Facts Quotes - Page 35

• By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

  Edward Teller

  Simple, Theory, Physicist

  Edward Teller (1981). “The Pursuit of Simplicity”, Pepperdine Press

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• These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Mystery, Humans, Creator

  "'Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit' ('The Raw and the Cooked')". Book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1964.

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• The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Loss, Effectiveness, Musician

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.121, Penguin

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• [Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

  Julian Barnes

  Beautiful, Lying, Literature

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

  Clint Eastwood

  Couple, Giving, Car

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• Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, Evil, Mad

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.59, Basic Books

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• All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Book, Talking, Usual

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.130, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I'm proud of the fact that I stood up early and unequivocally in opposition to Bush's foreign policy. [...] That opposition hasn't changed.

  Barack Obama

  Up Early, Proud, Stood Up

  "Not "corrupted" by DLC, Says Obama". www.blackcommentator.com. June 19, 2003.

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• I find it expressed in various passages of Scripture that the fact that God knows things while in a state of possibility, when their existence belongs to the future, does not change the nature of the possible in any way; that nature remains unchanged; and the knowledge of the realisation of one of several possibilities does not yet effect that realisation. This is likewise one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses concerning which there is no doubt nor any dispute.

  Maimonides

  Law, Doubt, Principles

  "Guide for the Perplexed". Book Maimonides, Ch.20, 1190.

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• Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Men, Psychics, Two

  P. D. Ouspensky (2004). “Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World”, p.12, Book Tree

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• The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Spring, Real, Greek

  Kenneth Rexroth (1968). “Classics Revisited”, p.59, New Directions Publishing

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• I have never concealed the fact and said it before the court in 1938 that I came from an anti-Semitic past and tradition... I ask only that you look at my life historically and take it as history. I believe that from 1933 I truly represented the Lutheran-Christian outlook on the Jewish question - as I revealed before the court - but that I returned home after eight years' imprisonment as a completely different person.

  Martin Niemoller

  Christian, Believe, Home

  "Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984" by James Bentley, (p. 334), 1984.

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• It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Mean, Work Out, Use

  Thorstein Veblen (1964). “The Nature of Peace”, p.168, Transaction Publishers

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• In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Writing, Should Have

  "Ravel: Man and Musician". Book by Arbie Orenstein, p. 126, 1975.

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• Being natural and matter-of-fact about nudity prevents your children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body. If parents are very secretive about their bodies and go to great lengths to prevent their children from ever seeing a buttock or breast, children will wonder what is so unusual, and even alarming, about human nudity.

  Lee Salk

  Attitude, Children, Parent

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• Our vulnerability [to ressentiment] is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone "has the right" to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Rights, Hands, Differences

  "The Art of Life". Book by Zygmunt Bauman, 2013.

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• That general warrants, whereby an officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offence is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive, and ought not to be granted.

  George Mason

  May, Messengers, Granted

  "The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America" compiled and edited by Newton Thorpe, Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1909.

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• I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks.

  Mordecai Richler

  Mom, Pain, Dad

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• The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the "intellectual sacrifice" is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of "science" and the sphere of "the holy" is unbridgeable.

  Max Weber

  Religious, Sacrifice, Men

  Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.154, Routledge

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• I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Numbers, People

  Howard Zinn (2012). “Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches 1963-2009”, p.108, Haymarket Books

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• That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

  Alan Lightman

  Determination, Achievement, Age

  "Reunion". Book by Alan Lightman, www.nytimes.com. 2003.

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• I think any supernatural hero today, whether he's a vampire, werewolf, a resuscitated mummy, whatever he is, is going to have to deal with the fact that scientists are going to want to catch him and study him. His big enemy is not going to be Dr. Van Helsing today, it's going to be the doctor who wants to put him in a lab and get his blood for what it can do to cure disease or grant immortality.

  Anne Rice

  Hero, Thinking, Blood

  "With The Wolf Gift, Anne Rice Returns to Supernatural Horror". "Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy" with John Joseph Adams, David Barr Kirtley, www.wired.com. April 18, 2012.

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• I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

  Terry Eagleton

  School, Literary Theory, Study

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.10, John Wiley & Sons

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• Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Light, Validation, Finals

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.41, Routledge

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• In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Ignorance, Reality, Names

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.62, Beacon Press

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