Prove Quotes - page 77
Here sits the Unicorn;
Leashed by a chain of gold
To the pomengranate tree.
So light a chain to hold
So fierce a beast;
Delicate as a cross at rest
On a maiden's breast.
He could snap the golden chain
With one toss of his mane,
If he chose to move,
If he chose to prove
His liberty.
But he does not choose
What choice would lose.
He stays, the Unicorn,
In captivity.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. Shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture; and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.
Anne Brontë
It does not seem impossible,” murmured Her Exactitude. "Moreover, it accords with our ethical imperative. Luckily, our imperative is based upon experience, rather than upon artifacts or scriptures, so we are not likely to be thrown into disorganization by judgments made centuries ago. We do not assert as true anything which we have not proven or seen proven by others. Thus, we never claimed that we were the center either of the universe or of a deity's attention. While we do not deny deity, we do not presume to understand it, plea bargain with it, or tell others what shape it takes. It does make life easier.
Sheri S. Tepper
Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even today the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that consumption will continue nearly stationary. Two generations, with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which was to follow the explosion of new power. All the men who were elderly in the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old nursing the same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for fifty years, permitted, or encouraged, society to think that force would prove to be limited in supply. This mental inertia of science lasted through the eighties before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible.
Henry Adams
Kierkegaard was concerned to prove what might be called the activist nature of love, and in this respect he returns to the conception of the early Greek philosophers. He goes so far as to say that the poet who sings of earthly love cannot be a Christian, 'for love of one's neighbour is not sung, it is acted'.
Herbert Read
I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
Eugène Ionesco
They shouldn't need photographs to prove this guy is dead. They should have kept the body. They should have brought the son-of-a-bitch back to New York, pickled him in alcohol, and mounted him on top of the Ground Zero mosque with a pork chop in his mouth and a fireman's axe up his ass - or is that just me? Facing Mecca, of course, because we wouldn't want to be disrespectful.
Pat Condell
The growers are willing to spend tremendous amounts of money to try to represent the fact that farmworkers don't want a union, by hiring people like Jose Mendoza, who took a picture with Senator Dirksen to try to prove that the farmworkers don't want a union. They could very easily have paid the workers decent wages with the money they are spending. They have hired public relations firms to try to prove that we are a violent union, which I think everyone knows we are not.
Dolores Huerta
And this is where your new Afghan roommates that you took in will prove so valuable because they'll turn to you and say ‘Have you people lost your fucking minds?!' Have you ever heard of honor killings, public beheadings, throwing gay men off of roofs, arranged marriages to minors, state-sanctioned wife-beating, female genital mutilation, marriage by capture? Because we have.
Bill Maher
It is said that Louis Farrakhan's racist crackpot Nation of Islam and its sectarian gang gets young men off drugs. For all I know it does, it may, but that does not recommend it, to me, nor does it prove anything of its theology. Whereas I can tell you that of the suicide bombing population one hundred percent is faith-based. And I don't think that in itself disapproves faith, but I think it should make you skeptical of that kind of random sampling. Of the genital mutilation community the same can be said.
Christopher Hitchens
The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell.
Brian Hayes (scientist)
I let nothing slip, however small; and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old chroniclers, to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass away entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete barbarism? Who knows that, when men-of-war shall be no more, "White-Jacket" may not be quoted to show to the people in the Millennium what a man-of-war was? God hasten the time!
Herman Melville
Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure.
Edward FitzGerald (poet)
There are no gods (including God). Like all species, ours is a product of nature. This is not something either to celebrate or to mourn. But it can prove a transformational and mind-opening experience to put all gods, religions and supernatural enthusiasms aside and to explore the world from the point of view of a human being who lives, dies, and is as natural as a tiger or a dove.
Eric Maisel
...They also make a distinction between a warrior and a murderer, which, as they explain it, is not much to our advantage. It is not, say they, the number of scalps alone which a man brings with him that prove him to be a brave warrior. Cowards have been known to return, and bring scalps home, which they had taken where they knew was no danger, where no attack was expected and no opposition made. Such was the case with those Christian Indians on the Muskingum, the friendly Indians near Pittsburg, and a great number of scattered, peaceable men of our nation, who were all murdered by cowards. It is not thus that the Black Snake, the great General Wayne acted; he was a true warrior and a brave man; he was equal to any of our chiefs that we have, equal to any that we have ever had...
Anthony Wayne
The conversation makes me crazy, and I haven't been in very many places where I have had conversations with people of color who don't agree with me. It feels like the most dismissive and dangerous shrug-off of a phenomenon that has not gone away; how can you be post-racial in a society proven to have huge economic disparity between races? And attitudinally?...
Lydia R. Diamond
He would talk with me often about his feelings. You know, Clemente felt strongly about the fact that he was a Puerto Rican and that he was a black man. In each of these things he had pride. But it was a beautiful, uncompromising kind of pride, because I never heard him – and you must remember here that I am fluent in Spanish – I just never heard him make a slurring remark about anyone's color or religion. In this he was remarkable. On the other hand, because of the early language barriers, I am sure that there were times when he thought people were laughing at them when they were not. It is difficult for a Latin-American ballplayer to understand everything said around him when it is said at high speed, if he doesn't speak English that well. But, in any event, he wanted very much to prove to the world that he was a superstar and that he could do things that in his heart he felt that he had already proven.
Roberto Clemente
None are so easily taken in as the "knowing ones." The knowing one is generally an egregious ninny. The man who loses his last shilling at Doncaster, is no other than he who was sure of winning; who could prove by his betting-book that he must win by backing Chaff against the field. He is a fine specimen of the family of Oldbirds. So is the careful, cautious wight, the original Master Surecard, the man of many savings, who in his old age falls in love with a loan; who dies in prison from the pressure of foreign bonds, or drowns himself in the new canal by way of securing what he calls his share. The genuine old bird is a pigeon.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
Someone once wrote, "A bullet need happen only once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again.” My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided. And we're going to have to keep on doing it "again and again and again.” That's how this country gets united. That's how we bring people of good will together. Only we can prove that we have the grace and the character and the common humanity to end this kind of senseless violence, to reduce fear and mistrust within the American family, to set an example for our children. That's who we are, and that's who we always have the capacity to be. And that's the best way for us to honor the sacrifice of the brave police officers who were taken from us this morning.
Barack Obama
Weil's new mathematical language, algebraic geometry, had enabled him to articulate subtleties about solutions to equations that hitherto had been impossible. But if there was any hope of extending Weil's ideas to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, it was clear they would need to be developed beyond the foundations he had laid in his prison cell in Rouen. It would be another mathematician from Paris who would bring the bones of Weil's new language to life. The master architect who performed this task was one of the strangest and most revolutionary mathematicians of the twentieth century - Alexandre Grothendieck.
Alexander Grothendieck
That day the whole world held festival. All schools were dismissed, - all banks and workshops and factories closed, - all "unnecessary labor suspended," as the great salutes and the great chimes came booming out, which announced the agreement of a world of self-forgetting men. That day, do I say? Every day from that day was festival, - century after century. So soon as the world once learned the infinite blessing of Active Love, and stayed it by Faith, and enjoyed it in Hope, there was no danger that the world should unlearn that lesson.
That lesson - if this vision of a possibility prove true - comes to the world by no change of law; by no new revelation, nor other gospel than the world has now. It comes simply as man after man and woman after woman lead such unselfish lives, as all of us see sometimes, as all would be glad to live...
Edward Everett Hale
