Assemblage Quotes

• A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention

  Dean Kamen

  Technology, Ideas, Office

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• The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.

  Elihu Root

  Faith, Fall, People

  Elihu Root (1916). “Addresses on International Subjects”

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• The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Ideas, Machines, Aliens

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• Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

  Anna Deavere Smith

  Individuality, Identity, Constellations

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• Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization - the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Sex, Men, Organization

  "Corporate Man". The New York Times, January 22, 1984.

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• Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time, with eyes of a child, fresh with wonder.

  Joseph Cornell

  Art, Children, Eye

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• I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It's a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously.

  Betye Saar

  Art, Memories, Future

  Betye Saar, James Christen Steward, University of Michigan. Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art (2005). “Betye Saar: extending the frozen moment”, University of California Press

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• Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship's captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools.

  Aristotle

  Men, Views, Watches

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• Out beyond our world there are, elsewhere, other assemblages of matter making other worlds. Ours is not the only one in air's embrace.

  Lucretius

  Our World, Air, Other Worlds

  Titus Lucretius Carus, Rolfe Humphries (1968). “The Way Things are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus”, p.82, Indiana University Press

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• Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

  Robert Pinsky

  Strong, Children, Paper

  "Thrilling Difficulty". Interview with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, www.guernicamag.com. November 1, 2007.

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• What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Different, Action, Virtue

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• The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation.

  Wendell Phillips

  Christian, Truth, Real

  Wendell Phillips (1955). “Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia”

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• A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

  Carl Sagan

  Inspirational, Funny, Reading

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.305, Ballantine Books

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• Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Artist, World, Painting

  Marcel Duchamp (1973). “Marchand du sel”

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• If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found.

  Frederick Sommer

  Photography, Photographer, Found

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• A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.

  J. B. Bury

  History, Facts, Ends

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• Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface.

  Christophe Agou

  Photography, Art, Beneath The Surface

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• [Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

  Julian Barnes

  Beautiful, Lying, Facts

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Sex, Men, Opposites

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2015). “Wifes And Daughters”, p.137, Elizabeth Gaskell

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• My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Mother, Father, Warrior

  Carlos Castaneda (2013). “Fire from Within”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

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• All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Bible, Prayer, Sublime

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 419), 1895.

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• If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review,in such manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Blood, Europe, Circles

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1476, Delphi Classics

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• By my physical constitution I am but an ordinary man ... Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean hypocracies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into rage like a lion.

  John Adams

  Mean, Sleep, Cutting

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1851). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.197

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• Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Men, Wish, Done

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2009). “The Great Crash 1929”, p.157, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

  Erica Jong

  Sweet, Sex, Real

  Erica Jong (2007). “Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life”, p.89, Penguin

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