Reconstruction Quotes - Page 6

• Something new has happened: For the first time in German history our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people, and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland.

  Walter Ulbricht

  People, German History, Needs

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• Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

  John Irving

  Years, Stories, Months

  "Wrestling Life Into Fable". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2005.

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• We further decree that the Senate of the United States elect a prominent Democrat as their presiding officer, to act as President until the next election, and to reconstruct the Cabinet according to our wishes hereafter to be declared.

  Emperor Norton

  Wish, President, United States

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• Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

  Umberto Eco

  Pendulums, Said

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.457, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

  Fred Frith

  Thinking, Influence, Composer

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• Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.

  Andy Goldsworthy

  Artist, Stones, Form

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• We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

  Umberto Eco

  Memories, Past, Perspective

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2015.

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• Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.

  Paul Rotha

  Regret, Past, Reality

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• It's going to be possible to rebuild the physical aspects of Kosovo. I was there recently, and you get a sense of the destruction of homes. Infrastructure and the countryside is relatively untouched. I think the biggest problem will not be the physical reconstruction; it will be the emotional and mental reconstruction.

  James Wolfensohn

  Home, Emotional, Thinking

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• What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

  Piet Mondrian

  Sky, Doe, Use

  Carel Blotkamp, Piet Mondrian (1994). “Mondrian: the art of destruction”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Government, Community, Firsts

  Text of Testimony Before the Senate Appropriations Committee, www.nytimes.com. March 27, 2003.

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• This is all a bit of a puzzle, ... It will depend obviously on how quickly these areas can be repopulated, and also you've got the positive of reconstruction spending and the fact that that will create jobs.

  Paul Ashworth

  Jobs, Facts, Spending

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• Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

  John Dewey

  Regulation, Consciousness, Individual

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston (2008). “The Early Works, 1882-1898: 1895-1898. Early essays”, p.93, SIU Press

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• What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.

  Thomas Friedman

  War, Team, Cutting

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• For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

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• It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

  William Graham Sumner

  Human Nature, Trouble, Remedy

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• I plan to be a part of Haiti's reconstruction and future.

  Henry Rollins

  Haiti, Plans

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• Sometimes people say to me, 'Well, what was the difference between Kosovo, which was a successful intervention, and Iraq and Afghanistan that have been so difficult?' And the answer is perfectly simple. In Kosovo, you have, after the removal of the loss of its regime, you had a process of political and economic reconstruction that took its part without the intervention of terrorism. If you had the intervention of terrorism, by the way, it would have been extremely difficult there - but we didn't.

  Tony Blair

  Successful, Loss, Simple

  Interview with Glenn Thrush, www.politico.com. August 24, 2016.

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• Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Moving, Rights

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

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• If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

  Philip Levine

  Voice, Alive, Whole

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• When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.

  Hamid Drake

  Europe, Creative, Way

  Source: the-attic.net

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• I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

  George Saunders

  War, Reading, Writing

  "George Saunders on Trump, Mystery, and Why He Rejects Social Media". Interview with Catherine Woodiwiss, sojo.net. August 30, 2016.

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• the explanation of the ebb and flow of the women's movement ... is partly psychological. During those early post-war years when successes came thick and fast and were almost thrust upon us, the nation was still under the influence of the reconstruction spirit, when everything seemed possible ... A few years later the nation had reached the stage which follows a drinking bout. It was feeling ruefully in its empty pockets. It did not want to part with anything to anybody. Its head ached. Noble sentiments made it feel sick. It wanted only to be left alone.

  Eleanor Rathbone

  War, Drinking, Years

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• I understand why so many Americans are fed up with government. The 112th Congress was almost universally derided as the worst ever. It was the most polarized body since the end of Reconstruction, according to one study, and I grew embarrassed by its partisan bickering, inactivity, and refusal to address the vital challenges facing America.

  Olympia Snowe

  Government, America, Challenges

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• One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Dream, Hate, Simple

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2013). “Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880”, p.650, Transaction Publishers

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