Facts Quotes - Page 26

• It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.

  Robert Frost

  Teaching, Taken, Moments

  Robert Frost (2014). “The Letters of Robert Frost”, p.240, Harvard University Press

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• It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.

  Charles Lamb

  Kings, Eye, Thinking

  Charles Lamb, Mary Lamb (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Illustrated)”, p.1492, Delphi Classics

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• At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.

  George Orwell

  Agreement, Orthodoxy, Moments

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• England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.

  George Orwell

  Country, Horse, Kings

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.275, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

  George Orwell

  Fighting, Men, Class

  "The Road to Wigan Pier". Book by George Orwell (Diary 6-10 February), March 8, 1937.

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• I suppose I could think of a lot of things to say about the fact that I still play. But I don't really need to. I can tell you this, that I enjoy it. I still enjoy it. I like to get out in the air and I like to walk and I like to do the things that are involved in playing golf.

  Arnold Palmer

  Golf, Thinking, Air

  PGA Championship Q&A, www.pga.com. May 24, 2005.

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• The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent fact, but the man of insight knows what lies on the surfaces does lie.

  Israel Zangwill

  Lying, Men, Doe

  Israel Zangwill (2016). “The Big Bow Mystery”, p.91, Oldcastle Books

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• The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

  Russell Baker

  President, Firsts, Theory

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

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• Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Men, Ego

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

  Jean Cocteau

  Lying, History, Ends

  The Observer, September 22, 1957.

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• I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.

  Lyman Abbott

  Believe, Light, Appreciate

  Lyman Abbott (2009). “The Theology of an Evolutionist”, p.37, Cambridge University Press

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• How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.

  Lyman Abbott

  Children, Mean, Appreciate

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• In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

  Martin Buber

  Philosophical, Men, Humanity

  Martin Buber, S. N. Eisenstadt (1992). “On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity”, p.34, University of Chicago Press

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• All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

  Isaac Asimov

  Wall, Loneliness, Men

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• The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

  Isaac Asimov

  Might, Revolutionary, Insight

  "The Three Numbers". Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974.

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• Fact is stranger than fiction. You see people walking down the street that would never be allowed on television. You have to tone it down.

  Ricky Gervais

  People, Tone, Fiction

  2002 On the Jo Whiley show, BBC Radio 1, 30 Sep.

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• I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Attitude, Brutality

  "Degas: An Intimate Portrait" by Ambroise Vollard, translated by Randolph T. Weaver. Dover, (p. 43), 1986.

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• I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair."

  Kenneth Tynan

  Indulge In, Luxury, Despair

  "Conference at Edinburgh (1963)". "Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events". Book by Kenneth Tynan, p. 146, 1967.

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• Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Father, Romance, Made

  Sherwood Anderson (1924). “A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue”, p.4, University of Michigan Press

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• All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.

  William Winwood Reade

  Believe, Destiny, Men

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.179

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• It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.

  Jean Piaget

  Children, Eye, Long

  Jean Piaget (1997). “The Moral Judgement of the Child”, p.165, Simon and Schuster

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• For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other.

  Jean Piaget

  Religious, Mean, Animal

  Jean Piaget (1997). “The Moral Judgement of the Child”, p.186, Simon and Schuster

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• if I hadn't gone to a private Christian school, I'd never have built up enough animosity to want to have started a band. And now that I have one, the fact that they are giving me such resistance and publicity, they have made me far bigger than they'd ever have wanted me to have become. So I guess in a strange way the Christians have influenced me the most.

  Marilyn Manson

  Christian, School, Giving

  Vox Magazine, October 1997.

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• There's no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure's not so bad As never having tried.

  Ken Kesey

  Failure, Failing, Disgrace

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• All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Government, Expression, People

  Quoted in Arthur Livingstone (ed) TheMind and Society (1935).

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