Points Quotes - page 45
We know that, even as we watch with extreme concern everything unfolding in the United States over these past few days ... we are not immune to that in Canada. ... We have a responsibility as Canadians to continue to lead with respect, to engage substantially with different points of view and to never resort to violence as a way of impacting public discourse. That is something that Canadians have recommitted to across the country over these past days and we will continue to be extremely vigilant to remember that the choices we make as leaders, as politicians, have consequences.
Justin Trudeau
The whole beauty of the Film is that it has a certain fixed speed. The way you see it is mechanically conditioned. I mean, take a painting - you can just glance at it, or you can stare at the left hand top corner for half an hour. Same thing with a book. The author can't stop you from skimming it, or staring at the last chapter and reading backwards. The point is, you choose your approach. When you go into a cinema it's different. There's the film, and you have to look at it as the director wants you to look at it. He makes his points, one after another, and he allows you a certain number of seconds or minutes to grasp each one. If you miss anything he won't repeat himself, and he won't stop to explain. He can't. He's started something and he has to go through with it.
Christopher Isherwood
The question which the House would have to decide was, whether a system had been created under which all countries might live in that peace which it was the great object of the confederacy to establish. A difference of sentiment on some points of the arrangements could be no impeachment of the wisdom of the whole. Perfection belonged to no work of human beings, even when many years were devoted to it; much less when its completion was accelerated by the necessity of circumstances. On this general principle he applauded and was prepared to maintain the proceedings of the Congress at Vienna.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh
It was not merely a question whether the Bourbon family, which had already given so many benefits to France, and among them, that best of all benefits, peace, should continue to reign in France, but whether tyranny and despotism should again reign over the independent nations of the continent? Whether as applied to this country, we should enjoy the happy state that we had bought with our blood after a long struggle, or whether we should once more revert to that artificial system which, during that struggle, we were compelled to maintain? Upon these points there could exist only one feeling, and his lordship trusted that Providence would ordain only one result.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh
Sheckley at his best is nobody but Sheckley; his ability to make what may roughly he described as moral points with a sort of genial free-wheeling ingenuity is purely his own. There is also a second-best Sheckley, when it is obvious that he is not trying very hard; then the unlikeliness of his stories becomes tedious and often enough the genial note turns sour and snickery; in this phase, he writes like John Collier in a shabby grotesque mask. There is also a third Sheckley, have none of the Sheckley aura about...
Robert Sheckley
Seurat read Delacroix's journals and made notes on his use of colour mixing in his paintings. Delacroix's puzzlement over why blobs of blue and yellow failed to produce green could have prepared Seurat to see in his French translation of Rood's Modern Chromatics an answer to the problem. He [Seurat] mentions in his letter to Fénéon that Ogden Rood's book had been brought to his attention in 1881 (the year it was published in France).. .w:Ogden Rood's chief lesson was to make clear the distinction between coloured lights and coloured pigments.. .However, as [w:Herbert, Robert L.|Herbert]] points out, in 1881 and 1882 Seurat's oil paintings were still in the Barbizon tradition and it was not until 1883 that his palette lightened and not until he started 'Grande Jatte|A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte|Grande Jatte' in 1884 that he started to use separate blobs of complementary colour in a clear, conscious manner..
Georges Seurat
My letter [Ahmadinejad's "letter to the American people"] had different aims and goals. Many American citizens in the messages and letters they sent requested that I bring up my points of view directly. Many of them said that the government of America doesn't let them receive my point of view in its entirety and without distortions. So I talked to them directly. The behavior of the American government has severely damaged the position of the United States. No country in the world looks upon America as a friend. When the U.S. is mentioned, people are reminded of war, aggression and bloodshed, and that's not a good thing. In other words, the American people are paying for something they don't believe in.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Enjoined by the Constitution 'to take care that the laws be faithfully executed', and convinced by undoubted evidence that violations of said act had been committed and that a widespread and flagrant disregard of it was contemplated, the proper officers were instructed to prosecute the offenders, and troops were stationed at convenient points to aid these officers, if necessary, in the performance of their official duties. Complaints are made of this interference by Federal authority; but if said amendment and act do not provide for such interference under the circumstances as above stated, then they are without meaning, force, or effect, and the whole scheme of colored enfranchisement is worse than mockery and little better than a crime. Possibly Congress may find it due to truth and justice to ascertain, by means of a committee, whether the alleged wrongs to colored citizens for political purposes are real or the reports thereof were manufactured for the occasion.
Ulysses S. Grant
In the Senate yesterday, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of breaking their promise to confirm a number of presidential judicial nominations. To punish the Dems, McConnell used Senate rules to waste virtually the whole day having the Senate clerk read the bill under consideration, a global warming bill, aloud -- all 491 pages of it. Why? A Republican lobbyist leaked an internal GOP strategy memo to the Democrats (quote): "The GOP very much wants to have this fight, engage in it for a prolonged period, and then make it as difficult as possible to move off the bill." Why? (quote) "The focus is much more on making political points than in amending the bill, changing the baseline text for any future debate, or effecting policy." Making not policy but political points the goal of Mr. Bush's party: and you thought they weren't good at anything.
Mitch McConnell
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct". Not only is his overtendency like mine - namely, to make all knowledge the most powerful affect - but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange!
Baruch Spinoza
Gangs have always existed-they are primarily a community a young men trying to find intensity, meaning, a path to the outer world (outside of home) that most tribal groupings addressed with rituals, rites of passage, initiation ceremonies. We've lost this knowledge as a culture. Gangs also exist when there are lots of empties in a person, in family, in community. It points out how we need to do more to bring real art, passions, teachings, caring, and resources into the emptiness of young peoples' lives...
Luis Rodriguez
...Most people are content to live their lives within prescribed and personal boundaries. But one of the points of artists surely is that they live outside their skin. That they're connected. That they hurt with the hurt of their fellow humans. How, then, can they disengage? How can you – if your task, if your gift, is narrative – absent yourself from the great narrative of the world?...
Ahdaf Soueif
History, I was learning, is the story we tell ourselves about what really happened. My task as a writer/novelist was to try to get as many versions of that reality and then imaginatively construct the story. The fact that there were so many versions of what really happened should not surprise us: After all, we experience history as individuals through our particular characters, personalities, points of view. This reality of how we live history ideally suits the form of a novel, which focuses on "the truth according to character.
Julia Alvarez
Here, for the first time, we find ourselves a little at issue with the accepted system of chemistry. Fluorine stands at the head of a group-called the inter-periodic-whereof the remaining members are (see Crookes' table, p. 28), manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel; ruthenium, rhodium, palladium; osmium, iridium, platinum. If we take all these as group V, we find that fluorine and manganese are violently forced into company with which they have hardly any points of relationship, and that they intrude into an otherwise very harmonious group of closely similar composition. (Chapter III. The Later Researches, Part V.-The Bars Groups)
Annie Besant
Jon Stewart: But I can show you a prediction that's wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, King of Wrong Mountain. And it concerns accountability for pundits.
Dick Morris (clip): Romney's going to win. He's going to win by, I believe, more than 5 points. I believe he's going to get more than 300 electoral votes.
Dick Morris (clip): You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are.
Jon Stewart: No, you won't and they won't. Nobody will, because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning-free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in musical chairs, when the music stops, nobody ever moves the chair. They just keep adding more chairs.
Dick Morris
You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world - which is why it doesn't work. I don't share this heresy. I'm too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn't talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn't understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, "You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God's game and laugh about it.
Eugène Ionesco
Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet "the happiness of man on earth" depends upon their combination.
Lewis Mumford
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, "Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!" insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For most North Koreans the state equals the race, equals the country. This is where the North has been so much more successful than what I call the "Unloved Republic" of South Korea. There, as in Weimar Germany, the state is seen as having betrayed the race. When Moon Jae-in looks back on the history of the ROK he holds up only the anti-state riots and protests as high points.
Brian Reynolds Myers
