Spectators Quotes - Page 11

• We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.

  David Gergen

  Sports, Office, Vote

  1993 In US News & World Report, 10 May.

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• Now tell me this. What would you consider the greatest spectator sport in the country today? Would you say it was baseball, basketball, football?... It's politics. That's right, politics. Millions and millions of people following it every day in the newspapers, over the TV and the radio. Now mind you, they wouldn't get mixed up in this themselves for all the tea in China, but they know the names and numbers of all the players. And what they can't tell the coaches about strategy. Oh, you should see some of the letters I get.

  Frank Nugent

  Basketball, Sports, Baseball

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• Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

  David Hume

  Drama, Passion, Magic

  David Hume (1825). “Essays and treatises on several subjects: An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.258

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• A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Artist, Bridges, Soul

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• For my own part, I am apt to join in the opinion with those who believe that all the regions of Nature swarm with spirits, and that we have multitudes of spectators on all our actions when we think ourselves most alone.

  Joseph Addison

  Believe, Thinking, Our Actions

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1853). “The Spectator: With a Biographical and Critical Preface, and Explanatory Notes ...”, p.40

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• Classical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away.

  Gelsey Kirkland

  Dance, Struggle, Hands

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• Perhaps you say, Why are the wicked joyous? Why do they live in luxury? Why do they not toil with me? It is because they who have not put down their names to strive for the crown are not bound to undergo the labors of the contest. They who have not gone down into the race-course do not annoint themselves with oil nor get covered with dust. For those whom glory awaits trouble is at hand. The perfumed spectators are wont to look on, not to join in the struggle, nor to endure the sun, the heat, the dust, and the showers.

  Bill Vaughan

  Struggle, Race, Dust

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• It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.

  Edmund Burke

  Sympathy, Men, Suffering

  Edmund Burke (1823). “A philosophical inquiry, etc”, p.54

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• . . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

  Orson Scott Card

  Eye, Stories, World

  Orson Scott Card (2010). “Ender's Game”, p.15, Macmillan

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• People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.

  Noam Chomsky

  Media, People, Political

  Noam Chomsky (2011). “Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda”, p.23, Seven Stories Press

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• Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports.

  Mason Cooley

  Sports, Murder Mysteries, Curiosity

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• Very great charm of shadow and light is to be found in the faces of those who sit in the doors of dark houses. The eye of the spectator sees that part of the face which is in shadow lost in the darkness of the house, and that part of the face which is lit draws its brilliancy from the splendour of the sky. From this intensification of light and shade the face gains greatly in relief and beauty by showing the subtlest shadows in the light part and the subtlest lights in the dark part.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Nature, Travel, Eye

  Leonardo da Vinci (2008). “Notebooks”, p.128, OUP Oxford

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• The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Art Is, Works Of Art

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.344, Simon and Schuster

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• At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution.

  Chris Burden

  Two, Venice, Wire

  Chris Burden, Alberta College of Art. Gallery (1976). “Chris Burden, February 18, 1976”

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• I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

  Frederik Pohl

  Sports, Book, Pleasure

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• The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!

  Augusto Boal

  Character, Thinking, Theatre

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• Dismiss the old horse in good time, lest he fail in the lists and the spectators laugh.

  Horace

  Retirement, Horse, Laughing

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• A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Philosophy, History

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• Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

  Jonathan Swift

  Life, Tragedy, Life Is

  Jonathan Swift (1998). “The Sayings of Jonathan Swift”, p.18, Gerald Duckworth & Co

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• Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Beach, Doctors, People

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• In the actual condition of medical science, the physician mostly plays the part of simple spectator of the sad episodes which his profession furnishes him.

  Francois Magendie

  Simple, Play, Physicians

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• My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

  Jean Anouilh

  Giving Up, Years, Wife

  Jean Anouilh “The Waltz of the Toreadors”

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• The true work of art continues to unfold and create within the personality of the spectator. It is a continuous coming into being.

  Mervyn Levy

  Art, Personality, Works Of Art

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• The process of drawing is... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.

  Michael Ayrton

  Communication, Artist, Drawing

  Michael Ayrton (1962). “Drawing and Sculpture”

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• The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.

  Walter Lippmann

  War, Mind, Behind The Scenes

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.35, Harvard University Press

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