Themes

"The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.—I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

"Live Below the Line raises real money to help the world's poorest people, but it is also a symbolic demonstration aimed at highlighting - not replicating - the plight of the world's poor."

"I'm looking to evolve the concept of the new renaissance artist, taking the world by storm through the art of public display and demonstration, with technical savvy, using cell phones and computers."

"It is impossible for the cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers or, in general for any number which is any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain."

"I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction."

"The idea that the order of demonstration was the order of nature came from Plato. Aristotle said that the order of discovery was the reverse of the order of demonstration."

"Knowledge is the sure and undoubted resolution by experiment of all opinions concerning the truth... Experiment is manifest demonstration of the truth, and resolution the putting away of doubt. We cannot be resolved of any doubt save by experiment, and therefore is no better to make it than on ourselves. Let us therefore verify what we have said about concerning the truth, beginning with ourselves."

"...mathematicians say—the construction propounded will be possible too, and once more the demonstration will correspond, in the reverse order to the analysis; but if we come upon something that is admitted is impossible the problem will also be impossible. It is quite possible to accept that Plato 'discovered' the method of Analysis, in the same sense as Aristotle discovered the syllogism; that is to say, he was the first to reflect upon the process of thought involved and to describe it in contrast with the process of Synthesis."

"All sorts of new and interesting and wonderful things were happening, and it was exciting. And then I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War during a visit that Lyndon Johnson made to the Century Plaza Hotel. My girlfriend was a reporter for the London Evening Standard and we were on our way to a party, and she said, "We should check this out." So we arrived there, and soon it turned into a police riot. It was interesting to see police losing control, because they were up against a world they really didn't understand – which was very non-aggressive, but they didn't know that."

"Children understand very well that in each woman, in each man, in each child, there is capacity of waking up, of understanding, and of loving. Many children have told me that they cannot show me anyone who does not have this capacity. Some people allow it to develop, and some do not, but everyone has it. This capacity of waking up, of being aware of what is going on in your feelings, in your body, in your perceptions, in the world, is called Buddha nature, the capacity of understanding and loving. Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace."

"I move to suspend the rules and concur in the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 5037) to amend titles 38 and 18, United States Code, to prohibit certain demonstrations at cemeteries under the control of the National Cemetery Administration and at Arlington National Cemetery, and for other purposes….Prohibition.--No person may carry out-- ``(1) a demonstration on the property of a cemetery under the control of the National Cemetery Administration or on the property of Arlington National Cemetery unless the demonstration has been approved by the cemetery superintendent or the director of the property on which the cemetery is located; or ``(2) with respect to such a cemetery, a demonstration during the period beginning 60 minutes before and ending 60 minutes after a funeral, memorial service, or ceremony is held, any part of which demonstration-- Each family of the United States military now attends to their loved ones funeral with a wrenching worry that it will be met possibly with a protest or a demonstration. With the approach of our Nation's annual day of remembrance, it is altogether fitting that we approve this bill to protect the sanctity of our military funerals at our national cemeteries and Arlington National Cemetery."

"One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?'"

"We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States."

"There may be personalities which have not merely transcended substance, but are rid of it altogether: in all ages the theologian and the mystic have told of such "disembodied spirits," postulated by the one, felt by the other, and now the psychical investigator with his automatic writing and his cross-correspondences is seeking to give us rigorous demonstration of them."

"In other cases, when the medium becomes entranced, the demonstration of a communicator's separate intelligence may become stronger and the sophistication less."

"You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again."

"The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want."

"Watch me at the window from your place on the couch You watch me pretending that I am really looking out You say, "Come here, I can't see you in this light" But I'm much safer beside the moon tonight 'Cause when I am a silhouette I have no fear, I can love you from here When I am a silhouette I can give myself to you and you'd never see through, never through."

"Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves. Let me forget about today until tomarrow."

"I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of meterotic-emotional life."

"He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway."

"Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events. In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice: when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato."

"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them."

"Luxury and richness of decoration, and the general striking appearance of a facade, seem to be the only source of pleasure to generosity of persons...Public and private utility, the welfare and comfort of individuals, are the ends of the Art to which all other points must be … that decoration should begin."

"Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated."

"I enjoy decoration. By accumulating this mass of detail you throw light on things in a longer sense: in the long run it all adds up. It creates a texture — how shall I put it — a background, a period, which makes everything you write that much more convincing. Of course, all artists are terrible egoists. Unconsciously you are largely writing about yourself. I could never write anything factual; I only have confidence in myself when I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguise."

"To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers."

"Modesty is the decoration of poverty, thanks-giving is the decoration of affluence and wealth. Patience and endurance are the ornaments and decorations of calamities and distress. Humility is the decoration of lineage, and eloquence is the decoration of speech. Committing to memory is the decoration of tradition (hadīth), and bowing the shoulders is the decoration of knowledge. Decency and good morale is the decoration of the mind, and a smiling face is the decoration of Munificence and generosity. Not boasting of doing favours is the decoration of good deeds, and humility is the decoration of service. Spending less is the decoration of contentment, and abandoning the meaningless and unnecessary things is the decoration of abstention and fear of God."

"She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never condescended to construct a decoration."

"The tattooing in these portraits [in Dr Hocken's collection] ought to suggest the savage, of course, but it does not. The designs are so flowing and graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration. It takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing and but fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing. After that, the undecorated European face is unpleasant and ignorable."

"One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering. "Why are you afraid?" I said. "I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful," she said."

"I have my mantra about silhouette, proportion, and fit. I believe that when they are in harmony and balance, you'll look great in anything."

"The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament."

"The tradition of painting and decorating oxcarts started in the early twentieth century. Originally, each region of Costa Rica had its own particular design, enabling the identification of the driver’s origin by the painted patterns on the wheels."

"You may have a throne at the royal court, with beautiful decorations and soft carpets, all sorts of luscious fruits and beautiful gardens, the excitement of the chase and princely pleasures - but still, the mind is not made happy by such illusory diversions."

"So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage."

"A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration."

"Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is."

"The silhouette was named for Etienne de Silhouette, the notoriously stingy finance minister to Louis XV, who ironically was himself incapable of casting a shadow, due to lycanthropy?"

"...beds were quiet and she allowed her eyes to dwell in thought on the dark-veiled silhouette in the mirrors, she felt a thrill of admiration for that solitary form patrolling without visible strain or vainglory a demented dreamland of fearful potential."

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

"Bring from the east, bring from the west, Flowers for the hair, gems for the vest ; Bring the rich silks that are shining with gold, Wrought in rich broidery on every fold, Bring ye the perfumes that breathe on the rose, Such as the summer of Egypt bestows ; Bring the white pearls from the depths of the sea — They are fair like the neck where their lustre will be. Such are the offerings that now will be brought, But can they bring peace to the turmoil of thought ? Can they one moment of quiet bestow To the human heart, feverish and beating, below ?"

"Decorate! your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is. Or the theater stage designer's maxim: "If you can't hide it, decorate it.""

"People would be amazed at the behind-the-scenes activity in hero-making; quarrels over which cases are most deserving; seeing that all ranks and units are properly represented; dressing up weak cases to make them appear stronger; last minute switches from one class of decoration to another. … The number of decorations is determined, not by the number of deserving cases, but by the number and types of medals the admiral totes along."

"There were many wooden chairs for the bulk of his visitors, and two wicker armchairs with red cloth cushions for superior people. From the packing-cases had emerged some Indian clubs,… and all these articles... made a scattered and untidy decoration that Mrs. Clough assiduously dusted and greatly cherished."

"Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration."

"The glorification of the "'woman's role," then, seems to be in proportion to society's reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its empt."

"At the very moment he cried out, David realised that what he had run into was only the Christmas tree. Disgusted with himself at such cowardice, he spat a needle from his mouth, stepped back from the tree and listened. There were no sounds of any movement upstairs: no shouts, no sleepy grumbles, only a gentle tinkle from the decorations as the tree had recovered from the collision."

"Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one's privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply."

"I have sat, a minister and ambassador, covered with gold lace, gaudy with ribbons and decorations, at the table of kings, the feasts of princes and princesses, only to fall once more into indigence and know imprisonment."