Obvious Quotes - Page 24

• At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Thinking, Understanding

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• The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

  Luciano Berio

  Spiritual, Ears, Demand

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• But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

  James Henry Breasted

  Lonely, Father, Land

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• After all, you're not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the world and your obvious success in many fields.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen

  Unique, People, World

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• The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Jobs, Children, Work

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• Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.

  George Polya

  Knowledge, Math, Obvious Things

  George Pólya (1968). “Mathematical discovery: on understanding, learning, and teaching problem solving”

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• [About a conference on Systematic Biology] Many interesting statements were made that apply directly to the work of taxonomists. In some cases the interest lay in the value of the suggestion and sometimes in the obvious need for rebuttal.

  Richard E. Blackwelder

  Science, Interesting, Systematic

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• The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this - justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms.

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Equality, Justice, Shapes

  Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1874). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, p.215

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• There exists a "fear of freedom" of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.

  James A.C. Brown

  Fear, Mean, People

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• The factory farm is . . . an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous. . . All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog.

  Matthew Scully

  Dog, Vegetarianism, Evil

  Matthew Scully (2011). “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy”, p.138, Souvenir Press

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• No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'

  Trey Parker

  Funny, Writing, Order

  Interview with Jeff Otto, www.ign.com. May 12, 2005.

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• The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive

  Stefan Molyneux

  Purpose, Offensive, Obscure

  Twitter post from Dec 15, 2016

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• The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.

  Alfie Kohn

  Important, Quality, Needs

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• Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.

  Peter Garrett

  Cutting, Climate, Needs

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.

  Richard Greenberg

  Writing, Character, Play

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• What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

  Alan Ayckbourn

  Running, Laughter, Pie

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• This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception. Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud.

  Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

  Motivation, Math, Ideas

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• The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Math, Men, Numbers

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• We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

  Michael Herr

  Hands, Enemy, Warfare

  Michael Herr (2011). “Dispatches”, p.153, Vintage

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• The question is still asked of women: 'How do you propose to answer the need for child care?' That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: 'If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?'.

  Jean Baker Miller

  Children, Community, Doe

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• The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Children, Lying, Believe

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969). “On Certainty”

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• It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Easy, Certain

  David Hume, Tom L. Beauchamp (2000). “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition”, p.6, Oxford University Press

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• When observers look back 50 years from now, the arguments supporting Florida's ban on same-sex marriage, though just as sincerely held, will again seem an obvious pretext for discrimination.

  Robert Lewis Hinkle

  Sex, Gay, Florida

  "Federal judge strikes down Florida's ban on same-sex marriage". www.foxnews.com. August 21, 2014.

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• To earlier feminists who had fought for the vote and for fair treatment in the workplace, it had seemed obvious that the ready availability of abortion would facilitate the sexual exploitation of women.

  Mary Ann Glendon

  Availability, Abortion, Feminist

  ""The Women of 'Roe v. Wade'". First Things, June/July 2003.

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• Those who see what's obvious aren't necessarily brighter than others. They're just more likely to observe that the emperor is naked. Like children, they see what's actually there. Their perceptions are less clouded by belief systems, taboos, habits of thought. One responsibility of management--an important one--is to call attention to the invisible obvious, pointing it out as a child does (sometimes to the embarrassment of adults). Doing so also requires supporting employees who take that risk, too, and other risks as well.

  Richard Farson

  Children, Responsibility, Risk

  Richard Farson, Ralph Keyes (2003). “Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins”, p.76, Simon and Schuster

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