Predecessors Quotes - Page 6

• I am also, I must confess, a little sceptical of the theory that we have a right, if we could, to pass on our capital burden to future generations. I remarked last year in this context that our predecessors had not passed any significant part of their burden on to us.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Years, Generations, Littles

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 134), March 29, 1963.

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• New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Writing, Long

  Samuel Johnson (1821). “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works”, p.373

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• Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

  Allan Massie

  Running, Book, Class

  Allan Massie (2013). “Life & Letters: The Spectator Columns”, Quartet Books (UK)

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• Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.

  Jeremy Collier

  Light, Culture, Hints

  Jeremy Collier (1728). “Essays upon several moral subjects”, p.70

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• He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Obscurity, Violence, Pushing

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.38

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• My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Long, Korean, My Family

  "In my census, boxes multiply into a blur" by Chang-rae Lee, www.cnn.com. March 31, 2010.

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• To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the - my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which aren't in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

  Bill Shorten

  Unions, Tradition, Trade

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

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• Every bit as visceral and hypnotic as its award-winning predecessor, On the Ropes is a tour-de-force of fluid, yet detailed storytelling.

  Dave Gibbons

  Winning, Awards, Rope

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• In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

  Noah Feldman

  War, Korea, President

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• We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

  Eugene Jarecki

  Fashion, Mean, Holocaust

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

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• First and foremost, you do not have to live up to or emulate the lives of any of your predecessors. But at the very least, you should know about them. You will have your own life, interests, and ideas of what you want or do not want in life. Do what you enjoy doing. Be honest with yourself and others. Don't think of satisfying anyone: your elders, peers, government, religion, or children who will come after you. Develop meaningful ideals, and become conscious of others, their existence, and their lives.

  Yuri Kochiyama

  Meaningful, Children, Thinking

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• I recognize in [my readers] a specific form and individual property, which our predecessors called Pantagruelism, by means of which they never take anything the wrong way that they know to stem from good, honest and loyal hearts.

  Francois Rabelais

  Trust, Reading, Heart

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• The designation of the locality in one excludes the appearances narrated by the rest; the determination of time in another leaves no space for the narratives of his fellow-evangelists; the enumeration of a third is given without any regard to the events reported by his predecessors; lastly, among several appearances recounted by various narrators, each claims to be the last, and yet has nothing in common with the others. Hence nothing but wilful blindness can prevent the perception that no one of the narrators knew and presupposed what another records.

  David Friedrich Strauss

  Determination, Space, Perception

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• One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

  George Santayana

  Ideas, Bye, America

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.8, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I am now old enough to make common cause with my predecessors against my successors.

  Mason Cooley

  Causes, Common, Aging

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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 . . .

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Race, Generations

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• Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

  Johan Huizinga

  Thoughtful, America, Essence

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• Most of the 50 or so invitations you receive each week come from people inviting the President's Chief of Staff, not you. If you doubt that, ask your predecessor how many he received last week.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  People, Doubt, President

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• It is given to few to add the store of knowledge, to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the future of the world lies in the hands of those who are able to carry the interpretation of nature a step further than their predecessors.

  Thomas Huxley

  Lying, Spring, Knowledge

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1908). “Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.109, Library of Alexandria

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• It was something new that was happening everywhere. You couldn't miss it. If you needed to go to the grocery you would go to the predecessors of the big supermarkets of today.

  William Eggleston

  Missing, Today, Something New

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

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• Politically or ideologically oriented evaluations of Chief Justice Rehnquist should not overlook what a successful and popular chief justice he was within the Court as the justices' presiding officer, .. The contrast between Rehnquist's undeniably happy Court and that of his predecessor, Warren E. Burger, could not have been greater.

  David Garrow

  Successful, Justice, Evaluation

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• You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Winning, Two

  "Obama wants new approach after shutdown" by Tom Cohen, www.cnn.com. October 18, 2013.

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• Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

  John Jay Chapman

  Secret, Generations, Enthusiasm

  John Jay Chapman (1970). “The Collected Works of John Jay Chapman: Criticism & memoirs”

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• Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Eye, Night, Museums

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• Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

  Ivan Klíma

  Book, Light, Literature

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