Figure Quotes - page 78
The tall fellow Bazille has done something I find quite fine: a young girl [in his painting 'View on the village' ] in a very light dress in the shadow of a tree beyond which one sees a town. There is a good deal of light, sunlight, He is trying to do what we [Berthe and her sister Edma] have so often tried to bring off: to paint a figure in the open air. This time I think he has succeed.
Berthe Morisot
1910–11 was a time of the wildest uncertainty and political ferment. True, those good old politicians who still figure in the cartoons were already with us, but in what different guise! Our die-hard Mr Winston Churchill was the radical Home Secretary; Mr Ramsay MacDonald was preaching class war with something very near to verbal coherence; Mr Lloyd George, whom frequent photographs have endeared to us as a benevolent landed proprietor, was inveighing against the privileges of the gentry in terms which might have been translated direct from Danton or Robespierre.
Evelyn Waugh
Greg, what are you talking about? Ending corruption? Like there's a version of this society that isn't corrupt? Corruption isn't the exception, it's the norm. It's baked in. The whole idea of using markets to figure out who gets what is predicated on corruption-it's a way to paper over the fact that some people get a lot, most of us get not much, and so we invent a deus ex machina called market forces that hands out money based on merit. How do we know that the market is giving it to deserving people? Well, look at all the money they have! It's just circular reasoning.
Cory Doctorow
Bobbie sighed. "You know, a thousand of those stars out there are ours now. That's like, what? Three ten-thousandths of a percent of our galaxy? That's what we're fighting over.”
"You think?”
"You don't?”
"Nah,” Alex said. "I figure we're fighting over who gets the most meat from the hunt and first access to the water hole. Mating rights. Who believes in which gods. Who has the most money. The usual primate issues.”
"Kids,” Bobbie said.
"Kids?”
"Yeah. Everyone wanting to make sure their kids have a better shot than they did. Or than everyone else's kids. Something like that.”
"Yeah, probably,” Alex said.
Daniel Abraham
I'm very lucky I didn't have it easy, because I've learned so much from having to figure out everything on my own and create things for myself. Now I can teach what I've learned to the next generation. I'm not just going to be the pretty face that disappears. I've learnt how to produce, to direct, to write. I'm not disposable so easily anymore. When I am 60, I can keep directing. I have the potential to really, truly have a voice that makes a difference.
Salma Hayek
One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism-how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Not since the day almost 45 years ago, when word reached Washington that his brother, John, had been cut down in Dallas, has there been news about an individual that struck so deep a blow to so many in this capital. The medical bulletin from Massachusetts General Hospital about Sen. Ted Kennedy was at once a personal tragedy and a political cataclysm. In his 46 years in the Senate, Kennedy probably has touched more people, in more cherished ways, than any other public figure. And his illness threatens to alter, for the worse, the prospects of every other politician -- starting with Barack Obama and John McCain.
Ted Kennedy
Since Biden circa 2022 is often compared to 1970s Jimmy Carter due to a combination of sluggish job approval ratings, unhappy progressive activists, and big-time economic problems (especially inflation), it is germane to observe that Carter managed to soundly defeat Ted Kennedy - the liberal lion of the 1970s and subsequent decades - in the 1980 nomination contest. Are there any Ted Kennedys around right now to mobilize progressive anti-administration grievances into a successful insurgent candidacy? Someday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have that stature - but not now. Indeed, the only potential rival from any wing of the party who is in that position is Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden. And even if there were some Kennedy-like figure available, would the fight disable the Democratic Party (as it arguably did in 1980) more than slogging ahead with the incumbent?
Ted Kennedy
It will be necessary to explain the spirit of the method of arranging the observed astronomical objects under consideration in such a manner, that one shall assist us to understand the nature and construction of the other. This end I propose to obtain by assorting them into as many classes as will be required to produce the most gradual affinity... and it will be found that those contained in one article, are so closely allied to those in the next, that there is perhaps not so much difference between them... as there would be in an annual description of the human figure were it given from the birth of a child till he comes to be a man in his prime.
William Herschel
When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Monty was not such a dashing, romantic figure as his opponent; nor would you find him leading a forlorn hope in person, for the simple reason that if he was in command forlorn hopes did not occur. He had an extraordinary capacity for putting his finger straight on the essentials of any problem, and of being able to explain them simply and clearly. He planned all his battles most carefully - and then put them out of his mind every night. I believe he was awakened in the night only half a dozen times during the whole war.
Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
Wallace Stevens
Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
Robert Frost
If you do do it, please hold me as a model, and not as 'the most romantic figure of the war . I'm tired of the lime light, and am really not stagy at all, and not ever going to be a public figure again. It was a war effort, imposed, involuntary. Don't do me as Colonel Lawrence (he died Nov. 11. 1918).
T. E. Lawrence
One example of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek ... which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light," failing to factor in laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins. This calculation comes to Coppedge third-hand, and is now outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA).
Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
But, presenting to your weakness the gift of the example of His own flesh, the more perfect Adam-that is, Christ, more perfect on this account as well (as on others), that He was more entirely pure-stands before you, if you are willing (to copy Him), as a voluntary celibate in the flesh. If, however, you are unequal (to that perfection), He stands before you a monogamist in spirit, having one Church as His spouse, according to the figure of Adam and of Eve, which (figure) the apostle interprets of that great sacrament of Christ and the Church, (teaching that), through the spiritual, it was analogous to the carnal monogamy.
Tertullian
All kinds of local and regional data confirm the faster muslim growth rate. The two provinces with the highest relative population growth between 1981 and 1991 are Kashmir (28%) and Lakshadweep (27%), both with a Muslim minority though in very divergent economic and political conditions; followed by Madhya Pradesh (26%) and Uttar Pradesh (25%). In Uttar Pradesh, between 1981 and 1991, the Muslim percentage rose from 15.53% to 17.33 %, in Bihar from 14.13% to 14.81%, in West Bengal from 21.51 to 23.61%. While in Bihar birth control seemed to have a slight effect in a decrease of the decadal increase from 30.03% in 1971-81 to 29.5% (still more than 5% higher than the Hindu figure) in 1981-91, there was a much larger increase in the decadal increase in U.P. from 29.11% to 36.54%, and in West Bengal from 29.55% to 36.89%.
Koenraad Elst
Unfortunately for all of them, the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) and the Allahabad High Court (2010) reconfirmed the old consensus: of course, a Hindu temple had stood at the site and had been forced to make way for the mosque. So, all these Leftist efforts to impose a rewritten version of history had been in vain. Moreover, in her recent book Rama and Ayodhya, Meenakshi Jain has documented what a sorry figure these supposed "experts” have cut when they were questioned in court during the Ayodhya proceedings. One after another was forced to admit that he didn't really know, that he hadn't been to the site though pontificating on its archaeology, that is was all just a hypothesis. So, those were the people who had been cited as authority by all the politicians, journalists and India-watchers. If the truth of their politically motivated deception is given proper publicity, their game will be over. (Ch. 16)
Koenraad Elst
