Specific Quotes
More Specific Quotes
In a ballet performance there are typically no words spoken from the stage. The dancers must tell the audience the story (if there is a story) using only their body movements and gestures , which they execute to the accompaniment of music . Often mime is used to relay specific elements of the story.
— p.8 (A Beginner’s Guide to Ballet)
How nauseating in view of all this to see Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, reduce this to a game of scrabble . . . to a matter of finding the right words. We now know that Fianna Fáil ministers see nothing wrong with a Minister for Finance taking large amounts of money for personal use from business interests as long as there is no proof that any specific favours were done.
joe higgins— Irish Independent
Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
neal stephenson— "The Oral Tradition"
The origin of certain superstitions is often connected to the intention of attributing adverse events to specific causes.
— Fausto Cercignani in: Brian Morris, Quotes we cherish. Quotations from Fausto Cercignani, 2013, p. 39.
The use of Enterprise Architectures is becoming increasingly widespread in the private sector. Borrowing insights from enterprise reference architectures developed during the last decade, IT vendors and companies belonging to specific industries are establishing reference data and process models advancing the standardisation of their businesses and creating a more integrated environment for their activities. Although public administrations share the same problem of non-standardisation, which is being magnified rapidly in a changing and demanding environment, little has been done so far in the direction of integration...
— Vassilios Peristeras and Konstantinos Tarabanis (2000). "Towards an enterprise architecture for public administration using a top-down approach." European Journal of Information Systems Vol 9 (4). p. 252 (abstract)
The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures.
— Ervin László (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: p.247
General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge.
— Kenneth Boulding (1956) "General systems theory - the skeleton of science" in: Management Science, Vol.2. No. 3. (April 1956) p.197: Opening sentences
specific types of Kundas are recommended for different kinds of Yagnas....A pit for sacrificial fire or a pot ( altar ) or small reservoir/clay-structure (made up on the ground in which the Yagna fire is lit.
— In p.9 (The Integrated Science of Yagna)
The production of surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus labour, is the specific end and aim, the sum and 558 substance, of capitalist production.
— 1867 Das Kapital.
I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. And I don’t need to belong to those or to any specific ideological categories in order to use my eyes and ears.
koenraad elst— From an interview with Dr. Ramesh Rao (2002, sulekha.com)
"Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error."
— "The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 1, (1990), 5
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not. They are pre-psychological expanses, red, for example, presupposing a site radiating heat. All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
yves klein— 1959 lecture at the Sorbonne; in: Studio International, Vol. 186 (1973), p. 43; Also quoted in: David Batchelor (2008) Colour. p. 122
Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
Herbert Spencer— Pt. II, Ch. 16, The Rights of Women.
As a rule each action of an ordinary person is motivated by a solitary aim serving a solitary purpose; it can hit only one target at a time and bring about one specific result. But with the Avatar, He being the Centre of each one, any single action of His on the gross plane brings about a network of diverse results for people and objects everywhere.
meher baba— 63 : The Working of the Avatar, p. 105
“I smell fennel,” Launcelot said. “That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.”
Donald Barthelme— p. 94 (The King (1990))
With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say that the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness.
john dewey— Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development
The evil of totalitarianism is not only that it fails to protect specific liberties but that it extinguishes the very possibility of freedom.
john n. gray— 'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.104)
The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.
rollo may— Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 106
To state the obvious, I thought it was wrong at the time... those statements and comments did not comport with the facts on the ground. ... But do I blame [the President] for that specific banner? I can't blame him for that.
john mccain— May 1, 2008; Fox News
On the whole it may be observed, that the specific use of a body of unproductive consumers, is to give encouragement to wealth by maintaining such a balance between produce and consumption as will give the greatest exchangeable value to the results of the national industry.
— Book II, Chapter I, On The Progress of Wealth, Section IX, p. 412-413
Odissi dancers use their heads, busts, and torsos in soft flowing movements to express specific moods and emotions.
— In Raymond S. T. Lee; Vincenzo Loia (1 January 2007). Computational Intelligence for Agent-based Systems. Springer. pp. 239–. ISBN 978-3-540-73177-1.
Odissi has emerged as a sculpturesque dance in which the head, bust and torso move in soft flowing movements to express specific moods and emotions.
— In Aakriti Sinha (2006). Let's Know Dances of India. Star Publications. pp. 15–. ISBN 978-81-7650-097-5.
General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e.g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments.
— M.D. Mesarovic and Y. Takahare (1975) General Systems Theory, Mathematical foundations. Academic Press. Cited in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993). Computer Aided Systems Theory. p.134
Christians believed in a teleological cosmos, one created by an omniscient God, a Grand Designer, for a specific purpose. This comforting view was threatened by the new statistical methods in physics, and also by Darwin's theory of evolution, which assumes that chance may intervene between generations to introduce new characteristics.
— Patricia Fara, Science A Four Thousand Year History (2009)
When we come to consider specific characters, we see that a difference exists that, in short, the species and even genera are no longer represented upon earth. More than this, it will be found that the earliest species comparatively soon gave place to others, and that they are not represented even in the next higher group of rocks.
— p.60 (Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844))
The United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency , accountability , and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We filed the [law]suit today because we are not authorised at present to break out the number of requests, if any, that we receive for user data under specific national security statutes. We believe that the US government's important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive.
— Ron Bell, Yahoo Lawyer, quoted on BBC News, "Yahoo demands US government allow disclosure of data requests", September 9, 2013.
[Engineering concerns] the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property."
— American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (1941) as cited in: Danny Greefhorst, Erik Proper (2011) Architecture Principles: The Cornerstones of Enterprise Architecture. p. 9
Queer has become "the discursive rallying point for younger lesbians and gay men and, in yet other contexts, for lesbian interventions and, in yet other contexts, for bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with antihomophobic politics. That it can become such a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance ought to be safe-guarded not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term."
— Judith Butler (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", p.230. New York: Routledge.
