Vacuum Quotes
More Vacuum Quotes
There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, offers more entertainment than the TV set.
harriet van horne— Women Know Everything! by Karen Weekes, published by Quirk Books, 2007
When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers’ interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling.
jim cummins— Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Diverse Society (1996), pp. 2-3
States should practice multilateralism and abandon unilateral actions that adversely affect a democratic and equitable international order, refraining from the threat or use of force. They should apply international law uniformly, abandon overreliance on “positivism” and efforts to circumvent treaty obligations or invent loopholes. As “nature abhors a vacuum” (Spinoza, Ethics), human rights law abhors “legal black holes”
— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [23]
Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
john kenneth galbraith— 1984 Speech at the American University, Washington DC. Quoted in Time magazine,18 Jun.
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
Saul Bellow— Dangling Man (1944) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18935-1], p. 84
I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously
Lee De Forest— "Dawn of the Electronic Age", Popular Mechanics, January 1952
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
john kenneth galbraith— Chapter 3, "The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx" p. 96
I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.
ernest hemingway— Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
When you look at a vacuum in a quantum theory of fields, it isn't exactly nothing.
peter higgs— in video Meet Peter Higgs by CERN (July 2004).
The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.
Boris Johnson— "The least said about Lib Dems, the better", Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2003, p. 24.
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
saul alinsky— p. 21 (Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971))
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
gaston bachelard— Ch. 2, sect. 3
What expressions we used – in part taken over and in part newly invented! above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.
Karl Barth— The Humanity of God (1960), p. 42
The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.
max beckmann— In: Max Beckmann – On my Painting, Tate Publishing London, 2003, pp. 17-18
Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.
david bohm— Statement of 1986, as quoted in Towards a Theory of Transpersonal Decision-Making in Human-Systems (2007) by Joseph Riggio, p. 66
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
arthur c. clarke— As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 31
Natura abhorret vacuum.
françois rabelais— Translation: Nature abhors a vacuum.Chapter 5.
His reluctance to pay for elaborate or expensive equipment, perhaps the result of an impoverished childhood, had established the legendary "sealing wax-and-string" tradition of the Cavendish , where everyday materials were ingeniously used to make and patch up experimental equipment, with sealing wax proving particularly useful for vacuum seals.
j. j. thomson— Dianna Preston, Before the Fallout from Marie Curie to Hiroshima (2005)
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
desmond tutu— As quoted in The Christian Science Monitor (20 December 1984)
A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
Alfred North Whitehead— Ch. 29, June 10, 1943
What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.
robert charles wilson— Vortex, Chapter 32 (p. 304)
States should practice multilateralism and abandon unilateral actions that adversely affect a democratic and equitable international order, refraining from the threat or use of force. They should apply international law uniformly, abandon overreliance on “positivism” and efforts to circumvent treaty obligations or invent loopholes. As “nature abhors a vacuum” (Spinoza, Ethics), human rights law abhors “legal black holes”
alfred de zayas— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [23]
To all appearance, the phenomena exhibited by the pendulum are not to be accounted for by impact: in fact, it is usually assumed that corresponding phenomena would take place if the earth and the pendulum were situated in an absolute vacuum, and at any conceivable distance from one another. If this be so, it follows that there must be two totally different kinds of causes of motion: the one impact a vera causa [true cause], of which, to all appearance, we have constant experience; the other, attractive or repulsive 'force' a metaphysical entity which is physically inconceivable.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, 'The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1889)
You will find that for a smoking flax there is no specific like heaven's oxygen; for a faint and flickering piety there is no cure comparable to the one without which all our own exertions are but an effort to light a lamp in a vacuum the breath of the Holy Spirit.
— P. 321. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand— Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, (1966)
To all appearance, the phenomena exhibited by the pendulum are not to be accounted for by impact: in fact, it is usually assumed that corresponding phenomena would take place if the earth and the pendulum were situated in an absolute vacuum, and at any conceivable distance from one another. If this be so, it follows that there must be two totally different kinds of causes of motion: the one impact a vera causa [true cause], of which, to all appearance, we have constant experience; the other, attractive or repulsive 'force' a metaphysical entity which is physically inconceivable.
thomas henry huxley— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1889)
[F]reedom, like any other virtue, does not exist in a vacuum. It must be worked and practiced to exist at all. And like any other virtue, it imposes upon those who would have it the unpleasant tasks of discipline and sacrifice. A materialistic people do not learn these tasks by reading posters or listening to pep talks, any more than you can learn to play the violin by the same methods.
— Ralph Austin Bard, United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy, speech to the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, New York City, September 24, 1942. Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VII, pp. 21-23
[F]reedom, like any other virtue, does not exist in a vacuum. It must be worked and practiced to exist at all. And like any other virtue, it imposes upon those who would have it the unpleasant tasks of discipline and sacrifice. A materialistic people do not learn these tasks by reading posters or listening to pep talks, any more than you can learn to play the violin by the same methods.
— Ralph Austin Bard, United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy, speech to the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, New York City, September 24, 1942. Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VII, pp. 21-23
Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
— Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
