specific quotes

   Never under the most despotic of infidel Governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country. And what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specificthe never-failing nostrum of all state physicians from the days of Draco to the present time; death. Is there not blood enough upon your penal code that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?

-Rochdale
  Maiden speech, House of Lords, 27 Feb, against a proposal to introduce the death penalty for machine- wrecking.

Il n'y a ni re'  gles ni mode'  les; ou pluto"  t il n'y a d'autres re'  gles que les lois ge  ne  rales de la nature qui planent sur l'art tout entier, et les lois spe  ciales qui, pour chaque composition, re  sultent des conditions d'existence propres a'   chaque sujet. There are no rules or models; that is, there are no rules except general laws of nature which hover over art and special laws which apply to specific subjects. 420

-Victor Marie Hugo
  Cromwell, pre  face.

The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific.

- David John Lodge
  Changing Places, ch.2.

For me, as for most novelists, every genuine imaginative event begins down there, with the facts, with the specific, and not with the philosophical, theideological, or the abstract.

- Philip Milton Roth
  The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography,'Dear Zuckerman'.