Renaissance Quotes - page 9
I believe that now we have a profound responsibility to open the gates of opportunity for all the world's people so that they can become stakeholders in the kind of society we would like to build at large in the world and at home. Let me be clear: promoting prosperity throughout the world is a crucial form of forward engagement.
We know how to launch this renaissance - for what has worked to spark the economic boom here in the United States is, at its essence, the way we can spark the fires of growth abroad. The difference is one of degree, not kind.
Al Gore
Weirdly, the world suddenly feels bipolar. All over again the west confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence. The old enemy was a superpower; the new enemy isn't even a state. In the end, the USSR was broken by its own contradictions and abnormalities, forced to realise, in Martin Malia's words, that "there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it". Then, too, socialism was a modernist, indeed a futurist, experiment, whereas militant fundamentalism is convulsed in a late-medieval phase of its evolution. We would have to sit through a renaissance and a reformation, and then await an enlightenment. And we're not going to do that.
Martin Amis
The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Paul Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.
Paul Cézanne
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Václav Havel
My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition. At the same time Benton introduced me to Renaissance art. [remark on his former art-teacher w:Thomas Hart Benton ].
Jackson Pollock
It is not known so generally that Kepler was... a geometrician and algebraist of considerable power, and that he, Desargues, and perhaps Galileo, may be considered as forming a connecting link between the mathematicians of the renaissance and those of modern times. Kepler's work in geometry consists rather in certain general principles enunciated, and illustrated by a few cases, than in any systematic exposition of the subject. In a short chapter on conics inserted in his Paralipomena, published in 1604, he lays down what has been called the principle of continuity, and gives as an example the statement that a parabola is at once the limiting case of an ellipse and of a hyperbola; he illustrates the same doctrine by reference to the foci of conics (the word focus was introduced by him); and he also explains that parallel lines should be regarded as meeting at infinity. He introduced the use of the eccentric angle in discussing properties of the ellipse.
Johannes Kepler
As modern interpolators... say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe's population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, [the] land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance [which led to the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution], the Enlightenment [which led to the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, led] [...] eventually [to] our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity [which led to the problems we face today].
James Howard Kunstler
