Fractions Quotes - Page 4

If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every ten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of eternity

Lois Duncan

Past, Years, Bird

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Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Robert A. Heinlein

Thinking, People, Wells

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Among the hundreds of so-called "UFO reports" each year, a sizable fraction of those clearly observed by reputable witnesses remain unexplained-and difficult to explain in conventional terms. There is a modicum of physical evidence, radar cases, residual effects, and some films-and photographs in support of the unexplained cases. Collectively, these cases constitute a genuine scientific mystery, badly in need of well-supported, systematic investigation.

Richard Hall

Years, Support, Needs

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Over half a million women are raped in this country every year, and only a fraction of them report it because they're too ashamed. It’s a really screwed up world, but its not your fault, and what happened to you, it doesn't make you the monster.

Mariska Hargitay

Country, Years, Monsters

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If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.

John Pilger

Children, War, Support

"This much I know". Interview with Tom Templeton, www.theguardian.com. November 13, 2005.

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We have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.

Thomas Pogge

Poverty, Economic, Decline

Source: www.truth-out.org

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Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness.

Brad Alan Lewis

Numbers, Meditation, Brain

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Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

John Taylor Gatto

Education, Children, Hands

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Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.

Milan Kundera

Beautiful, Eye, Thinking

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In 1966 Rolf Edberg wrote "This is mankind's home", "in the narrow borderland between the deathly heat beneath our feet and the coldness of space above us". He describes the fragility of our existence in poetic terms: "the atmospheric layer is so thin that it cannot be represented on any globe with even the finest brushstroke. At its thickest, it is only a few fractions of a millionth of the Earth's radius. This thin layer is what makes the difference between our planet and the sterile landscape of the moon." After reading that, one does feel the need to take better care of this fragile layer.

Margot Wallstrom

Reading, Home, Moon

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If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

Eckhart Tolle

Spiritual, Writing, Two

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All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.

Julian Simon

Thinking, Topics, Opinion

Julian Lincoln Simon (1998). “The Ultimate Resource 2”, p.55, Princeton University Press

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Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.

Stefan Petrucha

Real, Hero, Ocean

Stefan Petrucha (2012). “Ripper”, Penguin

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Love is insistent on its own continuation. Every fraction of a second, someone somewhere falls in love, a former enemy becomes a friend, and a newborn baby is born into the world.

Marianne Williamson

Inspirational, Baby, Falling In Love

FaceBook post by Marianne Williamson from May 04, 2013

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When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.

Richard Heinberg

Environmental, Energy, Levels

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The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.

Stephen Jay Gould

Reflection, Population, Records

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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Carl Sagan

Humility, Thinking, Compassion

Carl Sagan (1994). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, Random House Incorporated

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On the whole, at least in the author's experience, the preparation of species-specific antiserum fractions and the differentiation of closely related species with precipitin sera for serum proteins does not succeed so regularly as with agglutinins and lysins for blood cells. This may be due to the fact that in the evolutional scale the proteins undergo continuous variations whereas cell antigens are subject to sudden changes not linked by intermediary stages.

Karl Landsteiner

Science, Cells, Blood

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Because there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of destruction, when millions are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what is expended so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

Desmond Tutu

Children, Real, Educational

Desmond Tutu's Nobel Lecture in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1984.

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A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece

Lyn Hejinian

Pieces, Fragments, Whole

Lyn Hejinian (2013). “My Life and My Life in the Nineties”, p.70, Wesleyan University Press

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One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.

Marshall Sahlins

Night, Humanity, Age

Marshall Sahlins (2013). “Stone Age Economics”, p.38, Routledge

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...four in five of us are, to some extent, members of faith communities. If just a fraction of this huge body of believers were to connect their faith to sustainable development and act accordingly, with the support of their institutions, the gains could be world-changing

Ian Christie

Future, Community, Support

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Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize.

Yousuf Karsh

Eye, Opportunity, Men

Yousuf Karsh, David Travis (2009). “Regarding Heroes”, David R. Godine Publisher

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There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found.

David M. Raup

Animal, Past, Numbers

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The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

George Santayana

Mistake, Self, Cynical

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