Almost Quotes - page 75
...my watchword if I were in office at this moment would be summed up in one single word-the word "efficiency." (Cheers.) If we have not learned from this war that we have greatly lagged behind in efficiency we have learned nothing, and our treasure and our lives are thrown away unless we learn the lesson which the war has given us...last, and, perhaps, greatest of all, there comes a question that underlies the efficiency of our nation...I mean education (loud cheers), in which we are lagging sadly, and with which we shall have peacefully to fight other nations with weapons like the bow and arrow if we do not progress. We have nothing like a national system, but a great chaos of almost haphazard arrangement.
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known. Great God, how early it is! Until now I had almost forgotten His name.
"Come!” the voice booms, but commanding me now: Come, My son! I turn in surrender.
Surely I come quickly. Amen.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
Oh how bright and fair the morning star ...
William Styron
Nothing gives history a greater superiority to many branches of literature, than to see in a manner imprinted, in almost every page of it, the precious footsteps and shining proofs of this great truth, viz. that God disposes all events as supreme Lord and Sovereign; that he alone determines the fate of kings and the duration of empires; and that he transfers the government of kingdoms from one nation to another, because of the unrighteous dealings and wickedness committed therein.
Charles Rollin
The better artists are original and obdurate; they're the gravel in the pea soup. ln Jackson Pollock's painting the particularity, the immediacy, is the dripped paint, which remains dripped paint as a phenomenon, for all the beauty of the small shapes it makes it makes. The generality is in the scale or proportion and in the large shapes. It's in the appearance of chaos. The gesture or the motion shown in the application of the paint varies from painting to painting from the particular to a middling generality. The size and the color generally occur in the middle between particularity and generality. At the same time as Pollock and since, almost all first-rate art has been based on an immediate phenomenon, for example the work of Dan Flavin and Larry Bell.
Donald Judd
I was working on this movie and the makeup artist was just so ugly! I just wanted to say "Physician, heal thyself!" She looked exactly like Aaron Neville, and she was trying her hardest to make me look exactly like Aaron Neville. This one time, she leaned into my face with the mascara wand almost touching my eye and she says, "Whass my name?"
Margaret Cho
During the war the congregation was largely broken up [...] and it was never really reconstituted after the war. [...] Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood [...] and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur.
Oliver Sacks
