Relatively Quotes
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This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.
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More Relatively Quotes
The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. (On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.)
— Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2000) Programming Perl. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 4
Most of the American laws defining race are not to be compared with those once enforced by Nazi Germany, the latter being relatively more liberal. In the view of the Nazis, persons having less than one fourth Jewish blood could qualify as Aryans, whereas many of the American laws specify that persons having one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or "any ascertainable" Negro blood are Negroes in the eyes of the law and subject to all restrictions governing the conduct of Negroes.
stentson kennedy— Jim Crow Guide: The Way it Was, Chapter 4: "Who is Colored Where" (1955)
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
— H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), U.S. author. Prejudices, Ch. 3, Third Series (1922)
No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.
— 1971A Voyage Round My Father, act1.
According to Gould and Eldredge, the reason why so many links are missing is that they simply do not exist. They take the view that biological evolution proceeds in successive stages of "punctuated equilibrium." Living species would remain unchanged for extremely long stretches of time, and then undergo profound changes in relatively short periods. To borrow a term from the quantum theory of atoms, evolution would occur in "quantum jumps." It is very likely that the spark of life appeared during the first such "jump."
niles eldredge— Trinh Xuan Thuan, Chaos and Harmony (2001)
The multinational corporation and international production reflect a world in which capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, while labor has remained relatively immobile.
robert gilpin— Chapter Six, Multinational Corporations, p. 260
In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.
arthur travers harris— Statement on the July 1943 bombings of Hamburg, as quoted in The Valour and the Horror: The Untold Story of Canadians in the Second World War (1991), by Merrily Weisbord and Merilyn Simonds Mohr, p. 107.
Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap.
caitlín r. kiernan— (16 January 2005)
Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.
wilfrid sheed— "A Fun-House Mirror" (1972), pp. 107-108
My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers — to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response — for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.
daniel tammet— Chapter 6: Adolescence
The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.
thorstein veblen— p.112 (The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899))
Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one’s existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behavior, but these elements are in principle separable. ... The “metaphysical need,” ... both Marx and Nietzsche held, is a historical phenomenon that arises under determinate circumstances, and could be expected to disappear under other circumstances that we could relatively easily envisage.
raymond geuss— pp. 41-42 (Philosophy and Real Politics (2008))
One way ... in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.
raymond geuss— p. 54 (Philosophy and Real Politics (2008))
I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had two clear choices. Either win the [Vietnam] war in a relatively short time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come home.
barry goldwater— Barry M. Goldwater with Jack Casserly, Goldwater (Doubleday, 1988), p. 222
We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of these genes ( enzymes and proteins ) as they influence the course of embryology . In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.
stephen jay gould— "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330
I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.
r. a. lafferty— Interview in Alien Critic (August 1973)
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
h. l. mencken— Ch. 3 (Prejudices, Third Series (1922))
When that amusing "Pauli effect" of the overturned vase occurred, on the occasion of the founding of the Jung Institute, I had the immediate and vivid impression that I should " pour out water inside " ( to use the symbolic language that I have acquired from you). Then when the connection between psychology and physics took up a relatively large part of your talk, it became even more clear to me what I was to do. The outcome of all this is the enclosed essay.
wolfgang pauli— Letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948), referring to an incident where a vase fell over, apparently spontaneously as he entered a room, and an essay: Moderne Beispiele zur 'Hintergrunds-physik' (Modern Examples of 'Background Physics' ). Jung and Pauli worked together in developing theories of Synchronicity.
If we designate as intelligence, quantitatively, the total of mental functioning, it is evident that the suppression of verbal thought involves a defect, relatively very important among cultivated individuals leading a complex social life: the uneducated person from this point of view is a defective.
— Henri Piéron Le cerveau et la pensée [Thought and the Brain] (1923)
We tend to think of the stock and bond markets as relatively recent historical phenomena, but, in fact, there have been credit markets since human civilization first took root in the Fertile Crescent.
— Chapter 1, No Guts, No Glory, p. 6 (The Four Pillars of Investing (2002))
The multinational corporation and international production reflect a world in which capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, while labor has remained relatively immobile.
— Chapter Six, Multinational Corporations, p. 260
A change of world view not only brings about profound cultural changes, but also is responsible for what historians call a "change of age." An age is a period of time in which the prevailing world view has remained relatively unchanged.
— p. 4 (Re-Creating the Corporation (1999))
Software architecture is a relatively young discipline. There is as much confusion in it as there is excitement. In the literature one finds far too many perspectives, approaches, methodologies, frameworks, techniques and tricks.
— ?Varma Vasudeva (2009) Software Architecture: A Case Based Approach. p. 2
Indonesia is one of the least exposed economies in the region, with a vast domestic market and a relatively small share of exports to gross domestic product, so it is insulated from volatility in the global economy,
— George Worthington of IFR, quoted on BBC News, "Indonesia's economy grows at fastest pace in 15 years", February 6, 2012
Finally, Krste Misirkov, who had clearly developed a strong sense of his own personal national identity as a Macedonian and who outspokenly and unambiguously called for Macedonian linguistic and national separatism, acknowledged that a Macedonian national identity was a relatively recent historical development.
— Loring Danforth, "The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World", Princeton Univ Press, (December 1995), p.63
Systems thinking is relatively recent, at least as an identifiable practice. There are books on the subject, but different authors view the subject differently, so it is an as-yet unconstrained discipline.
— Derek K. Hitchins (2003) Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management. p. xv
Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra (1968) "A Case against the GO TO Statement" cited in: Bill Curtis (1981) Tutorial, human factors in software development. p. 109
One of the most distinctive features of the current regime under which we live is the prominence of heterosexuality and homosexuality as central, organizing categories of thought, behaviour, and erotic subjectivity. The rise to dominance of those categories represents a relatively recent and culturally specific development, yet it has left little trace in our consciousness of its novelty. As a result, not only do we have a hard time understanding the logic at work in other historical cultures' organizations of sex and gender, but we have an even harder time understanding our own experiences of sexuality that are not universal.
— David M. Halperin, How To Do the History of Homosexuality, p.3. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226314472.
As to the territorial limits of Europe, they may seem relatively clear on its seaward flanks, but many island groups far to the north and west Svalbard, the Faroes, Iceland, and the Madeira and Canary islands are considered European, while Greenland (though tied politically to Denmark) is conventionally allocated to North America. Furthermore, the Mediterranean coastlands of North Africa and southwestern Asia also exhibit some European physical and cultural affinities. Turkey and Cyprus in particular, while geologically Asian, possess elements of European culture and may be regarded as parts of Europe.
— Encyclopædia Britannica, Europe
