Home > Topic > a great number
1 " I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long. "
― Thomm Quackenbush , Flies to Wanton Boys
2 " Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers.But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away. People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy.Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures. One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally.The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there. "
3 " Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women. "
― Lemony Snicket
4 " What it takes is the passion to lead and the commitment to that passion through a lifetime. A great number isn’t bad though, but doesn’t take numbers to change the world. "
― Israelmore Ayivor , Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
5 " I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, " but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext. "
6 " And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir
7 " I have not spent my time studying the problem of " race" —" race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same " race." But a great number of " black" people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead " races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights. "
8 " A society with a great number of prisons is a totally failed society because it has terribly failed to create a marvellous society where crime is not something widespread but an exception! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan
9 " You receive a great number of rewards as soon as you begin creating something you dream of deep within your soul. "
― Marc Allen , The Millionaire Course: A Visionary Plan for Creating the Life of Your Dreams
10 " One great enemy we must all endeavor to fear not conquering is fear. Fear can cripple purpose and purposeful life. Fear asks question we must fear. Fear makes vision a nightmare. One must always cross the barrier of fear to get to the great city of true purposefulness. A great number of us who are unable to live to accomplish the true reason for our existence on earth are unable to cross the barrier of fear in the first place. "
―
11 " A great Country is not the Country with a great population,but a Country with a great number of persons that believe in entrepreneurship. "
12 " In a great number of the cosmogonic myths the world is said to have developed from a great water, which was the prime matter. In many cases, as for instance in an Indian myth, this prime matter is indicated as a solution, out of which the solid earth crystallized out. "
― Svante Arrhenius , Theories of Solutions
13 " Herein lies the beauty of the flaw: that a shortcoming is a spiritual sign that says " Look! There is a perfect opportunity right here to grow and become better!" But instead of seeing those signs, people instead look and see something that is no longer worthy. Whether it be about themselves or about others. And so we have it that there are a great number of individuals who are missing out on great chances to improve themselves and to also believe in others. "
14 " It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of observation and experience. "
― Robert G. Ingersoll , Some Mistakes of Moses
15 " The road of life is paved with daily successes, a great number of them penny and nickle triumphs. Sadly, these little feats are often seen as worthless―even failures―because we dream of greater gain. Our greed keeps us focused on a gleaming pot of gold waiting at the end of some elusive rainbow. And, despairing a big loss, we fail to see the value in small achievements. "
― Richelle E. Goodrich , Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year
16 " In the meantime, Charlie learnt to fly. Dorothea fell in love. Peter discovered a new star. And a great number of things happened to Justin. Hundreds of millions of ordinary, unexpected, and occasionally quite astonishing things.And that was his fate. "
― Meg Rosoff , Just in Case
17 " For many years I have regarded the Pentateuch simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of the ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands of ideas inconsistent with known and demonstrated facts. To me it seemed almost a crime to teach that this record was written by inspired men; that slavery, polygamy, wars of conquest and extermination were right, and that there was a time when men could win the approbation of infinite Intelligence, Justice, and Mercy, by violating maidens and by butchering babes. "
18 " The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It's a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural. "
― Kelli Jae Baeli ,
19 " A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school. "
― Anthony Bourdain , A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
20 " A jeweler will prefer the smallest fragment of diamond to several sapphires; and so, in the order established by God, our intimacy with Him gives Him more glory than all possible good, procured by us, for a great number of souls, but to the detriment of our own progress. Our Heavenly Father, “who devotes Himself more to the direction of a soul in which He reigns, than to the natural government of the whole universe and to the civil government of all empires,” looks for this harmony in our zeal. "