Instance Quotes - Page 36

• You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

  Ray Bradbury

  Teacher, Writing, School

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• Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.

  Margaret Sanger

  Race, Different, Birth Control

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• The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth

  Martin Heidegger

  Technology, Men, Essence

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• What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression

  Michel Foucault

  Running, Negative, Needs

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

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• If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first instance; while a firm refusal will make them clearly understand that they must treat you more as equals.

  Thucydides

  Giving, Demand, Way

  Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert B. Strassler (2008). “The Landmark Thucydides”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed. And ineach instance a new world order came about through the advent of a new tyrant or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end.

  George H. W. Bush

  War, Order, Tyrants

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• Looking ahead, I can see more and more instances where I will disagree with the president.

  Jim Jeffords

  Issues, President, Fundamentals

  "Senator Jim Jeffords Leaves GOP, Handing Senate to Democrats". "NBC Nightly News" with Tom Brokaw and Lisa Myers, archives.nbclearn.com. May 24, 2001.

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• The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

  Paul Klee

  Art, World, Today

  Paul Klee (2012). “Paul Klee”, p.119, Parkstone International

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• Ridicule can do much, for instance embitter the existence of young talents; but one thing is not given to it, to put a stop permanently to the incursion of new and powerful ideas.

  Aron Nimzowitsch

  Powerful, Ideas, Talent

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• At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Fashion, Believe

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• In horror movies today its lots of fast cut shot and lots of loud noises on the soundtrack. I tried to do the opposite. Playing with silence for instance.

  Alejandro Amenabar

  Cutting, Opposites, Silence

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• It is more difficult to manipulate with film than, for instance, video. The problem with video is that it gives you a thousand possibilities.

  Lars von Trier

  Giving, Video, Problem

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• I recall having read, at the brothers' instance, Madame Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy. This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Brother, Book, Keys

  Mahatma Gandhi, General Press (2014). “My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi”, p.117, GENERAL PRESS

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• Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Philosophy, Lying, Men

  Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.58, Cambridge University Press

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• It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

  Epicurus

  Men, Able, Impossible

  "Principal Doctrines". Translated by Robert Drew Hicks,

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• Flowers are beautiful, for instance, but we are not inclined to marry them. Duty, on the contrary, is a bugle call to action, whether you are inclined to act, or not. In this case, I obey the bugle call of duty.

  L. Frank Baum

  Beautiful, Flower, Action

  L. Frank Baum (2008). “8 Books in 1: L. Frank Baum's "Oz" Series, Volume 2 of 2. Little Wizard Stories of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, The Scarecrow Of Oz, Rinkitink In Oz, The Lost Princess Of Oz,”, p.503, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

  John Cage

  Talking, Ideas, Feelings

  Interview with Miroslav Sebestik (1991), as quoted in Miroslav Sebestik's documentary "Listen" (ARTE France Developpement), 2003.

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• The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly-except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Jesus, Stupidity, Pimp

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday!”, CNIB, 197

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• Ironically, as some people become harder, they use softer words to describe dark deeds. This, too, is part of being sedated by secularism. Needless abortion, for instance, is a "reproductive health procedure, . . ." "Illegitimacy" gives way to the wholly sanitized words "non-marital birth" or "alternative parenting."

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Dark, People, Giving

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• There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.

  Mark Twain

  Hair, Argument, Grows

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.12, Courier Corporation

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• I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it.

  Charles Schumer

  Respect, Passion, Law

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• Prayer is the supreme instance of the hidden character of the Christian life.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Christian, Prayer, Character

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.110, SCM Press

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• The Bible, which ranges over a period of four thousand years, records but one instance of a death-bed conversion (the thief on the cross) - one that none may despair, and but one that none may presume.

  Thomas Guthrie

  Christian, Years, Despair

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• Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Leadership, Fall, Math

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• On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

  Hans Blix

  War, Kyoto Protocol, Iraq

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