Distance Quotes - page 25
The teams at times could go but a short distance every day. In bad weather at night there would be as many as 150 horses at one of the small frame inns which were not more than five or eight miles apart. Each driver had to care for his eight horses, feed, clean, card, harness and unharness. For all this work my father received the wages of $15 per month.
Henry M. Leland
The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends.
George Herbert Mead
In what manner that power can be applied to draw water or ore from mines, to discharge iron bullets to a great distance, to propel ships against the wind, and to a multitude of other similar purposes, it would be too long here to detail; but each individual, according to the particular occasion, must select the construction of machinery appropriate to his purpose.
Denis Papin
Gradually... during the second half of the nineteenth century, the uncomfortable feeling of dislike of the action at a distance, which had been so strong in Huygens and other contemporaries of Newton, but had subsided during the eighteenth century, began to emerge again, and gained strength rapidly.
This was favoured by the purely mathematical transformation (which can be compared in a sense with that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system), replacing Newton's finite equations by the differential equations, the potential becoming the primary concept, instead of the force, which is only the gradient of the potential. These ideas, of course, arose first in the theory of electricity and magnetism or perhaps one should say in the brain of Faraday.
Willem de Sitter
Beside my own intense, multiple impressions of him, I also had to contend with his 'world image' created by the endless newspaper photographs, TV appearances, caricatures. Realizing this, I began to collect hundreds of photographs torn from newspapers and magazines and never missed an opportunity to draw him when he appeared on TV. These snapshots covered every angle, from above, below, profile, back, standing, sitting, walking, close-up, off in the distance. I particularly liked tiny shots where the features were indistinct yet unmistakable. Covering my walls with my own sketches and these photographs, I worked from canvas to canvas (the smallest 2 feet high, the largest, 11) always striving for a composite image.
Elaine de Kooning
These kinds of habits, in good company, are so very nauseous and disgusting, that if we indulge ourselves in them, no one can be very fond of our acquaintance. So far from it, that even those, who are inclined to wish us well, must, by these and the like disagreeable customs, be entirely alienated from us.- Those ill-bred people, who expect their acquaintance to love and caress them, with all their foibles, are as absurd as a poor ragged cinder-wench; who should roll about upon an heap of ashes, scrabbling and throwing dust in the face of every one that passed by; and yet flatter herself that she should allure some youth to her embraces, by these dirty endearments; which would infallibly keep him at a distance.
Giovanni della Casa
Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.
John L. Heilbron
I believe that there are varying points of contact. You have to be able to see the whole thing first. All great paintings are sculptures – there's so much of the factualness about it that a great painting forces you into a visual, physical movement of yourself. That's what determines the way you experience a painting kinetically. You move closer, you sight down it, you till your head, you step back, you feel as though you are in it. That being in it is just as important as looking from a distance.
Kenneth Noland
Abstract Expressionism – especially Pollock, not the more academic painters like De Kooning – made the threshold between illusion and the stuff of painting lower, the distance between them closer. Pollock made all things about the picture, all the stuff, actual. Taking the canvas off the stretcher, putting it on the floor, made it more real. Mixing up different kinds of paint, getting it to stain in, was getting at a kind of materiality.
Kenneth Noland
It may seem strange that there can be a structure for breaking all structures and that it can have a precise, limited form, and be built to particular specifications. Yet we have two major examples of such a structure in our experience. One is the mind as imagination. The other is society, progressively recast on the model of the imaginationː organized to shorten the distance between our context-preserving and context-transforming activities and to diminish the dependence of transformation on crisis.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Market-Garden was the biggest airborne operation of World War II, which is to say of all time. The D-day assault included 20,000 parachutists, some 1,500 transport planes, and about 500 gliders, and was protected by over 1,000 Allied fighters. In this D-day landing the 101st had over 400 C-47 transport aircraft and 70 gliders carrying nearly 7,000 officers and men. The remainder of the division arrived progressively by air and ship over the next six days. Our initial mission was to secure fifteen miles of highway extending from Eindhoven to Veghel and to seize and hold the bridges in the area for use of the spearhead units of the British Second Army advancing from the south. Although our objectives were scattered, I insisted on putting all the troops arriving the first day into a compact area between Zon and Veghel in order to have them within supporting distance of each other at the outset.
Maxwell D. Taylor
A central thesis of this book is that the connection between thought and practice is most intimately and fully realized only when our minds are addressed to our own affairs-the concerns of humanity. When we direct our thoughts to nature, even if to see ourselves as fixtures of nature, we loosen the connection between thought and practice. When we loosen it, we are tempted to assume the posture I earlier called naturalism. We survey both the human and the nonhuman worlds from a supposedly godlike distance. We treat the achievement of such distance as the realization of our longing for transcendence.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
The arrangements of society and culture are fighting petrified; they survive in the interruption or containment of practical and visionary strife. The more society and culture are organized to increase the distance between our context-preserving and our context-transforming activities, the more these arrangements take on the appearance of natural facts. They appear to us as givens, as our collective fate. Indeed, that is what, in a sense, they then become.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing-the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
From a score of well-observed original orbits it is shown that the "new" long-period comets generally come from regions between about 50000 and 150000 A. U. distance. The sun must be surrounded by a general cloud of comets with a radius of this order, containing about 1011 comets of observable size; the total mass of the cloud is estimated to be of the order of 1/10 to 1/100 of that of the earth. Through the action of the stars fresh comets are continually being carried from this cloud into the vicinity of the sun.
Jan Oort
The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC.
Cyril Ramaphosa
