Thousand Quotes - page 78
Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you cant help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
Robertson Davies
It is obvious that, with the best intentions in the world, Americanization cannot be established by propaganda. It is evident that, valuable as are the campaigns and parades and crusades of one kind or another, so long as they are without coherent form and interrelation they reach only the mass and may often add to rather than decrease the confusion. To reach the thousand subtle strains running through these old races, so highly organized and yet so intensely personal, Americanization must be simplified. It must find a way of reaching and holding the individual. We face the indisputable fact that almost without exception every foreign-born male adult is a member of some racial organization which takes precedence in his mind over every other form of association, of which he is a significant part, and in which he is recognized as an individual of worth and standing.
Frances Kellor
Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.
John Ziman
In the [past] one thousand years many parts of our country had been ruled by the Muslims and then by the British, but the nation had never compromised, in principle, its sovereignty over any part of the motherland. As a result, our nation had never ceased to strive for throwing out the aggressors and liberate those parts. And history tells us that ultimately it did succeed in freeing the entire land from the clutches of foreign invaders. However, for the first time, Partition conceded the moral and legal right to them over certain parts of the country and declared an ignominious finale to the one thousand years old heroic struggle for freedom. Thus it was an act of humiliating surrender on the point of principle. The usual interpretation of Partition, however, does not utter a word about this aspect. Even while conceding Partition to be a tragedy, it is sought to be made out as the only practical way out then available - as the inevitable price for achieving freedom.
H.V. Sheshadri
Ye will not pray; ye will not shun temptation; ye will not renounce known sin; ye will not fight against evil habits! Are ye stronger than God? Can ye contend with the Eternal One? Have ye the nerve which shall not tremble, and the flesh which shall not quiver, and the soul which shall not quail, when the sheet of fire is round the globe, and thousand times ten thousand angels line the sky, and call to judgment?
Henry Melvill
