Primacy Quotes

• America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Distribution Of Power, America, Historical

  Zbigniew Brzezinski (2016). “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, p.194, Basic Books

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• For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  America, Long, Chiefs

  Zbigniew Brzezinski (2007). “The Grand Chessboard”, p.34, Basic Books

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• I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

  John Henry Newman

  Firsts, Drink, Pope

  Letter to the Duke of Norfolk

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• People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.

  Rush Limbaugh

  America, Government, People

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.

  Johan Huizinga

  Mean, Ethical Standards, Understanding

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• There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making. It has been said that environmentalism failed as a movement, or worse yet, died. It is the other way around. Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience.

  Paul Hawken

  Decision, Hegemony, Rising

  Paul Hawken (2007). “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beau ty to the World”, p.234, Penguin

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• The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.

  Russell Kirk

  Order, Law, Giving

  Russell Kirk (2014). “The Roots of American Order”, p.22, Open Road Media

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• The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Freedom Of Speech, Brain, Mind

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• In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that "liberty inheres in some sensible object," are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise.

  Russell Kirk

  Order, Knowing, Giving

  Russell Kirk (1996). “Redeeming the Time”, Isi Books

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• I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.

  Larry McMurtry

  Mistake, Careers, People

  Larry McMurtry (2010). “Cadillac Jack: A Novel”, p.86, Simon and Schuster

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• Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Religion, Facts

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• Our present urgency is to recover a sense of the primacy of the Universe as our fundamental context, and the primacy of the Earth as the matrix from which life has emerged and on which life depends. Recovering this sense is essential to establishing the framework for mutually enhancing human-Earth relations for the flourishing of life on the planet.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Earth, Essentials

  Thomas Berry (2010). “Evening Thoughts”, p.86, Counterpoint

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• Giving primacy to God means having the courage to say ‘no’ to evil, ‘no’ to violence, ‘no’ to oppression, to live a life in service of others and which fosters lawfulness and the common good. When a person discovers God, the true treasure, he abandons a selfish lifestyle and seeks to share with others the charity which comes from God. He who becomes a friend of God, loves his brothers and sisters, commits himself to safeguarding their life and their health, and also to respecting the environment and nature.

  Pope Francis

  Brother, Selfish, Mean

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• I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

  Dennis Lehane

  Believe, Levels, Language

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• Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

  Charles Krauthammer

  War, Struggle, Conflict

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• All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Reality, Agreement, Imagination

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• Godfulness is simply recognizing the primacy of a presence of love, spaciousness, grace, generativity, caring, and creativity in the world and in myself. How can a mere financial crisis compare to that? The Generative Mystery cannot go bankrupt. It is not subject to scarcity. We never run out of God.

  David Spangler

  Love, Running, Creativity

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• One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Thinking, Intellectual, Twenties

  Evgeny Morozov (2014). “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism”, p.135, PublicAffairs

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• A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

  Susan Sontag

  History, Psychology, Matter

  "Illness As Metaphor" by Susan Sontag, ch. 7 (pp. 55-56), 1978.

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• If the Europeans truly wish to improve their NATO contribution they can show it simply enough. They can establish professional armed forces, like those of the UK. And they can acquire more advanced technology. Indeed, unless that happens soon the gulf between the European and US capabilities will yawn so wide that it will not be possible to share the same battlefield. Alas, I do not think that sharing battlefields with our American friends - but rather disputing global primacy with them - is what European defence plans are truly about.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Technology, Thinking, Wish

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• The Papacy was corrupt for whole centuries: especially from about 880 to 1050 and (with a short decent pontificate at rare intervals) 1290 to about 1660. No 'primacy' in any other organized religion has so disgraceful a record.

  Joseph McCabe

  Religion, Records, Century

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• Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

  Simon Winchester

  Book, Use, Individual

  Simon Winchester (1998). “The surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale of murder, madness and the love of words”

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• I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Irony

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• Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Stars, Kings, Drama

  "THE AVENGERS Star Tom Hiddleston Writes Eloquent Editorial in Defense of Superhero Movies" by Adam Chitwood, collider.com. April 20, 2012.

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• He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

  James Gleick

  Essence, Knowing, Doubt

  James Gleick (2011). “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”, p.585, Open Road Media

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