Primary Source Quotes

• The closer you can get to your setting and to primary sources, the more authentic your history is going to be.

  David B. Coe

  Source, Settings, Primaries

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

  Jacques Yves Cousteau

  Growth, Environmental, Population

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• In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

  Tom Vilsack

  Past, Years, United States

  "Rebuilding and Revitalizing America’s Rural Communities" by Sec. Tom Vilsack, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 3, 2010.

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• Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Philosophy, Book, Eye

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• A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

  Chauncey Wright

  Mean, Simple, Hands

  Chauncey Wright (2003). “Philosphical Discussions”, p.44, A&C Black

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• After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce

  Past, Research, World

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• I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

  Nancy Horan

  Reading, Use, Biographies

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• It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Cancer, Treatment, Stage

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.13, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.

  Pat Buchanan

  Religious, Children, Book

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• I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Book, Reading, Source

  "Sherlock: Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman interview". Interview with Michael Leader, www.denofgeek.com. July 22, 2010.

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• The Christian Theology Reader brings the best primary sources to the theological inquirer.

  Gabriel Fackre

  Christian, Source, Theology

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• Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.

  Victor Cousin

  Cousin, Ignorance, Vices

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• The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances,
  imbalances - are the primary sources of creativity.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Inspirational, Fear, Business

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• Aren't you failing English?" I asked. Angeline flushed. "It's not my fault." "Even I know you can't write an article on Wikipedia and then use it as a source in your own essay." Sydney had been torn between horror and hysterics when she told me. "I took 'primary source' to a whole new level!" Honestly, it was a wonder we'd gotten by for so long without Angeline. Life must have been so boring before her.

  Richelle Mead

  Writing, Long, Use

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• It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress.

  John Stuart Mill

  Communication, Progress, Action

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• What I try to do - and I think this is the former librarian in me - is to get primary source material.

  Theresa Breslin

  Thinking, Trying, Librarian

  "Theresa Breslin: bringing the past to life". Interview with Michelle Pauli, www.theguardian.com. September 2, 2010.

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• I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.

  Terry Teachout

  Writing, Perfect, Personality

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work. But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I've detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don't link to primary sources, I just don't trust you.

  Ben Goldacre

  Pain, Motivation, Dubious

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• The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Writing, Mean, Desire

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• My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

  Reza Aslan

  Jesus, Doe, Use

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• The mother is the early care giver and primary source of identification for all children.... A daughter continues to identify with the mother

  Nancy Chodorow

  Daughter, Mother, Children

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• Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.

  Harold Land

  Keys, Swings, Self

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• I had turned personal validation into my primary source of meaning and value, so that without it I was miserable and depressed.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Validation, Miserable, Source

  Source: www.lifeisstory.com

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• My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that's ever happened, and yet people's understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.

  Bill McKibben

  People, Goal, Understanding

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Oil is essential for a modern, industrial society. It's unique, first of all, because it's the primary source, at 40 percent, of the world's entire supply of energy, and it's irreplaceable in the transportation field; it provides 98 percent of world transportation energy.

  Michael Klare

  Unique, Oil, Energy

  "The Permanent Energy Crisis". Interview with Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. June 19, 2006.

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