Defined Quotes - Page 18

• Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then suchand such another proposition is true of that thing.... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

  Bertrand Russell

  Knowledge, Talking, May

  "Mathematics and Metaphysicians" (1901)

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• Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void.

  Epicurus

  Numbers, Infinity, Atoms

  Epicurus (1964). “Letters: Principles Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings Translated, with an Introd. and Notes, by Russel M. Geor. Indianapolis Merrill”

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• In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Zambia, Childhood

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• Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

  Johan Huizinga

  Quality, Decay, Elements

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• In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has hadless authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Home, Past

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• Masculinity varies from time to time and place to place. But it doesn't exist just in the mind of a single guy: it is shared withthe other guys. It is a code of conduct that requires men to maintain masculine postures and attitudes (however they are defined) at all times and in all places. Masculinity includes the symbols, uniforms, chants, and plays that make this the boys' team rather than the girls' team.

  Frank Pittman

  Girl, Attitude, Team

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• A Tory..., since the revolution, may be defined in a few words, to be a lover of monarchy, though without abandoning liberty; anda partizan of the family of Stuart. As a Whig may be defined to be a lover of liberty though without renouncing monarchy; and a friend to the settlement in the protestant line.

  David Hume

  Liberty, Revolution, Few Words

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• There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.

  Molly Haskell

  Literature, Film, Heroines

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• The office of the prince and that of the writer are defined and assigned as follows: the nobleman gives rank to the written work,the writer provides food for the prince.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Food, Giving, Office

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• The future of America may or may not bring forth a black President, a woman President, a Jewish President, but it most certainly always will have a suburban President. A President whose senses have been defined by the suburbs, where lakes and public baths mutate into back yards and freeways, where walking means driving, where talking means telephoning, where watching means TV, and where living means real, imitation life.

  Arthur Kroker

  Real, Mean, Lakes

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• Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Politeness, Benevolence, Wells

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• When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.

  Ana Castillo

  Suicide, Cancer, Political

  Ana Castillo (1995). “Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma”, Plume Books

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• A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen. Why push through the dip, why take the risk, why blow it all when there's the comfortable alternative instead? The people who break through usually have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.

  Seth Godin

  Motivational, Success, Blow

  Seth Godin (2010). “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”, p.101, Penguin

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• Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built all the roads, cities and machines in the world, written all the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact done everything that man has accomplished with matter. Character might be a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits.

  G. Stanley Hall

  Book, Character, Men

  G. Stanley Hall (2013). “Adolescence - Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion (1931)”, p.133, Read Books Ltd

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• Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.

  Richard Louv

  Change, Children, Growing Up

  Richard Louv (1990). “Childhood's Future”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Goals have never defined me as a player. What has defined me is my impact on the team. If that means passing or playing defense to win, I'll do it.

  Mia Hamm

  Team, Mean, Winning

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• Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem.... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women.

  Sandra Scarr

  Mother, Children, Work

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• There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

  Donald Davidson

  Giving Up, Ideas, Philosopher

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• I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

  Rob Corddry

  Writing, Decided

  "The GQ&A: Rob Corddry". Interview with Sean Fennessey, www.gq.com. July 21, 2011.

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• I took a long view in order to not destroy the core Galvin-defined principles imbued in Motorola, such as constant respect for people, its instincts for breakthrough innovation, and continuous renewal in thinking and process rigor.

  Christopher Galvin

  Thinking, Views, Order

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• For an American to be patriotic is to be loyal to the principles of our Constitution, and the First Amendment. The truth is that the policies of the government is sometimes in conflict with that. In our country, patriotism should not be defined as obedience to an authority.

  Daniel Ellsberg

  Country, Patriotic, Government

  "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers". PBS Live Chat, www.pbs.org. October 5, 2010.

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• The law hath so many contradictions and varyings from itself, that the law may not improperly be called a law-breaker. It is become too changeable a thing to be defined: it is made little less a Mystery than the Gospel. The clergy and the lawyers, like the Freemasons, may be supposed to take an oath not to tell the secret.

  Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet

  Law, Secret, May

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• The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

  Sigmund Freud

  Views, Definitions, Facts

  Sigmund Freud (2008). “General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• When I went to the Hall of Fame in 2000 and was inducted, it was a travesty the kind of carnage I saw out of these guys who were in their 50s and 60s, who had defined and in many ways laid the foundation for the NFL being what it is today.

  Howie Long

  Nfl, Guy, Foundation

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• The intricate engraving, fine lines, beading and milgrain accents echo an era defined by elaborate embellishments.

  Vera Wang

  Echoes, Lines, Eras

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