Function Quotes

• Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

  Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

  Inspirational, Education, Attitude

  Quoted in Evan Esar, The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1949). Usually attributed to Dewar, but it should be noted that the line "mind like parachute - only function when open!" appears in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Circus (screenplay by Robert Ellis and Helen Logan).

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• The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

  Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

  Learning, Science, Giving

  Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper (1966). “Historical essays”

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• The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Education, Teacher, Teaching

  Martin Luther King (1992). “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr”, p.124, Univ of California Press

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• When do you know you're insane? And when do you known you're sane? I think I treat a fine line between the two. It's a battle to function, but somehow I manage.

  Siobhan Fahey

  Thinking, Two, Insane

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• The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

  Margaret Fuller

  Spiritual, Women, Believe

  Margaret Fuller (2012). “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, p.78, Courier Corporation

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• Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

  Garrison Keillor

  Nature, Cat, Garden

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Order, Giving

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• The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Creativity, Cities

  "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 18, 1961.

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• Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

  Ezra Pound

  Vacuums, Doe, Use

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• The bass player's function, along with the drums, is to be the engine that drives the car... everything else is merely colours.

  Suzi Quatro

  Player, Car, Bass

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• The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

  Alvin Toffler

  Science, Talking, Together

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• The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Pockets, Theology, Picks

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• Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

  Ayn Rand

  Freedom, Rights, Political

  Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.100, Penguin

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• My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Lady Macbeth, Murder

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 1, sc. 3, l. 130

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• To love is not a passive thing. To love is active voice. When I love I do something, I function, I give. I do not love in order that I may be loved back again, but for the creative joy of loving. And every time I do so love I am freed, at least a little, by the outgoing of love, from enslavement to that most intolerable of master, myself.

  Bernard Iddings Bell

  Love You, Love Is, Order

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• I believe that forgiving them is god's function, our job is to arrange the meeting.

  Norman Schwarzkopf

  Jobs, Military, Believe

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• The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Bliss, Eternity

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.85, Anchor

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• There has been a strong tradition in this country that it is not the function of the military to educate the public on political issues.

  J. William Fulbright

  Education, Country, Strong

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• Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

  Bernard DeVoto

  Wisdom, Airplane, Player

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• The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement

  Lucian Freud

  Artist, Excitement, Starting

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

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• I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

  Clive Bell

  Trying, Degrees, Emotion

  'Art' (1914) pt. 3 ch. 3

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• I believe that the Apple Shuffle is an excellent compromise among the conflicting requirements of simplicity, elegance, size, battery life, and function

  Donald A. Norman

  Believe, Apples, Simplicity

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• Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed they won't function at all.

  Ralph Merkle

  Machines, Environment, Changed

  "Nanotechnology: Designs for the Future". Interview with John Gehl, ubiquity.acm.org. July 2000.

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• A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

  David McCullough

  Past, History, Forget

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• By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

  William Carlos Williams

  Imagination, Listening, Use

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