Instruments Quotes - Page 33

• Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

  James Madison

  Inspirational, War, Army

  "Political Observations" by James Madison, founders.archives.gov. April 20, 1795.

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• Your body is merely a machine made to express the thoughts that flow through you and nothing more. It is but an instrument for you to express your imagings just as a piano is an instrument for a musician to express his imagings. Just as the piano is not the musician, so, likewise, your body is not you.

  Walter Russell

  Piano, Secret, Musician

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• Knowledge is like a knife. In the hands of a well-balanced adult it is an instrument for good of inestimable value; but in the hands of a child, an idiot, a criminal, a drunkard or an insane man, it may cause havoc, misery, suffering and crime. Science and religion have this in common, that their noble aims, their power for good, have often, with wrong men, deteriorated into a boomerang to the human race.

  Leo Baekeland

  Children, Knowledge, Science

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• The chemists work with inaccurate and poor measuring services, but they employ very good materials. The physicists, on the other hand, use excellent methods and accurate instruments, but they apply these to very inferior materials. The physical chemists combine both these characteristics in that they apply imprecise methods to impure materials.

  Wolfgang Ostwald

  Science, Hands, Excellence

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• We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

  David Sarnoff

  Science, Way, Sin

  "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man?". Book by Marshall McLuhan, p. 11, 1964.

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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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• I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!

  Richard Goldschmidt

  Knowledge, Exercise, Science

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• Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.

  Humphry Davy

  Knowledge, Science, Advancement

  Sir Humphry Davy (1812). “Elements of Chemical Philosophy”, p.54

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• O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!

  Johannes Kepler

  Knowledge, Science, Telescopes

  "The Sidereal Messenger of Galileo Galilei and a Part of the Preface to Kepler's Dioptrics Containing the Original Account of Galileo's Astronomical Discoveries".

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• To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

  Isaac Asimov

  Knowledge, Science, Perfect

  Isaac Asimov (1968). “The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences”

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• While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

  Edward Jenner

  Science, Discovery, Vaccines

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• Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.

  Henri Poincare

  Nature, Philosophical, Science

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• Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fall, Men, Work Out

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.180, Simon and Schuster

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• Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Mean, Past

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1973). “Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future”, Penguin Classics

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• I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that 'while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.' If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Mean, Years, People

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46”, p.661, Library of America

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• The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Light, Community

  "Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction". Book by Kathrin Glüer, p. 213, December 5, 2011.

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• The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Knowledge, Science, Practice

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.171, University of Chicago Press

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• Lust is the cause of generation
  Appetite is the support of life
  Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and
  Fraud the preservation of its instruments.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Fear, Support, Lust

  Leonardo da Vinci (2008). “Notebooks”, p.263, OUP Oxford

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• The more your meditation goes deep, the less and less you will feel the burden of the mind. The more and more meditation goes deep, the less and less you will be a mind. Thoughts will become rare, and ultimately they cease. That doesn't mean you become unthinking; it only means that your consciousness becomes clear, transparent, without thoughts moving continuously as clouds. Whenever you need to think you can think; but now thought becomes an instrument to you, not an obsession as it is presently. Thoughts are an obsession without meditation.

  Rajneesh

  Moving, Mean, Thinking

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• Preacher is an instrument of compassion, not an instrument of wrath.

  Radhanath Swami

  Compassion, Wrath, Preacher

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• We must be instruments of God's compassion to those who are suffering.

  Radhanath Swami

  Compassion, Suffering, Instruments Of God

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• In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Play, Skills, Soul

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1888). “Longfellow's Days: The Longfellow Prose Birthday Book : Extracts from the Journals and Letters of H. W. Longfellow”

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• The state machine, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument with which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument of oppression against all hostile classes; it means violence and is certainly not anything 'benevolent.' 'You are merciless.' Quite so. We definitely do not adopt a benevolent policy towards the reactionary activities of the reactionaries and the reactionary classes.

  Mao Zedong

  Communication, Mean, Army

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• This formidable censor of the public functionaries [the press], by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Mind, Public Opinion

  Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington (2011). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private”, p.324, Cambridge University Press

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• The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived. To avoid this they should be instructed to a certain degree.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Rights, People

  Thomas Jefferson (1984). “Jefferson: Writings”, p.1601, Library of America

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