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phenomenon quotes

  • Oversimplification isnowa commontermof reproach in academic discussions; everyone is against oversimplification. But there is no parallel term nearlyas frequently used to describe the opposite phenomenon, which surely occurs as often, if not more so.

    - Bennett Maurice Berger
      Authors of their Own Lives (edited by Berger), introduction.

  •    Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^9  Nicholas Nickleby, ch.23.

  • A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed, it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

    - Susan Faludi
      Backlash (UK edn), ch.3,'Backlashes Then and Now'.

  • O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heavenof silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

    - Marianne Craig Moore
      O  To Be A Dragon,'O  To Be  A Dragon'.

  • Crime is a socio-political artifact, not a natural phenomenon.We can have as much or as little crime as we please, depending on what we choose to count as criminal.

    - Herbert Leslie Packer
      The Limits of Criminal Sanction, p.364.

  • When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of [the] universe, every phase of present or past lifetherein, has been examined, classified, and coordinatedwith the rest, thenthemissionof sciencewill be completed.What isthisbut saying thatthetaskof science canneverend till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

    - Karl Pearson
      The Grammar of Science, pt.1, ch.5.

  • If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

    - Henry David Thoreau
      Walden, or Life in theWoods,'The Pond inWinter'.

  • The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since theVietnam War.

    - Edmund White
      'AfterwordAIDS: An American Epidemic', added to later editions of States of Desire:Travels in Gay America.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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