Function Quotes - page 3

Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation. (Rudolf Steiner)
In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind. View quote
Henri Poincaré
Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius. View quote
An Wang
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man. View quote
Albert Einstein
A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand. View quote
Renzo Piano
Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction. View quote
Charles Cooley
Militarism is basically a way of thinking, a certain interpretation of the function of the state; this manner of thinking is, moreover, revealed by its outer forms: by armaments and state organization. View quote
Christian Lous Lange
Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary. View quote
Anna Friel
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them. View quote
Asa Gray
If a catastrophic event wipes out a large portion of House members, America needs to know this body, elected by the people, will be quickly and legally reconstituted and will continue to function. View quote
Charles W. Pickering
Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure. (Xavier Becerra)
I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. View quote
Rollo May
In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music - all with love. In other words, create a magic world. View quote
Valerie Solanas
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold. View quote
John Paul Stevens
The function of art is to struggle against obligation. View quote
Amedeo Modigliani
So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. View quote
William James
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. View quote
Umberto Eco
The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. View quote
Blaise Pascal
1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function. View quote
Jacques Derrida
Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, "expressed in curves. (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). View quote
Ayn Rand
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul. View quote
Derek Walcott
Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function! View quote
Tennessee Williams
A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. View quote
William O. Douglas