Surrounding Quotes - page 10
[A]nyone like-minded is free to leave the United States at any time and emigrate to a more congenial country, be it Poland under Legutko's Law and Justice party, Orbán's avowedly illiberal Hungary, or Vladimir Putin's Russia. In actual fact, however, despite all of the ruins supposedly surrounding us and all of the supposed repression, in the average year out of a population of more than 325 million, fewer than 5,000 Americans renounce their citizenship, typically not to escape the depredations of liberalism but to avoid paying taxes. At the same time, millions of foreigners strive to come to the United States, many of them giving up all their worldly possessions and risking their lives on the journey.
Gabriel Schoenfeld
... I often feel literally nauseated upon hearing works representative of the "new simplicity", or of the "new romantic" genre, works which, by aiming low, targeting only the mock-astral plane of musical yuppiedom, ignore the very dangers which make genuine art both human and transcendent. Fortunately, we are witnessing the growth of a grass-roots movement comprised of composers and performers who, having peeked over the fence surrounding this dungheap, have determined that shovelling shit is not to be their fate, and who are lovingly dedicating their lives to the seemingly endless, often agonizing labor which the production of challenging new works entails.
James Boros
Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real.
Alan Moore
The truth is, I've always been quietly proud of my real age. Why wouldn't I want to celebrate every crease in my brow, all that hard-earned wisdom that lives between the folds? If my first manager, Warren Coleman, hadn't been so insistent that I age myself down-he feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that an industry rife with female age discrimination would count me out of a lot of roles-I may have just omitted my age, rather than changing it. It's nobody's business. But when the Kennedy Center honor came around, I felt it was important to set the public record straight. Months before I learned I was to receive the award, I'd celebrated my ninetieth birthday. During the press blitzkrieg surrounding the Kennedy Center ceremony, I spoke that number aloud with nary a quake in my voice. "When were you born?" one reporter asked me. "December 19, 1924," I answered. For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of. It was a journey to delight in.
Cicely Tyson
Michael Jackson was one of the most talented and dynamic performer/singer/songwriters I ever had the pleasure of working with, he was amazing. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding his personal life in recent years overshadowed his unparalleled contributions to the music world, which is a tragedy in and of itself. But his music will live on forever no matter what and his memory will be adored and admired for years to come.
Michael Jackson
We heard- a shithouse rumor?- that we dominated the heights surrounding Lerida and Balaguer (this was different); the newspapers reported that the offensive was gaining ground everywhere; the Non-Intervention Committee met again and issued another of its 'decisions.' This time it was decided once more to withdraw all foreign 'volunteers' from Spain, but England's perfidious hand could be seen as plain as day, for wasn't Mr. Chamberlain interested in concluding an agreement with Banjo-Eyes? And wasn't the 'withdrawal' contingent upon British and French concession of belligerent rights to Franco, which would tip the scales even farther in his favor by legalizing what already existed- the shipment of arms, munitions, planes and tanks and men into his territory?
Francisco Franco
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
John Berger
Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely "critical literature" or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals.
P. D. Ouspensky
You ask Israel to cease building settlements on the West Bank, which are intended not only to house Israelis, but to provide a defense bulwark when the Islamist armies of the surrounding states, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria – Assad or his opponents – and Iraq, again try militarily to crush Israel. Will Britain come to Israel's aid? I recall when in one of those wars, Britain declined to deliver to Israel tanks it had purchased from your country. Britain under Chamberlain participated in the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia. What you and your European colleagues are doing now is repeating the sellout, this time of Israel. The Czech Republic, mindful of what happened to it, is the only European country to vote no to Palestinian statehood. When one of your predecessors told the world that he offered "peace in our time," he wrote himself into history as a disgrace. How will history on this issue recall you? Why would you expect Israel to cooperate in its intended lynching?
Ed Koch
Lords of themselves and leaders of mankind.On equal rights their base of empire lies,
On walls of wisdom see the structure rise;
Wide o'er the gazing world it towers sublime,
A modell'd form for each surrounding clime.
To useful toils they bend their noblest aim,
Make patriot views and moral views the same,
Renounce the wish of war, bid conquest cease,
Invite all men to happiness and peace,
To faith and justice rear the youthful race,
Till Truth's blest banners, o'er the regions hurl'd,
Shake tyrants from their thrones, and cheer the waking world.
Joel Barlow
The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things. The proposition is proved to be true, because the boundary of a thing is a surface, which is not part of the body contained within that surface; nor is it part of the air surrounding that body, but is the medium interposted between the air and the body, as is proved in its place.
Leonardo da Vinci
Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.
But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear of insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us - from this total examination of the "unchangeable" environment - comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy. More important, from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn.
Arthur Miller
Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I - granted the rules were violated at times - we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn't make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler's philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.
Ronald Reagan
