Almost Quotes - page 96
![In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. (Edward Bernays)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/52/edward-bernays-act-almost-422152.webp)
It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark in history.
John W. Campbell
The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.
Pauline Kael
Movies make hash of the schoolmarm's approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money - and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist's intentions" you'd probably wish you couldn't anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.
Pauline Kael
There appears to me to be no device at present but between an absolute surrender of the liberties of the People and a vigorous exertion...My view of things is I own very gloomy, and I am convinced that in a few years this Government will become completely absolute, or that confusion will arise of a nature almost as much to be deprecated as despotism itself...This is a great Crisis.
Charles James Fox
But at no one time had he given an unqualified opinion of the governments which succeeded that event [the abolition of the French monarchy]; much less would he stand pledged to give the least countenance to the scenes of blood and cruelty which had been the almost inseparable attendants on the varied and successive governments that followed one another. He formed his opinion of government by the test of practice, and not by the theory and on paper.
Charles James Fox
However it may have happened, it is an excellent thing, and I do not like it the worse for its being so very triumphant a peace for France...The sense of humiliation in the Government here will be certainly lost in the extreme popularity of the measure...this rascally people are quite overjoyed at receiving from Ministers what, if they had dared to ask it, could not have been refused them at almost any period of the war. Will the Ministers have the impudence to say that there was any time (much less that when Bonaparte's offer was refused) when we might not have had terms as good? Bonaparte's triumph is now complete indeed, and, since there is to be no political liberty in the world, I really believe he is the fittest person to be the master.
Charles James Fox
I wished to find out whether a similar bright line could be seen in the spectrum of sunlight as in the spectrum of lamplight, and I found, with the telescope, instead of this, an almost countless number of strong and feeble vertical lines which, however, were darker than the other parts of the spectrum, some appearing to be almost perfectly black.
Joseph von Fraunhofer
I use the term "Communist Jews" in exactly the same sense that I would say "Italian gangsters." Most Italians are not gangsters, but everybody knows that the Mafia is mostly Italians. Well, my experience is that communism is as Jewish as the Mafia is Italian. It's a fact that almost all of the convicted spies for communism have been atheist Jews like the Rosenbergs. And international communism was invented by the Jew Karl Marx and has since been led mostly by Jews - Trotsky.
George Lincoln Rockwell
Almost all of the material phenomena which occur under terrestrial conditions are recognized as quantum mechanical consequences of the electrical attraction between electrons and nuclei and of the gravitational attraction between massive objects. We should be able, therefore, to express all the relevant magnitudes which characterize the properties of matter in terms of the following six magnitudes: M, m, e, c, G, and h; M is the mass of the proton, m and e are the mass and electrical charge of the electron, c is the light velocity, G is Newton's gravitational constant, and-most importantly-h is the quantum of action ...
Victor Frederick Weisskopf
Incredible. I didn't know how to calm him down, and then I had an inspiration. I went to my hut, where, for months I had hidden a piece of chocolate. We would almost have killed one another for something like that. I went back to him, going right into his face and ate the chocolate. All of a sudden he was quiet. This was utterly beyond him.
Werner Herzog
In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity.
Michel Foucault
To divide people into sadists and masochists is almost as foolish as dividing them into eaters and digesters. In all cases one must disregard abnormalities; after all, there are people who are better at digesting than they are at eating and vice versa. As regards masochism and sadism, it is safe to say that a healthy person displays both perversities. The only ugly thing in each case is the word. The one derived from the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is particularly degrading, and it is hard not to let one's taste for things be spoiled by the designation. Nevertheless, a man with an artistic imagination will manage to let an authentic woman turn him into a masochist and an inauthentic one into a sadist. One knocks the latter's educated unnaturalness out of her until the woman is revealed. If she already is a woman, the only thing left to do is adore her.
Karl Kraus
