Universality Quotes - Page 2

• Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

  Hu Shih

  Past, Law, Doe

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• Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy.

  Stephen Harper

  Policy, Areas, Has Beens

  Stephen Harper's Speech to the National Citizens Coalition's Colin Brown Memorial Dinner, 1994.

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• It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.

  Vaclav Havel

  Rights, People, Leader

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• We live in a world where great incompatibles co-exist: the human scale and the superhuman scale, stability and mobility, permanence and change, identity and anonymity, comprehensibility and universality.

  Kenzo Tange

  Identity, Mobility, World

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• The universality of salvation means that it is granted not only to those who explicitly believe in Christ and have entered the Church. Since salvation is offered to all, it must be made concretely available to all.

  Pope John Paul II

  Believe, Mean, Church

  Pope John Paul II (1991). “Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Permanent Validity of the Church's Missionary Mandate”

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• Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood.

  Arthur Compton

  Mean, Science, Men

  "The Human Meaning of Science".

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• The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Life, Ethics, Reverence

  Albert Schweitzer (2014). “Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography”, p.237, Henry Holt and Company

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• [The aim of science is] to explain what so far has taken to be an explicans, such as a law of nature. The task of empirical science constantly renews itself. We may go on forever, proceeding to explanations of a higher and higher universality.

  Karl Popper

  Taken, Science, Law

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• The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

  Sean O Faolain

  Writing, Artist, Ideas

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• The universality of Islam is not uniformity, it is unity with diversity.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Diversity, Unity, Islam

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• The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.

  Ruth Benedict

  Men, Civilization, White

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• I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Believe, Writing, Thinking

  Lorraine Hansberry (2012). “Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?”, p.6, Vintage

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• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

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• The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

  Kenneth E. Iverson

  Tools, Language, Well Known

  "Notation as a Tool of Thought". Cvommunications of the ACM, 23 (8), (pp. 444 - 465), August 1980.

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• If form follows function, as we know it does in this Universe, then consciousness will adapt to whatever form it requires in order to function. Hopefully, it will also develop its fundamental function; what that is may be debatable within many schools of thought, but it is indisputable that evolved thinking recognizes the universality of Life.

  Vanna Bonta

  School, Thinking, Order

  Zero Gravity Interview (2006), as quoted in Laura S. Woodmansee "Sex in Space" (p. 75), August 1, 2006.

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• The only ‘realistic’ prospect is to ground a new
  political universality by opting for the impossible,
  fully assuming the place of the exception, with no
  taboos, no a priori norms (‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’),
  respect for which would prevent us from ‘resignifying’
  terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of
  sacrifice … if this radical choice is decried by some
  bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!

  Slavoj Žižek

  Heart, Exercise, Sacrifice

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• No such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world - a testimony to its universality.

  Michael Shermer

  Lying, Foundation, World

  Michael Shermer (2005). “The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule”, p.64, Macmillan

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• Painting, because of its universality, becomes speculation.

  El Greco

  Painting, Speculation

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• It is the great beauty of true religion that it shall be universal, and a departure in any instance from universality is a corruption of religion itself.

  Joseph Glanvill

  Religion, Departure, Corruption

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• I read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant ... I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, to how they talked about the dead and how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere.

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Hero, Talking, Years

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• Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.

  Horace Mann

  School, Civilization, Two

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• That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Ideas, Clue

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• The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  People, Fiction, Done

  "Author Joyce Carol Oates on Widowhood’s ‘World of Absurdity’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. February 3, 2011.

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• To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--

  John Gardner

  Suicide, Art, Pain

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• However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

  Yukio Mishima

  Art, Men, Individuality

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