Proof Quotes - page 35
Through the week, more information on the attacks came in, and I spent considerable time reviewing this data, as well as reams of classified material on the rest of the world. My practice in prior government jobs had been to consume as much intelligence as I could. I might have agreed or disagreed with analyses or conclusions, but I was always ready to absorb more information. Proof of the Assad regime's chemical-weapons usage was increasingly clear in public reporting, although left-wing commentators, and even some on Fox, were saying there was no evidence. They were wrong.
John R. Bolton
I prefer to be called one of the flock. I am no more than you are, I am simply one of the flock, equal to the rest. If it is any satisfaction to the doctor to know what kind of insanity I have, if they are going to call my pretensions insanity, I say, humbly, through the grace of God I believe I am the prophet of the New World.
I wish you to believe that I am not trying to play insanity, there is in the manner, in the standing of a man, the proof that he is sincere, not playing. You will say, what have you got to say? I have to attend to practical results. Is it practical that you be acknowledged as a prophet? Is it practical to say it. I think if the Half-breeds. have acknowledged me, as a community, to be a prophet. I have reason to believe that it is beginning to become practical. I do not wish for my satisfaction the name of prophet. Generally that title is accompanied with such a burden, that if there is satisfaction for your vanity there is a check to it.
Louis Riel
If employment is falling off, what is the lesson? The lesson is that our home trade, our domestic consumption, must have decreased in a larger proportion than our foreign trade has increased. (Hear, hear.) The competition from abroad has grown more and more severe, and, on the whole, taking our trade as a whole, it must have declined if the employment in trade has decreased. (Hear, hear.) Wages have been reduced. You have only to read the papers to see almost daily some trade or another has to submit to a reduction. That, then, is not a proof of boundless prosperity. It is a proof of comparative decline, and, in my judgment, the handwriting is on the wall, there to be read by every impartial man; and, though I contemplate no immediate catastrophe, I say the situation calls for preparation while there is still time to find a remedy. (Cheers.)
Joseph Chamberlain
Perhaps the lines of nationalism and factionalism and every other goddamn "ism” in the world had reduced the chances for this weary planet. Or not. Nuclear devices had existed for over a century, and only four of them had ever been used in anger. This could be interpreted as proof of divine intervention, good luck, a sign that the human race was growing up, or ominous portent, depending upon one's standing in the "half-empty, half-full” school of cocktail-party philosophy.
Larry Niven
If...the Social Democrats make substantial gains at the polls every one here...will accept that as indisputable proof that the German people desire peace. ... A great Socialist triumph on that day would not only sweep the clouds of war from off this political horizon, but would also make it easy for an understanding to be reached between Germany and Great Britain concerning future naval policy, and thus relieve the taxpayers of both countries of the crushing burden which the present rivalry in Dreadnought building imposes.
Keir Hardie
It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
Thomas Pynchon
Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal- for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them-while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.
John Galt
Men don't know anything! Men don't know when their lives became so entirely awful, when everyone else turned into such a tosser! A man does not know how he came by the half a pie he is holding in his hand. And scientists-those frauds!-seize on this, and try to use it as proof of the mysteries of human consciousness and the unknowable nature of the brain, which is rubbish! The brain is the simplest organ in the body. It only has three bits. There's the front bit, which is the bit you scratch when you come in at half one in the morning, and the person you live with says, "Where the fuck were you?”. The middle bit, which tries to come up with the excuse. And the back bit, which plays the last song that was on in the pub.
Dylan Moran
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
William Faulkner
In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy.
Werner Heisenberg
The county was listed as a rural slum, the land as eroded. When I asked to be shown erosion, the answer was, it is 'sheet erosion' That is, the constant effect of rainfall on all earth. There was not an eroded ditch in the county. Every farm was well cared for, every house in repair, painted, cared for-simple frame houses, a few without electricity or plumbing, but many with both.... None of them wanted to be rehabilitated. None of them would speak to Garet or to me until we proved that we did not come from the Government. Garet was dumbfounded when men surrounded the car and demanded that proof; luckily he had it, by chance. And these are the people who are said to be demanding subsidies! That was a story-Communist Terror in Illinois. (The manager of the project was a Party member.) No editor would print it, of course. The truth about this country never does get into print.
Rose Wilder Lane
... the treatment he experienced in England previous to his last departure from it. But I think he does not sufficiently make allowance for the envy and jealousy which prompted people to seize on his separation from Lady Byron as a pretext for attacking him with a thousand slanders, to which her unbroken silence on the cause of their separation lent but too much colour. Byron attributes the insults he received to a false system of morality in England, which condemned him without proof, and intruded itself into a domestic disagreement in which not even friends are deemed authorized to interfere; instead of ascribing them to what is much more likely to be the true cause, an envenomed jealousy of his genius, and the success with which its fruits have been crowned. Other separations in high life have taken place, without either husband or wife being exposed to persecution;..
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.
John Stuart Mill
Now as there are, according to Humboldt, one hundred and seventy words in common between the languages of the new and old continents, and many of these are expressive of the most primitive ideas, there is, by Dr Young's calculation, overpowering proof of the original connection of the American and other human families.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
The thing about sexual assault and the narrative that gets played out so often is that it's a deadlock. It's what one person said vs. what another person said. It's just that my personal experience as a survivor is incredibly muddied. I was very young and had such a crush on the person. I willingly obliged so many preambles to The Moment. I felt incredibly complicit. My self-gaslighting was so sustained and calcified that I wasn't entirely sure if it "counted.” At the time it wasn't something I would ever have felt secure declaring as assault if the burden of proof lay with me recounting everything about my intentions vs. the other person's. We talk about consent and it's important to define, but it's never this hard and fast yes/no pact that's then committed to the stenographer...
Mary H.K. Choi
Clemente was an emotional man, and that was his beauty. It drove him not only to physical anguish, but also to nearly incredible performances on the field as well as to the good work he was engaged in at his death. Often, although not so much in his maturing years, he seemed almost paranoid in his complaints against this or that, but when he said he loved mankind you had to believe him, because even the heat of his most bitter outburst almost always blew over, and where he had been loud, he would suddenly become reasonable and even eloquent. A man to confuse you? Yes, absolutely, but only because man's full range of passions ran strong in him. Cunning he was not. Honest he was. And the proof is that he was no honorary chairman of that relief committee for Nicaragua -- he was no figurehead chairman in name only; he was not merely a celebrity lending his prestige but not his heart or his labor to a cause. Honorary chairmen do not disappear into the Atlantic in the performance of duty.
Roberto Clemente
Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one's beliefs.
Ashley Montagu
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
