paul Pearsall

  Addiction, Description, Choosing To Live

  Paul Pearsall (2009). “Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, be a Good Blamer and Throttle Your Inner Child”, p.45, Basic Books

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• In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

  Cesare Pavese

  Art, Strong, Sex

  Cesare Pavese (2017). “This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950”, p.286, Routledge

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• My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Fall, Rocks, Wife

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2000). “The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.69, Cambridge University Press

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• It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.

  Learned Hand

  Kind, Legislation, Court

  Letter to Louis D. Brandeis, January 22, 1919.

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• The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mean, Way, Someday

  Richard P. Feynman (2009). “The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist”, p.24, Hachette UK

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• [Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Children, Animal, Talking

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• You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

  Ernest Renan

  Suffering, Comfort, May

  "Ernest Renan: a Critical Biography". Book by H. W. Wardman, 1964.

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• It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies... which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.

  John Dewey

  Philosophy, Men, Class

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.121, 谷月社

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• The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.

  John Dewey

  Home, School, Ideas

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Sidney Hook (2008). “The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924, Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education”, p.244, SIU Press

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• The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Philosophy, Would Be

  "Democracy and Education". Book by John Dewey, 1916.

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• The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Mistake, Hands

  "Psychoanalyse und Soziologie". "Critical Theory and Society : A Reader" by S. E. Bronner, 1989.

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