Principal Quotes

• There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

  Denis Diderot

  Knowledge, Mean, Reflection

  Denis Diderot (1966). “Selected Writings”, New York : Macmillan

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• Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

  Bertrand Russell

  Love, Life, Wedding

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Marriage and Morals”, p.79, Routledge

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• Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

  Mark Twain

  Mom, Baby, Children

  Pudd'nhead Wilson ch. 4, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" (1894)

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• A mother is neither cocky, nor proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child had just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium.

  Mary Blakely

  Mother, Children, Cocky

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• If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Inspiring, Thankful

  Pudd'nhead Wilson ch. 16, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" (1894)

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• It is just as necessary to forgive ourselves as it is to forgive others, and the principal reason why forgiveness seemed so difficult is because we have neglected to forgive ourselves.

  Christian D. Larson

  Life Changing, Forgiving, Reason Why

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• The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

  H. L. Mencken

  Lying, Men, Office

  "Charting the Candidates '72" by Ronald Van Doren, 1972.

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• Advertising is the principal reason why the business person has come to inherit the earth.

  James Adams

  Advertising Business, Earth, Reason Why

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• Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections.

  John Dryden

  Grace, Affection, Goodness

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• My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

  Loni Anderson

  Daughter, Mother, Teacher

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• Smoking is the now the principal avoidable cause of premature death in Britain. It hits the worst off people hardest of all. Smoking is one of the principal causes of the health gap which leads to poorer people being ill more often and dying sooner.

  Frank Dobson

  People, Smoking, Dying

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• A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

  Henry Adams

  Inspirational, Leadership, Education

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 20 (1907)

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• Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thinking, Tree, Fruit

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• I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

  Bertrand Russell

  Death, Christian, Atheist

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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• Common sense … has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work; it seldom anticipates what science is going to discover.

  Russell L. Ackoff

  Successful, Validation, Common Sense

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• The battle against the Devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the Devil is still alive and active in the world.

  Pope John Paul II

  Battle, Devil, Saint

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• Words may be either the servants or masters. If the former they may safely guide us in the way of truth. If the latter they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of thought where there is no solid footing. Among the sources of those innumerable calamities which from age to age have overwhelmed mankind, may be reckoned as one of the principal, the abuse of words.

  George Horne

  Abuse, Brain, Age

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• Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.

  Jonathan Stroud

  Opportunity, Wife, Skirts

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• One of the principal occupations of man is to divine woman.

  Jacques de Lacretelle

  Men, Occupation, Divine

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• The principal difference between love and hate is that love is a irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Love, Hate, Differences

  Sydney J. Harris (1953). “Strictly personal”

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• In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees.

  Philippe Claudel

  Writing, Goal, Mind

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• The principal linkages between Japan and the U.S. global economies are trade, financial markets, and commodity markets.

  Mark Zandi

  Japan, Financial, Commodity

  "Mark Zandi: No Global Impact From Japan". Interview with Lori Ann LaRocco, www.cnbc.com. March 17, 2011.

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• To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

  Aleister Crowley

  Hands, Plums, Verbs

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• The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

  William J. Mitchell

  Photography, Struggle, Reality

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• Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

  Noam Chomsky

  Why Not, Facts, Action

  "Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders / GRITtv, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

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