Predecessors Quotes - Page 3

• You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

  Renny Harlin

  Imagination, Individuality, Want

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• Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

  Emile Durkheim

  Order, Movement, Generations

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.372, Simon and Schuster

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• I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

  Rachel Cusk

  Children, Writing, Risk

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• President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me, now. No president - no president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.

  William J. Clinton

  Years, President, Four

  William J. "Bill" Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, www.nytimes.com. September 5, 2012.

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• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Children, Race

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• Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Progress, Generations, Injustice

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

  C. S. Lewis

  Exercise, Thought Provoking, Rebel

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• Philosophy would long ago have reached a high level if our predecessors and fathers had put this into practice; and we would not waste time on the primary difficulties, which appear now as severe as in the first centuries which noticed them. We would have the experience of assured phenomena, which would serve as principles for a solid reasoning; truth would not be so deeply sunken; nature would have taken off most of her envelopes; one would see the marvels she contains in all her individuals.

  Marin Mersenne

  Nature, Truth, Father

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• We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, Years, Laughing

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Well, you can certainly teach free-throwing. And you can teach the boys to pass at angles and run in curves. - University of Kansas Jayhawks head coach Phog Allen, reposting the contention of his Kansas predecessor and inventor of basketball James Naismith, pictured, that basketball could not be coached
  When I dunk, I put something on it. I want the ball to hit the floor before I do.

  Darryl Dawkins

  Basketball, Running, Boys

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• People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Mean, Talking, People

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.160, Ravenio Books

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• To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.

  Michel Foucault

  Growing Up, Knowledge, Science

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• I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.

  Boutros Boutros-Ghali

  Used, Successors

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• Like their predecessors, the Presidents of today just throw up their hands.

  Stephen Ambrose

  Hands, President, Today

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• Towering genius disdains a beaten path ... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts for distinction.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Genius, Path, Distinction

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln(1832-1865) (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)”, p.14, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

  Vince Cable

  Banking Crisis, People, Debt

  Liberal Democrat conference: Vince Cable speech in full, www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2010.

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• When you're writing for a sequel and there's a movie that's been deemed sacred ground by the fanbase that's the predecessor, you cannot do anything to tread on that, so it's a bit trickier than just being able to sit down and write something.

  Troy Duffy

  Writing, Down And, Sacred

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

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• I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men... in receiving from the people the sacred trust confided to my illustrious predecessor.

  Martin Van Buren

  Patriotic, Men, People

  Martin Van Buren's Inaugural Address, March 4, 1837.

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• As Our Predecessors have many times repeated, let no man think that he may for any reason whatsoever join the Masonic sect, if he values his Catholic name and his eternal salvation as he ought to value them. Let no one be deceived by a pretense of honesty. It may seem to some that Freemasons demand nothing that is openly contrary to religion and morality; but, as the whole principle and object of the sect lies in what is vicious and criminal, to join with these men or in any way to help them cannot be lawful

  Pope Leo XIII

  Honesty, Lying, Men

  Pope Leo XIII (1990). “A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII”, p.76, TAN Books

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• It is true that my predecessor did not object, as I do, to pictures of one's golf skill in action. But neither, on the other hand, did he ever bean a Secret Serviceman.

  John F. Kennedy

  Golf, Hands, Skills

  Address to the American Newspaper Publishers, delivered 27 April 1961, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York

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• In 2003, Congress should have resisted the rush to a war of choice with Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent us from repeating the mistakes of my predecessors.

  John Garamendi

  War, Mistake, Military

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• Remember that accumulated knowledge, like accumulated capital, increases at compound interest: but it differs from the accumulation of capital in this; that the increase of knowledge produces a more rapid rate of progress, whilst the accumulation of capital leads to a lower rate of interest. Capital thus checks it own accumulation: knowledge thus accelerates its own advance. Each generation, therefore, to deserve comparison with its predecessor, is bound to add much more largely to the common stock than that which it immediately succeeds.

  Charles Babbage

  Knowledge, Science, Progress

  "The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the industry, the science, and the government of England".

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• In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Science, Men

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays”, p.41, Booklassic

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• Only by following out the injunction of our great predecessor [William Harvey] to search out and study the secrets of Nature by way of experiment, can we hope to attain to a comprehension of 'the wisdom of the body and the understanding of the heart,' and thereby to the mastery of disease and pain, which will enable us to relieve the burden of mankind.

  Ernest Starling

  Nature, Pain, Heart

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• As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.

  Ava DuVernay

  Long, Environment, Projects

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

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