Background Quotes
More Background Quotes
Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person’s social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant.
anthony crosland— The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland
It (insecurity) is a feeling that is deeply felt and is shared by most members of my community, irrespective of religion, status, education, background or place of origin.
ratu joni madraiwiwi— Speech to the Fiji Law Society, 2 July 2005
Om is the mysterious cosmic energy that is the substratum of all the things and all the beings of the entire universe. It is an eternal song of the Divine. It is continuously resounding in silence on the background of everything that exists.
— In p.16 (OM Chanting and Meditation)
Most activist Muslims, like me, will always fight to protect Jews from anti-Semitism but will always fight the racist and apartheid goals of Zionism. Zionism requires a continuous shrill cacophony in the background, for it requires the suspension of reason in asserting that an end goal for one people can be justified by any means against another.
akber choudhry— [1].
How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the 'Hard ECU' as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.
geoffrey howe— Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 180 col. 464.
— Personal statement in the House of Commons on his resignation, 13 November 1990.
Number, as it were, lies behind the psychic realm as a dynamic ordering principle, the primal element of which Jung called spirit. As an archetype, number becomes not only a psychic factor, but more generally, a world-structuring factor. In other words, numbers point to a background reality in which psyche and matter are no longer distinguishable.
marie-louise von franz— p. 216 (Creation Renewed & Reversed)
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind . Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic hardware and technology to establish background for the metaphysical , philosophical , and religious meanings later.
arthur c. clarke— As quoted in The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (1970) by Jerome Agel, p. 300
I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.
stephen jay gould— "Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
william james— Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"
Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
carl jung— "Woman in Europe" (1927) In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.245
Meaning is found in relationship. Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to the background.
bruce lee— p. 4 (Striking Thoughts (2000))
A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career. Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science .
— Bill Gates, Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed. BBC News (14 December 2007).
His background is not simply the Abbey School of Dunfermline (where he is reputed to have been a schoolmaster), but the surrounding Scottish countryside and community to which he belonged. His wisdom – and his poems are very wise about life – evidently came from his having lived long and profoundly as a member of that whole Scottish community.
— John Speirs, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 85.
Today's serious nonfiction writer is important to society because from a solid background of social sciences, combined with the journalistic skills of a reporter, one moves beyond the reporter function to the front edge of our emerging society.
— Betty Friedan (May 1978) 30th Anniversary Journal, American Society of Journalists and Authors, quoted in American Society of Journalists and Authors; Edited by Glen Evans (1983). The Complete Guide to Writing Non-Fiction. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. p. 5. ISBN 0-89879-117-0.
The aggressive Edwardian prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgar's finales is now as strange to us as the England that produced Greensleeves and The Woodes so wilde. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic. In consequence much of Elgar's music, through no fault of its own, has for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence.
edward elgar— Constant Lambert Music Ho! (London: Hogarth Press, [1934] 1985) p. 240.
Now, get this as a technical fact, not a hopeful idea. Every time we have investigated the background of a critic of Scientology, we have found crimes for which that person or group could be imprisoned under existing law. We do not find critics of Scientology who do not have criminal pasts.
l. ron hubbard— "Critics of Scientology" (5 November 1967)
Harriet Miers is totally qualified for the Supreme Court of the United States. Her legal background, her absolute leadership in the legal field when she was a practicing lawyer are unqualified.
kay bailey hutchison— "Transcript for October 23". Meet the Press. MSNBC (October 23, 2005). Retrieved on 2007-07-21.
The discipline, nonetheless, is exacting: everything that can be observed should be observed, even if it is only recalled as the bland background from which the intriguing bits pop out like Venus in the evening sky. The goal is always finding something new, hopefully unimagined and, better still, hitherto unimaginable.
k. barry sharpless— Nobel lecture, 2001
You'd be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes.
Andy Warhol— As quoted in Moderna Museet (1968), Andy Warhol: Stockholm, Moderna Museet, February–March 1968 (exhib. cat.), Malmö: Sydsvenska Dagbladets, [ISBN]; repr. 1970, Boston: Boston Book and Art, [ISBN]
— As quoted in Mike Wrenn (1991), Andy Warhol: In His Own Words, London & New York: Omnibus Press [Music Sales Group], ISBN 0-7119-2400-7 [ISBN 978-0-7119-2400-0]
— As quoted in Isabel Kühl (2007), Andy Warhol: Living Art, Munich & New York: Prestel, ISBN 978-3-7913-3814-9 [ISBN 3-7913-3814-5]
Mein background bestand ja darin, daß ich ein Labor gegründet hatte, das Biological Computer Lab an der University of Illinois – da sind sehr viele freaks gewesen, also Leute, die nicht so denken wie alle anderen.
heinz von foerster— Von Foerster in: "Interview mit Heinz von Foerster". by Kai Lorenz, Gernot Grub. Berlin, 23 January 1997.
With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.
james frazer— Chapter 7, Incarnate Human Gods
The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange.
alexandre koyré— Newtonian Studies (1965), p. 114
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species if separate species we be for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
h. p. lovecraft— "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" - written 1920; first published in The Wolverine, No. 9 (March 1921)
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Rainer Maria Rilke— Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)
If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.
john lancaster spalding— p. 156 (Aphorisms and Reflections (1901))
"I object to background music no matter how good it is. Composers want people to listen to their music , they don't want them doing something else while their music is on. I'd like to get the guy who sold all those big businessmen the idea of putting music in the elevators, for he was really clever. What on earth good does it do anybody to hear those four or eight bars while going up a few flights."
— Aaron Copland, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.
O, wer weiss Was in der Zeiten Hintergrunde schlummert. Who knows what may be slumbering in the background of time!
Friedrich Schiller— Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, I. 1. 44.
Tulsidas is a devotee of Rama, who is an emblem of moral values and decorum . Quite naturally, a tone of high seriousness marks his devotional poetry. His bhakti has a sound socio-moral base with a rational background.
— K. R. Sundararajan, in "Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern", p. 81
