Function Quotes - Page 18

• Your proudest moment is to watch your egg not just function, but to achieve on her own.

  Joan Rivers

  Parenting, Motherhood, Eggs

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• It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason.

  Robert Morrison MacIver

  Religious, Government, Liberty

  Robert Morrison MacIver (1965). “The Web of Government”

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• Most people who meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are right about this. She is smart, funny and thoroughly charming... Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of "You know, I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife... wow!"

  Barack Obama

  Strong Women, Smart, Thinking

  "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream". Book by Barack Obama, October 17, 2006.

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• Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.

  Claude Bernard

  Country, Anatomy And Physiology, Typography

  Claude Bernard (1974). “Lectures on the phenomena of life common to animals and plants”, Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd

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• Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

  Rene Dubos

  Science, Men, Decision

  Barbara Ward, René Jules Dubos (1972). “Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet: an Unofficial Report Commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment”, Penguin Books

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• Biologists have long attempted by chemical means to induce in higher organisms predictable and specific changes which thereafter could be transmitted in series as hereditary characters. Among microorganisms the most striking example of inheritable and specific alterations in cell structure and function that can be experimentally induced and are reproducible under well defined and adequately controlled conditions is the transformation of specific types of Pneumococcus.

  Oswald Avery

  Character, Mean, Cells

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• All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.

  Mark Twain

  Education, School, Knowledge

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.425, Courier Corporation

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• But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.

  Arthur Balfour

  Change, Religious, Knowledge

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• The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

  Karl Pearson

  Science, Feelings, Mind

  Karl Pearson (2007). “The Grammar of Science”, p.6, Cosimo, Inc.

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• During my span of life science has become a matter of public concern and the l'art pour l'art standpoint of my youth is now obsolete. Science has become an integral and most important part of our civilization, and scientific work means contributing to its development. Science in our technical age has social, economic, and political functions, and however remote one's own work is from technical application it is a link in the chain of actions and decisions which determine the fate of the human race. I realized this aspect of science in its full impact only after Hiroshima.

  Max Born

  Art, Mean, Science

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• Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

  Francois Jacob

  Science, World, Limits

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• Thus science strips off, one after the other, the more or less gross materialisations by which we endeavour to form an objective image of the soul, till men of science, speculating, in their non-scientific intervals, like other men on what science may possibly lead to, have prophesied that we shall soon have to confess that the soul is nothing else than a function of certain complex material systems.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Men, Soul

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.760, Courier Corporation

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• All living organisms are but leaves on the same tree of life. The various functions of plants and animals and their specialized organs are manifestations of the same living matter. This adapts itself to different jobs and circumstances, but operates on the same basic principles. Muscle contraction is only one of these adaptations. In principle it would not matter whether we studied nerve, kidney or muscle to understand the basic principles of life. In practice, however, it matters a great deal.

  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

  Life, Jobs, Science

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• Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Science, Men, Mirrors

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Phenomenon of Man”, p.140, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion.

  Alfred Binet

  Science, Numbers, People

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• This is only one step in a much larger project. I discovered (no, not me: my team) the function of sugar nucleotides in cell metabolism. I want others to understood this, but it is not easy to explain: this is not a very noteworthy deed, and we hardly know even a little.

  Luis Federico Leloir

  Team, Science, Discovery

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• I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations.

  G. H. Hardy

  Lying, Believe, Science

  G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.123, Cambridge University Press

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• As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

  Sydney Brenner

  Mean, Science, Cells

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• I have been long sensible that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and placing our rising generation on the level of our sister states (which they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Education, Country, Medicine

  Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Francis Cabell, Joseph Carrington Cabell (1856). “Early History of the University of Virginia: As Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, Hitherto Unpublished; with an Appendix, Consisting of Mr. Jefferson's Bill for a Complete System of Education and Other Illustrative Documents; and an Introduction, Comprising a Brief Historical Sketch of the University, and a Biographical Notice of Joseph C. Cabell”, p.366

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• The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.

  Joseph Campbell

  Yoga, Eye, Ideas

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• The civil Government, though bereft of every thing like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success; whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.

  James Madison

  Government, Religion, Atheism

  "Letters and Other Writings of James Madison".

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• A first grader should understand that her or his culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society...Cultural relativity is defensible, attractive. It's a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Faith, Mean, Other Cultures

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• While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

  Mark Epstein

  Buddhist, Disappointment, Moving

  Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.89, Penguin

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• Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.

  Rajneesh

  Mean, Sleep, Men

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• For dignity of character, consciousness is needed, not conscience and that's the function of meditation. Meditation does not give you any character directly. It does not say what to do and what not to do. It never gives you any commandments. It simply gives you a technique for becoming more aware, for being more alert, watchful, witnessing.

  Rajneesh

  Character, Giving, Meditation

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