Specific Quotes
More Specific Quotes
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)
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
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
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)
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)
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)
Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance — embracing all opposites.
taisen deshimaru— As quoted in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Buddhist Wisdom (2000) by Gill Farrer Halls, p. 162
These differences involve a tendency for more males to be at one end of the continuum on a specific cognitive ability, while the majority of females tend to be toward the other end of the continuum on the same ability, with some overlap between the two groups.
virgil miller newton— Miller Newton (1995). Adolescence: Guiding Youth Through the Perilous Ordeal.W.W. Norton and Company, NY, NY, pg 43.
Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
j. robert oppenheimer— Letter to his brother Frank (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 136
Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
hannah arendt— p. 5 (The Life of the Mind (1971/1978))
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
hannah arendt— p. 15 (The Life of the Mind (1971/1978))
All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.
octavia butler— Chapter 19 (p. 357)
Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one’s existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behavior, but these elements are in principle separable. ... The “metaphysical need,” ... both Marx and Nietzsche held, is a historical phenomenon that arises under determinate circumstances, and could be expected to disappear under other circumstances that we could relatively easily envisage.
raymond geuss— pp. 41-42 (Philosophy and Real Politics (2008))
In some central and important cases, ... the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action.
raymond geuss— p. 52 (Philosophy and Real Politics (2008))
You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, but ourselves as human animals.
asger jorn— Statement in 1950, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 76
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"
Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.
— p.340 as cited in: Philosophica gandensia, Vol.6-7 (1968). p.141
God has always kept on earth a government of his own…In Eden the government was direct, individual and personal. God spoke directly to man and gave specific commands to be obeyed.
— David Lipscomb, in Civil Government : Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian's Relation To It (1889), p. 12
As the size of software systems increases, the algorithms and data structures of the computation no longer constitute the major design problems. When systems are constructed from many components, the organization of the overall system the software architecture presents a new set of design problems. This level of design has been addressed in a number of ways including informal diagrams and descriptive terms, module interconnection languages, templates and frameworks for systems that serve the needs of specific domains, and formal models of component integration mechanisms.
— David Garlan and Mary Shaw (1993). "An introduction to software architecture." Advances in software engineering and knowledge engineering Vol 1. p. 1-40. Abstract
Historicism runs counter to the specific capacity of the literary work to escape the limits of historical time, to allow for the cross-generational flourishing of tradition, and open the present to a multidimensional temporality.
— Russell Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20
In the past few years, it has been recognized that project management is an identifiable profession or job category, if you like requiring specific skills, training, knowledge and even cultivated personality traits.
— Micheal Marcus in: Computerworld, 12 okt 1981. Vol. 15, nr. 41. p. 45
Curiosity is defined as a need, thirst or desire for knowledge . The concept of curiosity is central to motivation . The term can be used as both a description of a specific behavior as well as a hypothetical construct to explain the same behavior.
— G. Loewenstein (1994), in "The Psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation". Psychological Bulletin, 116(1):75-98.
For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant , in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.
— Miguel de Unamuno The Tragic Sense of Life (1913) IV : The Essence of Catholicism
Assassination, whether in peacetime or in wartime, constitutes an illegal killing, while targeted killing is the intentional slaying of a specific individual or group of individuals with explicit governmental approval.
— Morgan, Matthew J. (2009). The Impact of 9/11 and the New Legal Landscape: The Day that Changed Everything?. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 227-228. ISBN 0230608388.
Of seven abortion restrictions tested in a July 15-17 Gallup poll, informing women of certain risks of an abortion in advance of performing it is the most widely favored, at 87%. Seven in 10 Americans favor requiring parental consent for minors and establishing a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions. Nearly two-thirds favor making the specific procedure known as "partial birth abortion" illegal... 71% say [abortion] should be illegal in the second trimester and 86% in the third.
— Gallup.com press release citing poll results on July 25, 2011. [20].
Television interviews in particular should focus on the public issue involved (right to confidential and professional medical care, freedom of choice and so forth) and not on the specific details of the procedure.
— Warren Hern, excerpted from his medical textbook Abortion Practice, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1984.
specific areas of production include countries such as USA , India , China , America , the Middle East and Australia , where climatic conditions suit the natural growth requirements of cotton, including periods of hot and dry weather and where adequate moisture is available, often obtained through irrigation .
— In P.7 (The Biology of Gossypium hirsutum L. and Gossypium barbadense L. (cotton) Version)
