2 random quotes
May 30th 2011 00:40
Two quotations with nothing particular in common, except, as always, they have something interesting to say...!
from E=mc˛ - a biography of the world's most famous equation - David Bodanis - chapter 7
What guided Einstein was that, in his mid-twenties, he found the unknown intriguing. He felt compelled to comprehend what might have been intended for our universe by The Old One (as he referred to his notion of God).
'We are in the position,' Einstein explained later, 'of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.'
When the chance came to reach through the gloom, and pluck out The Old One's book that had the shimmering equation E=mc˛ written on its pages, Einstein had been willing to take it.
from Democracy and the Student Left - George F Kennan (quoted in Style: an Anti-Textbook, pg 127).
After the needless destruction of natural environment, I regard this - not advertising as such, but the consignment to the advertiser of the entire mass communication process, as a concession to be exploited by it for commercial gain - as probably the greatest evil of our natural life. We will not, I think, have a healthy intellectual climate in this country, a successful system of education, a sound press, or a proper vitality of artistic and recreational life, until advertising is rigorously separated from every form of legitimate cultural and intellectual communication - until advertisements are removed from every printed page containing material that has claim to intellectual or artistic integrity and form every television or radio program that has those same pretensions, from every roadside and every bit of countryside that purports to offer to the traveller a glimpse of what his continent once was and once again might be.
from E=mc˛ - a biography of the world's most famous equation - David Bodanis - chapter 7
What guided Einstein was that, in his mid-twenties, he found the unknown intriguing. He felt compelled to comprehend what might have been intended for our universe by The Old One (as he referred to his notion of God).
'We are in the position,' Einstein explained later, 'of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.'
When the chance came to reach through the gloom, and pluck out The Old One's book that had the shimmering equation E=mc˛ written on its pages, Einstein had been willing to take it.
from Democracy and the Student Left - George F Kennan (quoted in Style: an Anti-Textbook, pg 127).
After the needless destruction of natural environment, I regard this - not advertising as such, but the consignment to the advertiser of the entire mass communication process, as a concession to be exploited by it for commercial gain - as probably the greatest evil of our natural life. We will not, I think, have a healthy intellectual climate in this country, a successful system of education, a sound press, or a proper vitality of artistic and recreational life, until advertising is rigorously separated from every form of legitimate cultural and intellectual communication - until advertisements are removed from every printed page containing material that has claim to intellectual or artistic integrity and form every television or radio program that has those same pretensions, from every roadside and every bit of countryside that purports to offer to the traveller a glimpse of what his continent once was and once again might be.
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