Obvious Quotes - Page 20

• [About a conference on Systematic Biology] Many interesting statements were made that apply directly to the work of taxonomists. In some cases the interest lay in the value of the suggestion and sometimes in the obvious need for rebuttal.

  Richard E. Blackwelder

  Science, Interesting, Systematic

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• The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this - justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms.

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Equality, Justice, Shapes

  Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1874). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, p.215

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• There exists a "fear of freedom" of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.

  James A.C. Brown

  Fear, Mean, People

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• The factory farm is . . . an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous. . . All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog.

  Matthew Scully

  Dog, Vegetarianism, Evil

  Matthew Scully (2011). “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy”, p.138, Souvenir Press

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• All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.

  Quentin Crisp

  Cutting, Sea, California

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• No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'

  Trey Parker

  Funny, Writing, Order

  Interview with Jeff Otto, www.ign.com. May 12, 2005.

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• The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive

  Stefan Molyneux

  Purpose, Offensive, Obscure

  Twitter post from Dec 15, 2016

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• The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man. Thanks to number, the cry becomes a song, noise acquires rhythm, the spring is transformed into a dance, force becomes dynamic, and outlines figures.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Song, Spring, Math

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• I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.

  Richard Greenberg

  Writing, Character, Play

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• What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

  Alan Ayckbourn

  Running, Laughter, Pie

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• This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception. Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud.

  Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

  Motivation, Math, Ideas

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• The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Math, Men, Numbers

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• We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

  Michael Herr

  Hands, Enemy, Warfare

  Michael Herr (2011). “Dispatches”, p.153, Vintage

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• It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too.

  Aristotle

  Men, Matter, Firsts

  Metaphysics, bk.1, ch.2, 982 (translated by H Tredennick).

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• In the United States, except for slaves, servants and the destitute fed by townships, everyone has the vote and this is an indirect contributor to law-making. Anyone wishing to attack the
  law is thus reduced to adopting one of two obvious courses: they must either change the nation's opinion or trample its wishes under foot.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Law, Two, Feet

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter XIV, 1835.

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• We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.

  Philip K. Dick

  Effort, World, Cognition

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.260, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

  Tony Kushner

  Thinking, Obvious Things, Forever

  Interview, blogs.denverpost.com. January 31, 2010.

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• I also tried to avoid doing obvious dance records.

  Boy George

  Records

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• Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

  H. G. Wells

  War, Hands, People

  H.G. Wells (1914). “the World Set Free”

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• For a lot of companies, it's useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe it's better to shoot higher. You don't want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what's possible and how to make the world better.

  Larry Page

  Believe, World, Want

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• With short hair you begin to crave pearl necklaces, long earrings, and a variety of sunglasses. Short hair removes obvious femininity and replaces it with style.

  Joan Juliet Buck

  Hair, Long, Style

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• Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

  Edgar Meyer

  Jazz, Scottish, Classical Music

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• The Spirit works through community. Somebody will have a stupid, screwy idea. That's okay. The point of having creeds and confessions and traditions is to keep us in touch with the obvious errors.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Stupid, Errors, Ideas

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• I ask the reader to remember that what is most obvious may be most worthy of analysis. Fertile vistas may open out when commonplace facts are examined from a fresh point of view.

  Lancelot Law Whyte

  Views, Analysis, May

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• Why all of these broken homes? What happens to marriages that begin with sincere love and a desire to be loyal and faithful and true one to another? There is no simple answer. I acknowledge that. But it appears to me that there are some obvious reasons that account for a very high percentage of these problems. I say this out of experience in dealing with such tragedies. I find selfishness to be the root cause of most of it.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Home, Simple, Loyal And Faithful

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