Inert Quotes - page 2
The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shoreline. To the south of the mainland, there is an offshore island, which we shall call the Southern Island. It consists entirely of metals of subtly modulated personality. North of the mainland, situated rather like Iceland off the northwestern edge of Europe, lies a single, isolated region-hydrogen. This simple but gifted element is an essential outpost of the kingdom, for despite its simplicity it is rich in chemical personality. It is also the most abundant element in the universe and the fuel of the stars.
Peter Atkins
"Education to personality" has become a pedagogical ideal that turns its back upon the standardized-the collective and normal-human being. It thus fittingly recognizes the historical fact that the great, liberating deeds of world history have come from leading personalities and never from the inert mass that is secondary at all times and needs a demagogue if it is to move at all. The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders.
Carl Jung
Just as a telegram is composed of symbols called words, so the personagram is made of Aspect-prints that together combine to form the message. Only this message is written "on" a psychological structure by psychologically animate symbols. A telegram is inert itself; the information appears upon it, but it can't send a message or interpret its own. A personagram can.
Robert Butts
Delacroix's composition is more entirely created, while that of Seurat employs matter organized scientifically, reproducing, presenting t our eyes objects constructed by scientific means rather than by signs, coming from our feeling. As result there is in his works a positivism, a slightly inert stability, coming from his composition, which is not the result of a creation of the mind, but of a juxtaposition of the objects. It is necessary to cross this barrier to re-feel light, colored and soft, and pure, the noblest pleasure.
Henri Matisse
The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."... The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln... He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.
H. L. Mencken
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place... All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.
Thomas Szasz
[ Gustav Fechner ] was troubled by materialism... His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lat in his affirmation of the identity of the mind and matter and in his assurance that the entire universe can be regarded as readily from the point of view of its consciousness... as it can be viewed as inert matter.
Edwin Boring
The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.
Emma Goldman
What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that - we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.
Dino Buzzati
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
Amy Bloom
War has changed little in principle from the beginning of recorded history. The mechanized warfare of today is only an evolution of the time when men fought with clubs and stones, and its machines are as nothing without the men who invent them, man them and give them life. War is force- force to the utmost- force to make the enemy yield to our own will- to yield because they see their comrades killed and wounded- to yield because their own will to fight is broken. War is men against men. Mechanized war is still men against men, for machines are masses of inert metal without the men who control them- or destroy them.
Ernest King
As science has penetrated the atom, we've discovered that solid matter consists mainly of empty space. We've discovered that inert objects, such as rocks, consist of particles whirling round each other trillions of times a second. Likewise, believers and nonbelievers in God may both be right, just traveling the same circle in opposite directions.
Robert Lanza
The processes that may be employed, to give to portions of inert matter, precise movements resembling those of organized beings, are innumerable, as they consist of an indefinite number and variety of cords pulleys, toothed-wheels, nails, screws, levers, inclined-planes, as well as agencies of air, water, fire, light, &c., combined in endless modes to produce a desired effect Ingenuity has been long exercised on such combinations, chiefly for public amusement or mystification, without any object of utility.
Andrew Ure
This Being out of God cannot, by any means, be a limited, completed, and inert Being, since God himself is not such a dead Being, but, on the contrary, is Life; - but it can only be a Power, since only a Power is the true formal picture or Schema of Life. And indeed it can only be the Power of realising that which is contained in itself - a Schema.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active the governor must be more energetic than the governed.
Marquis de Sade
