Notion Quotes - Page 15

• Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of what they promise.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Opposites, Promise, May

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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• The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

  Margaret Halsey

  Real, Race, White

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• There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

  Margaret Drabble

  Travel, Discovery, People

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• for the first time I tasted this tropical fruit, which people here are so fond of. ... I could have fancied I was biting into soap. I have a notion that we shall not become very good friends, the banana and I.

  Fredrika Bremer

  Food, Good Friend, People

  Fredrika Bremer, Adolph Benson, Carrie Catt (2007). “America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer”, p.98, Applewood Books

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• It turns out that our notions of what a 'self' is and how it might feel fulfilled have no more objective status than most of the rest of reality. It seems we make ourselves up as we go along.

  Maureen O'Hara

  Reality, Self, Might

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• as for the possibility of 'having it all,' career and family with no sacrifice to either, that is a myth we would do well to abandon, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one of the other is somehow deficient.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Sacrifice, Careers, Together

  Sonia Sotomayor (2013). “My Beloved World”, Vintage

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• Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

  Ida Tarbell

  Ambition, Mean, Democratic Ideals

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• I loved dancing with a delirious 'I wish I could die' passion, especially when the music appealed to me ... but alas! only one in ten partners had any notion of time, and what made it worse, the nine were always behind, never before the beat. ... Sometimes I would firmly seize smaller, lighter partners by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and whirl them along in the way they should go, but I saw they were not enjoying themselves, and oddly enough I wanted these wretches to like dancing with me.

  Ethel Smyth

  Dance, Passion, Dancing

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• I am worried about this word, this notion - security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch. Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? ... Why are we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else?

  Eve Ensler

  Insecure, People, Focus

  Eve Ensler (2006). “Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World”, p.13, Villard

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• Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

  Ronald Fisher

  Data, Issues, Tasks

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• So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Views, Analogies

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky”, p.227, The New Press

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• When we let go of all our notions about things, everything becomes really true.

  Kosho Uchiyama

  Letting Go, Really True

  Kōshō Uchiyama (1993). “Opening the Hand of Thought: Approach to Zen”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

  Jessica Valenti

  Mother, Children, Fun

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• If you'd like to be good at something, the first thing to out the window is the notion of perfection.

  Scott Berkun

  Perfection, Firsts, Window

  Scott Berkun (2009). “Confessions of a Public Speaker”, p.4, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• If the immigrant is responsible for assimilation of the country, and some of these people are in fact are born there. But if you find it unwelcoming to your own barbaric notions of equality, that is not on the country, that is on you. If you leave a horrible place, please leave your horrible practices behind.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Country, Practice, People

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• To me, fantasy should be as real as possible. I don't buy into the notion that because it's fantastic, it should be unrealistic, because I think you have to have a sense of believing the world that you're going into.

  Peter Jackson

  Real, Believe, Thinking

  "Peter Jackson Talks THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, Coming on When Guillermo del Toro Left, and Post-Converting LORD OF THE RINGS to 3D". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. December 14, 2012.

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• We in America count on the profit motive to get people to do the right thing. That's our basic American notion when it comes to business.

  Chris Matthews

  America, People, Profit

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.

  George Saunders

  Book, Thinking, Stories

  Source: www.nationalbook.org

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• The American notion of family is perhaps the most romanticized, deep-rooted, and misery-producing fantasy of the last hundred years.

  Joy Browne

  Family, Years, Lasts

  Joy Browne, M.D. (2010). “The Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life (and the Eight Realities That Will Save You)”, p.11, Harmony

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• I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

  Tobsha Learner

  Atheist, Father, Philosophy

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• The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonnably require that it be respected by others.

  African Spir

  Rights, Justice, Principles

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 44), 1937.

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• Up to here, in general, we have mainly stuffed the brain of the young people with a indigestible multitude of varios notions, without thinking about enough of the prime necessity to form their character.

  African Spir

  Character, Thinking, People

  "Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir". Book by Hélène Claparède-Spir, p.58, 1937.

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• I used to do miserably in English literature, which I thought was a sign of moral turpitude. As I look back on it, I think it was rather to my credit. The notion of actually putting writers' words into other words is quite ridiculous because why bother if writers mean what they mean, and if they don't, why read them? There is, I suppose, a case for studying literary works in depth, but I don't quite know what 'in depth' means unless you read a paragraph over and over again.

  Patricia Wentworth

  Education, Mean, Thinking

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• There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

  Patricia Wentworth

  Writing, Different, Peculiar

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• For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Ocean, Thinking, Vanity

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