Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

A Philosophical Take on Concepts

“A concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To possess a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: the ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applied, and being able to tell the consequences of its application. The term “idea” was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective and mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Frege, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by as subjective term.”

Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Rotten Reviews: For Whom the Bell Tolls

“At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War…Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux…”

Commonweal

“This book offers not pleasure but mounting pain; as literature it lacks the reserve that steadies genius and that lack not only dims its brilliance but makes it dangerous in its influence.”

Catholic World

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Adobe (n)

“Sun-dried mud (usually clay) and straw bricks used for building construction. Used since pre-Roman times in Sumerian and Babylonian Architecture. adobe has been employed throughout the non-European world, including the U.S. Southwest, and in some European buildings.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Anecdote

“A brief, presumably interesting report of an experience or incident, especially a humorous account reflecting human foibles; confidential tale or piece of gossip, or an unknown biographical or historical particular; digressive episode. Adj. anecdotal; n anecdotist, anecdotalist.

‘He joked with Baitsell about the formalities, laughed at the red ribbons attached to the will, told a couple of anecdotes about old Newport and Harry Lehr’s will, and finally signed his name in a great, flourishing hand.’” Louis Auchincloss, Powers of Attorney

 Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Rotten Rejections: Ambrose Bierce

[After viewing the film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in middle school, I became fascinated with Ambrose Bierce, and have been ever since. Regular readers of this blog will know that I often excerpt from The Devil’s Dictionary. The squib below is from a rejection  of Bierce’s collection of short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, which the Grolier Club named “one of the 100 most influential books printed before 1900….”]

“…uniformly horrible and revolting. Told with some power, and now and then with strokes of wonderfully vivid description, with plots ingenious in their terror and photographic in their sickening details, we must pronounce the book too brutal to be either good art or good literature. It is the triumph of realism–realism without power or symbolism.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Our Current Epistemological State

“Knowledge is the antidote to fear.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Homer’s City of 100 Gates

“Homer’s chosen image for power was to describe Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt, as a city of 100 gates; and from out of each one, at any moment, might pour 200 men riding chariots. Egyptian Thebes was known by its inhabitants as Waset. It should not be confused with Thebes in central Greece, a small but ancient Bronze Age city locked into an unprofitable rivalry with Athens and with its own numerical associations ever since Aeschylus wrote the play Seven Against Thebes.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

Rotten Reviews: Euripides

“A cliche anthologist…and maker of ragamuffin manikins.”

Aristophanes, The Thesmophoriazusae, 411 B.C.

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Ad Ignorantiam

“To ignorance: depending for its effect on the hearer’s not knowing something essential; arguing that something is true because it has not been proven false, or challenging another to disprove rather than endeavoring to improve.”

Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Ted Sizer on Society and Knowledge

“A society that is concerned about the strength and wisdom of its culture pays careful attention to its adolescents.”

Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.