Operative Quotes

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project” of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole. (Herbert Marcuse)
The employee is regarded by the employer merely in the light of his value as an operative. His productive capacity alone is taken into account. View quote
Leland Stanford
The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. View quote
Charles Lamb
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about. View quote
Tucker Carlson
I would like to see the day when somebody would be appointed surgeon somewhere who had no hands, for the operative part is the least part of the work. View quote
Harvey Cushing
Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life. View quote
Edward Zwick
This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative. View quote
Ron Ziegler
There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and non-interfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Labour, upon whichever of those operations it be bestowed, is productive, because it concurs in the creation of a product. Thus the labour of the philosopher, whether experimental or literary, is productive; the labour of the adventurer or master-manufacturer is productive, although he perform no actual manual work; the labour of every operative workman is productive, from the common day-labourer in agriculture, to the pilot that governs the motion of a ship. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
Even in the act of composition, the poet is in a state in which the reflective elements are subordinated to the intuitive. The vision, however, is not operative for so long as it continues, its very stress acts as a check on expression. (Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan)
Any law that takes hold of a man's daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life. View quote
Henry Ward Beecher
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. View quote
William James
Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist. View quote
Stanley Milgram
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic. View quote
Hunter S. Thompson
May I recommend, if you're doing your own homework, don't do a Google search. Seems to me that Google is pretty deeply in bed with the government. Maybe this is explaining why Google is being kicked out of all the other countries? Are they just a shill now for the United States government? Who is Jared Cohen? Is he private citizen or government operative? And isn't this the second Google guy we've found? This is the second Google executive now being exposed as an instigator of a revolution. View quote
Glenn Beck
Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself. View quote
Woodrow Wilson
Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. View quote
Sarah Palin
We are a multitude of selves, and the sooner we learn that, the better. And in that rich alliance of psychological Aspects lies the very secret of our practical operative stability. Only because we change our positions constantly in reference to the psyche and the world are we able to manipulate physically and translate inner experience into sense terms. View quote
Robert Butts
That is to say that every single book will be magnetized, will be ordered under complicated mathematical clusters, by related subjects, and semantic markers. You will state your questions, or the subject you are interested in, and the computer will find the books for you. Instataneous retrieval brings with it enormous changes in our relation to the history of a subject, because there is a cut-off point in all these systems beond which the previous books are no longer relevant. They have been adequately subsumed in the later ones. You have a completely different way of organsing knowledge-an immensely efficient and in many ways powerfully logical way, but which blocks the essential motion of the hand reaching along a shelf and stumbling on what it did not know was there. When these great knowledge and data-banks, as they are called, are operative there will come a whole change in the way the human mind and eye live with books. View quote
George Steiner
Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference? (Niklas Luhmann)
When we shift from negatively complaining to positively affirming, conditions change. Then complaining is no longer the operative law in our life-freedom is. View quote
Michael Beckwith
We call that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of a narrow region of the content of consciousness, attention. View quote
Wilhelm Wundt
As long as man has not ascended to the rank of existence where he leaves behind him the domain of the universal and enters into his own personal domain-no longer dependent upon the principles operative in the realm of the universal-he is still subject to the rule of the species and the universal form. However, as soon as he liberates himself from the burden of the species, he becomes a free man. Complete freedom belongs only to the prophet, the man of God. The man who is a mere random example of the species, on the other hand, is wholly under the rule of the scientific lawfulness of existence. Between this species man and the man of God, between necessity and freedom, is the middle range in which most people find themselves. View quote
Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world. View quote
Oliver Lodge