Irregular Quotes - page 2
Such people as can be prevailed upon to believe, that their reason is depraved, may easily be led by the nose, and duped into superstition at the pleasure of those in whom they confide, and there remain from generation to generation: for when they throw by the law of reason the only one which God gave them to direct them in their speculations and duty, they are exposed to ignorant or insidious teachers, and also to their own irregular passions, and to the folly and enthusiasm of those about them, which nothing but reason can prevent or restrain...
Ethan Allen
Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority. ... Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.
Walter Benjamin
Data management housekeeping is not the only problem to plague oversimplified approaches to high speed computation. The physical problems which are of practical interest tend to have rather significant complications. Examples of these complications are as follows: boundaries are likely to be irregular; interiors are likely to be inhomogeneous; computations required may be dependent on the states of the variables at each point; propagation rates of different physical effects may be quite different; the rate of convergence, or convergence at all, may be strongly dependent on sweeping through the array along different axes on succeeding passes; etc. The effect of each of these complications is very severe on any computer organization based on geometrically related processors in a paralleled processing system.
Gene Amdahl
I have no special regard for Satan; but, I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English, it is un-American; it is French.
Mark Twain
One should view the present situation – the status quo – as being maintained by certain conditions or forces. A culture – for instance, the food habits of a certain group at a given time – is not a static affair but a live process like a river which moves but still keeps to a recognizable form...Food habits do not occur in empty space. They are part and parcel of the daily rhythm of being awake and asleep; of being alone and in a group; of earning a living and playing; of being a member of a town, a family, a social class, a religious group... in a district with good groceries and restaurants or in an area of poor and irregular food supply. Somehow all these factors affect food habits at any given time. They determine the food habits of a group every day anew just as the amount of water supply and the nature of the river bed determine the flow of the river, its constancy or change.
Kurt Lewin
A healthy forest, untouched by forestry technology, is made up of a strange mixture of vegetation. Alongside well-defined areas of noble trees, conditions of apparent chaos can be found, which can best be described as irregular confusion. People who are not aware of the importance of the balance in Nature, of which the forest is a part, want to clear areas of everything they do not consider to be useful. A great deal of sensitive concern and observation is necessary to begin to understand why Nature depends on an apparently chaotic disorder.
Viktor Schauberger
He [Jesus] not only forbids actual uncleanness, but all irregular desires, upon pain of hell-fire; causeless divorces; swearing in conversation, as well as forswearing in judgment; revenge; retaliation; ostentation of charity, of devotion, and of fasting; repetitions in prayer, covetousness, worldly care, censoriousness: and on the other side commands loving our enemies, doing good to those that hate us, blessing those that curse us, praying for those that despitefully use us; patience and meekness under injuries, forgiveness, liberality, compassion: and closes all; his particular injunctions, with this general golden rule, Matt. VII. 12, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." And to show how much He is in earnest, and expects obedience to these laws, He tells them, Luke VI. 35, That if they obey, " great shall be their reward."
John Locke
Natural history is not taught in seminary. This is curious, as most people in pastoral ministry are about 567 times more likely to be asked about cosmology or sub-nuclear physics or human biology or evolution than they are to be asked about irregular Greek verbs or the danger of the patripassionist heresy. If we monotheists are going to go around claiming that our "God made the heaven and the earth," it is not unreasonable to expect us to know something about what that heaven and earth actually are.
Sara Maitland
Dialogue in Hell:
limitation to the increase of taxes. So they conceived a scheme truly admirable for its simplicity.... A special fund was created, the capitalized resources of which are meant to be a permanent redemption of the public debt by successive fractions; so that every time the state borrows, it must endow the sinking fund with a certain capital for the purpose of liquidating the new debt at a given time....
Our system of accounting, fruit of long experience, is distinguished by the clarity and the certitude of its procedures. It obstructs abuses and gives to no one, from the smallest official to the chief of state himself, the means of diverting the least sum from its original purpose, or of making irregular use of it.
Will Eisner
There exists also another type of galaxy agglomeration. These have diameters between roughly one and ten times those of large clusters, but have much smaller densitities; they are usually irregular, with patchy density variations and no central concentration. The larger and most conspicuous of these agglomerations may contain several clusters, which explains why they have been given the name "superclusters." In their longer dimensions, crossing times exceed the age of the Universe. They are thus unrelaxed. Unrelaxed apperance, together with large size, might be taken as a definition of superclusters.
Jan Oort
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
Steven Pinker
