Notion Quotes - Page 35

• I divide the world into three Classes - The few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Class, People, Achievement

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• Having a traditional view of marriage should not be seen as discriminatory, unfortunately the bill has promoted this notion. It has not created tolerance and has highlighted division.

  Jim Dobbin

  Gay, Views, Tolerance

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• I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Foundation, Essentials, Savages

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• According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Men, Portraits

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• What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

  Walter Lippmann

  Government, Expression, People

  "The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy".

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• The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Iraq, Effort

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• The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

  Isaac Asimov

  Mean, Ignorance, Knowledge

  "A Cult of Ignorance". Newsweek, January 21, 1980.

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• .. if all the information of the cosmos flows through our pores at every moment, then our current notion of our human potential is only a glimmer of what it should be.

  Lynne McTaggart

  Science, Information, Flow

  Lynne McTaggart (2012). “The Field Updated Ed: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe”, p.20, Harper Collins

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• We're not going to deputize a whole bunch of American citizens to start grabbing people or turning them in, in part because the ordinary American citizen may not know whether or not this person is illegal or not. But, you know, the notion that we're going to criminalize priests, for example, or doctors who are providing services to individuals, and throw them in jail for doing what their calling asks them to do, which is to provide help and service to people in need, I think that is a mistake. I think that's out of America's character.

  Barack Obama

  Mistake, Character, Thinking

  "Transcript: NPR Democratic Candidates' Debate". www.npr.org. December 4, 2007.

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• Currency speculation-over a trillion dollars a day-is a tax-free activity. The notion of a tax on "day trades" or other speculative swaps was revived in recent years, but has been studiously ignored by all our purveyors of conventional economic wisdom. That is because we have been persuaded, against logic, and moral sense, that the institution that most needs our support these days is not society, nor the human community, but the global corporation.

  Eric Kierans

  Years, Support, Community

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• Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

  Henry Fielding

  Men, Eternity, Higher

  Henry Fielding (1840). “The Works of Henry Fielding: Complete in One Volume, with Memoir of the Author”, p.36

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• There's a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.

  Twyla Tharp

  Inspirational, Creativity, Thinking

  Twyla Tharp, Mark Reiter (2003). “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”, Simon and Schuster

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• Humans suffer from self-centred notions as to the nature of life. Humans assume that alien life forms should conform to standards that match our own, including logic and morality. Even among humans, morality is ignored when expedient. Why should we expect more from an alien life form than we demand from ourselves?

  Steve Perry

  Life, Nature, Self

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• False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Men, Names, People

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• One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload

  Leonard Cohen

  Inspiration, People, Style

  Leonard Cohen (2014). “Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen”, p.347, Omnibus Press

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• Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

  John Dewey

  Study, Fallacy, Persons

  John Dewey (1998). “Experience and Education, 60th Anniversary Edition”, p.49, Kappa Delta Pi

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• In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Religious, Teaching

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• As humans, we are rarely anything more than children that have let the changes to the size and shape of our genitals convince us that there are more important things in life than wonder and happiness. we call the acceptence of this change 'growing up' and it makes us feel big and powerful in a world that would be no less mysterious to us than it was before if all of the fantasizing that we once used to explore the "unknown" quality of our reality had not become devoted almost exclusively to the notion that we are in control.

  Philip K. Jason

  Happiness, Children, Growing Up

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• The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Confused, Real, Men

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.120, Open Road Media

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• At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

  Atul Gawande

  Caring, Medicine, Differences

  Atul Gawande (2010). “Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance”, p.10, Profile Books

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• The Syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over-hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure. Our only hope therefore lies in a true induction.

  Francis Bacon

  Confused, Lying, Roots

  Francis Bacon (1858). “Works of Francis Bacon: 4”, p.49

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• I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.

  Andrew Cuomo

  Wall, Thinking, Abuse

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• Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals.

  Plato

  Art, Stars, Philosophy

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• On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

  Fred Hoyle

  Philosophical, Sight, Ideas

  Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”

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• Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.

  Samuel Johnson

  Squares, Cities, Together

  Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (1818). “The table talk of Samuel Johnson”, p.72

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