Predecessors Quotes - Page 3

• The lesson of the last year is this: foreign policy can't be managed through the politics of personality, and our President would do well to take note of an observation John F. Kennedy made once he was in office - that all of the world's problems aren't his predecessor's fault.

  Sarah Palin

  Years, Office, Personality

  Keynote Speech at the Inaugural Tea Party Convention, delivered 6 February 2010, Nashville, Tennessee

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• I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

  Rachel Cusk

  Children, Writing, Risk

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• Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

  Emile Durkheim

  Order, Movement, Generations

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.372, Simon and Schuster

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• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Children, Race

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• Taking into account these distinctions, in harmony with the Magisterium of my Predecessors[81] and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person.

  Pope John Paul II

  Law, Abortion, Catholic

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• Philosophy would long ago have reached a high level if our predecessors and fathers had put this into practice; and we would not waste time on the primary difficulties, which appear now as severe as in the first centuries which noticed them. We would have the experience of assured phenomena, which would serve as principles for a solid reasoning; truth would not be so deeply sunken; nature would have taken off most of her envelopes; one would see the marvels she contains in all her individuals.

  Marin Mersenne

  Nature, Truth, Father

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• Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Powerful, Knowing, Majority

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• You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

  Renny Harlin

  Imagination, Individuality, Want

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• Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

  Allan Massie

  Running, Book, Class

  Allan Massie (2013). “Life & Letters: The Spectator Columns”, Quartet Books (UK)

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• The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Tasks, Figures

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p. 114, 1988.

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• Young people today are being robbed. Of their rights.  Of their freedom.  Of their dignity.  Of their futures.  The culprits?  My generation and our predecessors, who either created or failed to stop the world straddling engine of theft, degradation, manipulation, and social control we call the welfare state.

  Tom G. Palmer

  Rights, People, Today

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• Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds. But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.

  Laura Riding

  Religious, Reality, Perfection

  "Poetic Drama". "The Common Asphodel". Book by Robert Graves, 1949.

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• The designation of the locality in one excludes the appearances narrated by the rest; the determination of time in another leaves no space for the narratives of his fellow-evangelists; the enumeration of a third is given without any regard to the events reported by his predecessors; lastly, among several appearances recounted by various narrators, each claims to be the last, and yet has nothing in common with the others. Hence nothing but wilful blindness can prevent the perception that no one of the narrators knew and presupposed what another records.

  David Friedrich Strauss

  Determination, Space, Perception

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• One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

  George Santayana

  Ideas, Bye, America

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.8, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I am now old enough to make common cause with my predecessors against my successors.

  Mason Cooley

  Causes, Common, Aging

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• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Race, Generations

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• I managed the Dodgers for 20 years. It's hard to believe that there are only four guys in the history of baseball who managed the same team for 20 years or more. One was owner of the team, Connie Mack. Another was part owner of the team, John McGraw. Then there was my predecessor, Walter Alston, and me. It's amazing. In the 20 years I managed the Dodgers, 210 managers were fired.

  Tommy Lasorda

  Baseball, Team, Believe

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• Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

  Johan Huizinga

  Thoughtful, America, Essence

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• Most of the 50 or so invitations you receive each week come from people inviting the President's Chief of Staff, not you. If you doubt that, ask your predecessor how many he received last week.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  People, Doubt, President

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• First and foremost, you do not have to live up to or emulate the lives of any of your predecessors. But at the very least, you should know about them. You will have your own life, interests, and ideas of what you want or do not want in life. Do what you enjoy doing. Be honest with yourself and others. Don't think of satisfying anyone: your elders, peers, government, religion, or children who will come after you. Develop meaningful ideals, and become conscious of others, their existence, and their lives.

  Yuri Kochiyama

  Meaningful, Children, Thinking

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• We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

  Eugene Jarecki

  Fashion, Mean, Holocaust

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

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• In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

  Noah Feldman

  War, Korea, President

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• Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.

  Jeremy Collier

  Light, Culture, Hints

  Jeremy Collier (1728). “Essays upon several moral subjects”, p.70

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• New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Writing, Long

  Samuel Johnson (1821). “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works”, p.373

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• I am also, I must confess, a little sceptical of the theory that we have a right, if we could, to pass on our capital burden to future generations. I remarked last year in this context that our predecessors had not passed any significant part of their burden on to us.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Years, Generations, Littles

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 134), March 29, 1963.

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