Ability Quotes - Page 38

• Exploring and understanding the Net is an ongoing process. Cyberspace never sits still; it evolves as fast as society itself. Only if we fight to preserve our freedom of speech on the Net will we ensure our ability to keep up with both the Net and society.

  Mike Godwin

  Fighting, Understanding, Freedom Of Speech

  Mike Godwin (1998). “Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age”, Crown Business

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• Every man who can be a first-rate something -- as every man can be who is a man at all -- has no right to be a fifth-rate something; for a fifth-rate something is not better than a first-rate nothing.

  J. G. Holland

  Men, Firsts, Rate

  "Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects". Book by J. G. Holland, October 3, 2009.

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• Ability for stupendous toil is lodged in every human spirit, a grand gift from the God of nature; but only the persevering worker knows what this latent power is able to achieve.

  Elias Lyman Magoon

  Toil, Able, Spirit

  Elias Lyman Magoon (1849). “Proverbs for the people: or, Illustrations of practical godliness drawn from the Book of wisdom”, p.182

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• Loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone.

  Gao Xingjian

  Loneliness, Reflection, Depends

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• The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

  George Sarton

  Acceptance, Simple, Ideas

  George Sarton (1952). “A History of Science: Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece”

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• In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march. ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices -- that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities.

  Walter E. Williams

  Army, Law, Greed

  "Economics for the Citizen (Part 9)". capitalismmagazine.com. January 20, 2005.

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• What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

  Erik Naggum

  Successful, Unix, Admire

  "Using Lisp to Call another program in linux?". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. November 11, 2002.

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• Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

  Dana Gioia

  Literature, Proportion, Interpretation

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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• As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Self Confidence, Brilliant, Complicated

  "Adventures of a Mathematician". Book by Stanislaw Ulam, 3rd edition. Chapter 4: "Princeton Days", p. 76, 1991.

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• There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Games, Play, Skills

  "Adventures of a Mathematician" by Stanislaw Ulam, Third Edition, (p. 119), 1991.

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• This backlog affects not just the ability to identify and convict the guilty, but it also affects our ability to identify the innocent.

  Chris Asplen

  Guilty, Innocent, Convicts

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• When it came down to technical skill and ability of the two teams, Croatia were far superior.

  Alan Mullery

  Team, Skills, Two

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• I love being inside my brain and pushing myself to think in ever more complex ways because I know the ideas are there for the taking. It's all about being focused and disciplined and making use of one's abilities.

  Nancy Crow

  Love Is, Thinking, Ideas

  Nancy Crow (2006). “Nancy Crow”

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• Teaching art is a shared experience. Our ability to share our own personal vision and interact with others through art can become realized.

  Michael Bell

  Art, Teaching, Vision

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• I think part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn't prescribe any. As far as I'm concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We're all conduits. Art preceded me, and it'll be here long after I'm gone.

  Pierre Coupey

  Art, Responsibility, Thinking

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• It was a great test of my ability to work with... watercolors. And it was also a test of my patience; I needed to put myself in a completely disciplined position... I couldn't make mistakes.

  Liu Dan

  Mistake, Tests, Needed

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• Every one's abilities may be increased or strengthened by a kind of culture.

  Jacob Abbott

  Culture, May, Kind

  Jacob Abbott (1835). “The Young Christian: Or, a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Duty”, p.303

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• The truth is that adversity is a part of most days. Whether you are ultimately weakened or strengthened by each event, or the accumulation of events, will depend on you first mastering the ability to Take It On!

  Erik Weihenmayer

  Adversity, Events, Firsts

  Erik Weihenmayer, Paul Stoltz (2012). “The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles into Everyday Greatness”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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• We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Distance, Skills, Luck

  "Beware of Other-Optimizing". lesswrong.com. April 10, 2009.

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• Micromessaging -- communicating with other human beings through visual, audible, sublingual means, no doubt predates our ability to speak. We actually read micromessages quite naturally without thinking about them. You might say human beings read each other's micromessages subconsciously, in the same way that one dog understands another dog is unfriendly simply because the dog's fur is standing on end. The dogs read each other perfectly. It's not all that different for people.

  Stephen Young

  Dog, Mean, Thinking

  Stephen Young (2006). “Micromessaging”, p.7, McGraw Hill Professional

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• What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

  Katy Lederer

  Book, Writing, Successful

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• I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.

  Adam Rapp

  Character, Writing, Gun

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• The American College of Sports Medicine found that the productivity of people after exercise was an average of 65 percent higher than those who did not exercise. If I have something that's really bothering me, so much that it almost hurts my head to try to sort it out, I always find the solution in a puddle of sweat! Intense exercise is like taking a magic pill that gives you the ability to solve problems like a superhero.

  Chalene Johnson

  Sports, Hurt, Exercise

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• Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Fleeting, Impulse

  "Day Watch". Book by Sergei Lukyanenko, Vladimir Vasilyev, 2000.

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• Fears to look bad in front of other people, to say something wrong, to be laughed at - all those fears deprive us of half of our abilities. This is one of the main school problems. That teacher understands it, who can teach students to study without fear of the teacher, without fear of classmates, and, the most important, without fear of a subject.

  Simon Soloveychik

  Teacher, School, People

  "The Last Book" by Simon Soloveychik, (Ch. 20), 1999.

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