Notion Quotes - Page 15

• I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

  Marge Piercy

  Political, Novelists, Realistic

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

  Larry Wall

  Pride, Lazy, Trying

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, as soon as you've chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of. It's like going to a place that you've never been to before - you've got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

  Alan Bennett

  Reality, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?

  David Attenborough

  Running, Clever, Numbers

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• Which are the people who have influenced us most? Not the ones who thought they did, but those who had not the remotest notion that they were influencing us. In the Christian life, the implicit is never conscious, if it is conscious it ceases to have this unaffected loveliness which is the characteristic of the touch of Jesus. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.

  Oswald Chambers

  Christian, Jesus, People

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition”, p.478, Discovery House

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• There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

  Mary Oliver

  People, Creative, World

  Mary Oliver (2016). “Upstream: Selected Essays”, p.21, Penguin

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• I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.

  Howard Thurman

  Religious, Mind, Way

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• ...the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office.

  Joseph J. Ellis

  Office, Vote, Behavior

  Joseph J. Ellis (2003). “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation”, p.162, Vintage

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• The bureaucratic manager, the consuming aesthete, the therapist, the protester and their numerous kindred occupy almost all the available culturally recognizable roles, the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are the presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Drama, Character, Men

  Alasdair MacIntyre (2013). “After Virtue”, p.298, A&C Black

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• As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Should Have, Law

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• The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.

  George Bernard Shaw

  War, Disarmament

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• The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Character, Civilization

  Joseph Campbell, M. J. Abadie (1981). “The Mythic Image”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

  Norbert Wiener

  Engineering, Names, Important

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• Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.

  James Branch Cabell

  Neighbor

  James Branch Cabell (2003). “These Restless Heads”, p.155, Wildside Press LLC

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• To say or imply that the foundation exists only on the sufferance of government is to reason from the untenable notion that the citizen and all his institutions are creatures of the state, not the other way around.

  Richard Cornuelle

  Government, Foundation, Citizens

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• Americans have only the dimmest notion of what their constitutional freedoms are - and what it took to get them...[and] the willingness to surrender what we're supposed to be fighting for is a recurring part of our history.

  Nat Hentoff

  Fighting, Surrender, Supposed To Be

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• Our institutions, if they do not erode entirely, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the whole notion of civic militarism seems bothersome, and in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Focus, Imperfection, Enemy

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• The notion of a world government to defend our rights would have sent the founding fathers running for their muskets.

  Pat Buchanan

  Running, Father, World Government

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• Americans' deepest religion is often equality. The notion that Christ alone is God-superior, authoritative, supernatural-and that Christ's teaching and person is far greater than Buddha's, or Muhammad's, or Moses's, no matter how much great and good wisdom may be contained in those others, is scandalous.

  Peter Kreeft

  Teaching, Matter, May

  Peter Kreeft, Fr. Ronald Tacelli (2016). “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith”, p.151, Ignatius Press

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• Whatever Party of Men obtain the Reins of Management, and have power to name the Person who shall License the Press, that Party of Men have the whole power of keeping the World in Ignorance, in all matters relating to Religion or Policy, since the Writers of that Party shall have full liberty to impose their Notions upon the World.

  Daniel Defoe

  Party, Ignorance, Men

  Daniel Defoe (1704). “An Essay on the Regulation of the Press”, p.4

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• Thought is a disease of the brain. The mind defends itself against the degenerative process of creativity; it begins to jell; notions solidify into inalterable systems.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Creativity, Brain, Mind

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• Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

  Alan Rudolph

  Running, Ideas, Film

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• Religion ... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? Because you're just not. If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. ... But on the other hand, if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say 'I respect that'.

  Douglas Adams

  Party, Moving, Heart

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• I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Thinking, Self

  "Addicted to War: A Conversation with Chris Hedges". Interview with Metta Spencer, peacemagazine.org. April-June 2007.

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• Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth

  Hazel Henderson

  Political, Challenges, Growth

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