Center Quotes - page 45
From November of 1892 I passed through astonishing and crucial experiences, following which, in the spring of 1893, there occurred the most extraordinary event of my life. I had crossed 14th Street at 4th Avenue, in New York City. Cars and people were hurrying by. While stepping up to the northeast corner curbstone, Light, greater than that of myriads of suns opened in the center of my head. In that instant or point, eternities were apprehended. There was no time. Distance and dimensions were not in evidence.
Harold W. Percival
On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose: Pentagon employees ran into smoke-filled corridors to guide their friends to safety. Firefighters rushed up the stairs of the World Trade Center as the towers neared collapse. Passengers aboard Flight 93 charged the cockpit and laid down their lives to spare countless others. One of the worst days in America's history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans' history. We'll always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice.
George W. Bush
The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.
Roger Ebert
I always took myself really seriously... but sometimes I'd be at a venue and the guy would call me ‘sweetie' or ‘honey' when we were doing drums and stuff. I'd carry the drums in myself so people wouldn't say I was a bitch. I went very briefly to an engineering school, so I knew the difference between white noise and pink noise and what a view meter was, and a logs player and things like that. I didn't need to know but it came in handy when I was sitting with Steve Albini like ‘really? Is that a good logs player?' I barely know what it is, but I learned "Smoke On The Water" so I could go to Guitar Center and play that and not have guys look at me. It was a different time-I think girls get taken a lot more seriously now.
Courtney Love
The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country.
Jane Jacobs
The truth is, I've always been quietly proud of my real age. Why wouldn't I want to celebrate every crease in my brow, all that hard-earned wisdom that lives between the folds? If my first manager, Warren Coleman, hadn't been so insistent that I age myself down-he feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that an industry rife with female age discrimination would count me out of a lot of roles-I may have just omitted my age, rather than changing it. It's nobody's business. But when the Kennedy Center honor came around, I felt it was important to set the public record straight. Months before I learned I was to receive the award, I'd celebrated my ninetieth birthday. During the press blitzkrieg surrounding the Kennedy Center ceremony, I spoke that number aloud with nary a quake in my voice. "When were you born?" one reporter asked me. "December 19, 1924," I answered. For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of. It was a journey to delight in.
Cicely Tyson
I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
Hermann Hesse
I can never predict what is going to capture my interest and draw me to create. I think it comes primarily from curiosity. I like to play the "what if” game with subjects. "What if slaves owned by Jewish families adopted that religion?” "What if a family living in the proposed footprint of Lincoln Center in 1959 were completely devoted to Jerome Robbins and his work?” "What if a straight guy became a drag queen?” That leads to the next important question of "why?” And then "who?” And so on.
Matthew Lopez (playwright)
In that photo ("Pale Blue Dot"), the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel something of reality-even a reality that some of us have long resisted. A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter-to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning of this scientific achievement.
Ann Druyan
I saw myself entering a cave in a rock formation on a bleak, windswept seacoast. The entrance to the cave was low, and the cave was quite deep. All I found in it was a very old and large parchment scroll. Its ends were rolled around heavy, gold-tipped poles, the two sides touching at the scroll's center and tied together by a strip of parchment that fell away as my fingers touched it. I untied the ends and opened the scroll just enough to expose the center panel, on which only two words were written; 'God is', and nothing else. ...
Helen Schucman
It is also a truly embarrassing indictment of what's considered "center" politics in the US that objecting to the appointment of an official who helped cover up the murder of a Black child is deemed the "progressive, far left" position...What is so hard to understand about this? Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership. This is not about the "visibility" of a post. It is shameful and concerning that he is even being considered.
Rahm Emanuel
Liberal intellectuals, then, whether of the continental persuasion like Aron or Luigi Einaudi, or in the British sense like Isaiah Berlin, were always distinctly more comfortable than most conservatives with the American connection that history had imposed upon them. The same was true, curious as it may seem, of Social Democrats. This was in part because the memory of FDR was still fresh, and many of the American diplomats and policy-makers with whom Europeans dealt in these years were New Dealers, who encouraged an active role for the state in economic and social policy and whose political sympathies fell to the left of center.
Tony Judt
Every politically significant revolution is anticipated by a transformation of the intellectual landscape. The European upheavals of the 1980s were no exception. The economic crisis of the early Seventies undermined the optimism of Western Europe's post-war decades, fracturing conventional political parties and propelling unfamiliar issues to the center of public debate. Political argument on both sides of the Cold War divide was breaking decisively with decades of encrusted mental habits-and, with unexpected speed, forming new ones. For better and for worse, a new realism was being born.
Tony Judt
In some sense it is my story, too. I grew up and read and became a historian and, I like to think, an intellectual. The Jewish question was never at the center of my own intellectual life, or indeed my historical work. But it intrudes, inevitably, and with ever greater force. One of the aims of this book is to allow such themes to encounter each other, to permit the intellectual history of the twentieth century to meet the history of the Jews. This is a personal as well as a scholarly effort: after all, many of us who have, in our work, kept these themes distinct are ourselves Jews.
Tony Judt
4) Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.
Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this - Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either.
Larry Niven
![Broadly speaking, the city of the future will not bring to its center any goods not intended for use or consumption therein. At Chicago 66% of the tonnage in and out is not for home use, but for distribution to other places. In view of this fact we designed a general freight scheems for the entire city's use, with car yards, freight depots and warehouses combined, eight miles from the city, where all trains shall unload and reload. [...] I believe that such a course would be economical both for the public service companies and the city government; certainly it would prolong the life of the street paving and eliminate congestion and a constant source of dirty and disorder. Can it be doubted that the city of the future will operate its cental street system, possibly all its streets, in this manner? (Daniel Burnham)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/00/daniel-burnham-believe-car-1003000.webp)
Lord of all being, thronèd afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star;
Center and soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart how near!
Sun of our life, Thy quickening ray,
Sheds on our path the glow of day;
Star of our hope, Thy softened light
Cheers the long watches of the night.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try.
Abraham Pais
No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it...
Thomas Pynchon
