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.
He was a terrific writer and was the most responsible for the success and development of Batman. He really was the background for Batman; Bob Kane had ideas while Bill sort of organized them".
bill finger— George Roussos, quoted in "Interviews with George Roussos", Dark Knight Archives, vol. 2, DC Comics, page 8
Against the background of this luminous and sparkling stage Bond stood in the sunshine and felt his mission to be incongruous and remote and his dark profession an affront to his fellow actors.
ian fleming— Ch. 5 (Casino Royale (1953))
I was always really determined to look the way I wanted to look, and I wanted to cut my hair. I wanted to look different because I was used to looking different. Because of my religious background I'd always been encouraged to look different.
— As quoted in NME (June 1983); later in NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1992) by John Tobler, p. 381
Like his rival Zhukov, Konev was a man of iron will, but he did not hail from such a disadvantaged background, and he was unique among Soviet high commanders in having begun his military career as a political officer.
ivan konev— Christopher Duffy
(You'd be surprised who'll hang an electric chair in the living room. Especially if the background matches the drapes.)
Andy Warhol— As quoted in Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan (2004), Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop, New York: Delacorte, ISBN 0-385-90079-1 [ISBN 978-0-385-90079-9]
The background looks like a lot of red cards.
arsène wenger— On Arsenal's redesigned club crest. (2002)
"Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation." "Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation." "A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle."
paulo freire— Chapter 1 (Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970))
... a man can overcome his background, even as he can overcome a skilled opponent.
david gemmell— Ch. 13 (The King Beyond the Gate)
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.
h. p. lovecraft— Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
james madison— Not found in any writings of Madison. The earliest known appearance is a 1994 pamphlet from the Militia of Montana. See “In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution”, above, for a sourced quote with a related theme.
Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read.
Gertrude Stein— Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (1931)
We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
— Writing for the court, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)
Man 's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos to the unknown which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination . The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.
— H. P. Lovecraft, in "The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 53
America's daily political vitriol is an undeniable fact. Against that depressing background, it is good to be able to celebrate an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility.
— Timothy Garton Ash, "We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility," The Guardian, 12 January 2011; and "Look it up: Wikipedia is turning 10," The Los Angeles Times, 14 January 2011
