Prior Quotes

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. View quote
Abraham Lincoln
Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. View quote
Earl Warren
Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. View quote
Clarice Lispector
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be. View quote
Bob Dylan
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen. View quote
Albert Einstein
Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us. View quote
Robert Mueller
Prior to the PATRIOT Act, the ability of government agencies to share information with each other was limited, which kept investigators from fully understanding what terrorists might be planning and to prevent their attacks. View quote
Chris Chocola
Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent. (Miguel de Icaza)
Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information. View quote
Roger Wicker
All of you, I am sure, have heard many cries about Government interference with business and about "creeping socialism." I should like to remind the gentlemen who make these complaints that if events had been allowed to continue as they were going prior to March 4, 1933, most of them would have no businesses left for the Government or for anyone else to interfere with - and almost surely we would have socialism in this country, real socialism. View quote
Harry S. Truman
You try to save a drowning man without prior authorization. View quote
Dag Hammarskjöld
While I was not consulted prior to the President's decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea, that decision from a military standpoint, proved a sound one, as we hurled back the invader and decimated his forces. Our victory was complete, and our objectives within reach, when Red China intervened with numerically superior ground forces. View quote
Douglas MacArthur
The texture of experience is prior to everything else. View quote
Willem de Kooning
The words of the Constitution are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life. View quote
Felix Frankfurter
Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory. View quote
Ian Hacking
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason. View quote
Marvin Minsky
There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11, I've never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq. (George W. Bush)
It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including - or perhaps especially - the failures. View quote
Lois McMaster Bujold
there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. View quote
Karen Armstrong