Variety Quotes - page 13
There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I - I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets - those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.
Richard Feynman
Something inhuman has come to Tarker's Mills, as unseen as the full moon riding the night sky high above. It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado. Its time is now, its place is here, in this little Maine town where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizen's Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next week there will be news of a darker variety.
Outside, its tracks begin to fill up with snow, and the shriek of the wind seems savage with pleasure. There is nothing of God or Light in that heartless sound-it is all black winter and dark ice.
The cycle of the Werewolf has begun.
Stephen King
I'd very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it.
Jeffrey Bernard
[O]ur purpose is to give a presentation of geometry... in its visual, intuitive aspects. With the aid of visual imagination we can illuminate the manifold facts and problems... beyond this, it is possible... to depict the geometric outline of the methods of investigation and proof, without... entering into the details... In this manner, geometry being as many-faceted as it is and being related to the most diverse branches of mathematics, we may even obtain a summarizing survey of mathematics as a whole, and a valid idea of the variety of problems and the wealth of ideas it contains. Thus a presentation of geometry in large brushstrokes... and based on the approach through visual intuition, should contribute to a more just appreciation of mathematics by a wider range of people than just the specialists.
David Hilbert
By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.
Andy Grove
In every nature, and in every portion of nature, which we can descry, we find attention bestowed upon even the minutest parts. The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of dimunition of care by multiplicity of objects, or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected.
William Paley
In all cases, wherein the mind feels itself in danger of being confounded by variety, it is sure to rest upon a few strong points, or perhaps upon a single instance. Amongst a multitude of proofs, it is one that does the business. If we observe in any argument, that hardly two minds fix upon the same instance, the diversity of choice shows the strength of the argument, because it shows the number and competition of the examples. There is no subject in which the tendency to dwell upon select or single topics is so usual, because there is no subject, of which, in its full extent, the latitude is so great, as that of natural history applied to the proof of an intelligent Creator.
William Paley
It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively - so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off.
Pauline Kael
I learned later that economic reasoning was not just mathematics and could be applied to a wide variety of social problems. Now, I think that no forms of social interaction-including religion, love, crime, and fertility choice-are immune from the power of economic reasoning. Hence, even widely held beliefs-for example, that beauty is an illegitimate credential of a worker or that democracy is important for economic growth-are not sacred truths and are subject to analysis.
Robert Barro
This evolution toward noise-sound is only possible today. The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras (whose performers are three times as numerous); on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all sorts of noises. But our ears far from being satisfied, keep asking for bigger acoustic sensations. However, musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of its tones. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones... We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.
Luigi Russolo
Like blaming evil, the copycat rationale is so empty that it doesn't even qualify as a convenient explanation... dismissing this rash of murder and sympathy- across the country, across a wide variety of students- as simply copycat shooters assumes that kids operate at about the same intelligence level as sardines.
Mark Ames
...in the Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type - political specimens - pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could not conceive how other people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs - or was supposed by the outside world to be in their control - and this was the reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.
Henry Adams
I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions.
John Cleland
