position quotes

For twenty years he has held a season ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he happened to find himself.

- Leo(pold) Charles Maurice Stennett Amery
  Of Herbert  Asquith, in Quarterly Review,  Jul.

You have been called to hold a high position, but not a safe one; a sublime position, but not a secure one. How terrible, how very terrible is the place you hold!

-St Bernard of Clairvaux
c.1145  Letter to Eugenius III shortly after he had became Pope, on the dangers of the growth of papal power. Collected in B S James (ed and trans)  The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1953).

The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Of sex.  Attributed.

Michael Harrington†was America's leading socialist; a position, one might have thought, that almost epitomized marginality.

-The Economist
  The Economist,12  Aug.

Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of ourcause, each one of us must fight on until the end.

- Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (of Bemersyde)
  Order to British troops facing the German offensive across the Somme battlefields,12  Apr. Quoted in  A Duff Cooper Haig (1936), vol.2, ch.23.

The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they must and should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.

- Martin Heidegger
'Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics', collected in Basic Writings (1977).

Only power can get people into a position where they may be noble.

- Alfred Kazin
Quoted in M Korda Power in the Office (1976).

The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position.On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of societyas one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth.On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

- Richard Charles Lewontin
  'Sex, Lies, and Social Science', in the NewYork Review of Books, 20  Apr.

   If capital isgrowing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  'Wage Labour and Capital', collected in Robert C  Tucker (ed)  The Marx^Engels Reader (2nd edn,1972), p.211.

When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal† But I brought myself down. I gave them a sword and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish. And I guess that if Ihad been intheir position,I'd have donethesame thing.

- Richard M(ilhous) Nixon
  Interviewed by David Frost, May.

   In a march of onlya few hours, I had passed from the western to the eastern hemisphere and had verified my position at the summit of the world.It was hard to realise that on the first miles of the brief march we had been travelling due north, while on the last few miles of the same march we had been travelling due south, although we had all the time been travelling precisely in the same direction.

- Robert Edwin Peary
  Description of crossing and then passing the Pole. The North Pole (published1910).

The imperialists brought the Chinese people cannons rather than flowers, death instead of 'human rights'† How can they be in a position to instruct us on'civil rights'?

-People's Daily
  People's Daily, 22 Mar.

One of the virtues, perhaps almost the chief virtue, of a newspaper is its independence.Whatever its position or character, at least it should have a soul of its own.

- C(harles) P(restwich) Scott
In the Manchester Guardian, special centenary issue,6 May.

Too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of theartists of Wales.There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

- Dylan Marlais Thomas
  Quite Early One Morning,'Wales and theArtist'.

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

- Leon originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein Trotsky
  My Life, p.501.

Perhaps there is no position more perilous to a man's honesty thanthat†of knowing himselftobe quiteloved by a girl whom he almost loves himself.

- Anthony Trollope
  Phineas Finn, ch.50.