All Quotes

"If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb."

"My wish is that the nuclear treatment for cancer be as affordable and cheap as aspirin."

"The science and technology which have advanced man safely into space have brought about startling medical advances for man on earth. Out of space research have come new knowledge, techniques and instruments which have enabled some bedridden invalids to walk, the totally deaf to hear, the voiceless to talk, and, in the foreseeable future, may even make it possible for the blind to "see.""

"Let no man thinke (speaking of the Indians,) that they are men of nothing; but if they thinke so, let them go and make triall."

"Apart from his sophistical defence of Spanish colonial policy, Acosta deserves high praise as an acute and diligent observer whose numerous new and valuable data are set forth in a vivid style."

"Much of what he says is of necessity erroneous, because it is influenced by the standard of knowledge of his time; but his criticisms are remarkable, while always dignified. He reflects the scientific errors of the period in which he lived, but with hints of a more advanced understanding."

"Since the normal tendency is to simplify, to trivialize, to eliminate the unfamiliar word or construction, the rule is praestat difficilior lectio...When we choose the 'more difficult' reading, however, we must be sure that it is in itself a plausible reading. The principle should not be used in support of dubious syntax, or phrasing that it would not have been natural for the author to use. There is an important difference between a more difficult reading and a more unlikely reading."

"Space technology can help in mapping and tracking United Nations' sustainable development goals such as zero poverty, zero hunger and improved quality of education."

"So far we have launched two satellites. The one launched in 2017 [suffered] an orbital failure. Last October, we launched another satellite. It is a HTS (high-throughput satellite) which will be used for broadband connectivity in Angola and Africa."

"Minnie, I canna caa my wheel, or spin the oo or twine the tweel. It's luve a laddie whammles me. Ech, the wanchancie glamarie."

"Caller rain frae abune reeshles amang the epple-trees: the leaves are soughan wi the breeze, and sleep faas drappan doun."

"Deid sall ye ligg, and ne'er a memorie sall onie hain, or ae regret for ye, sin that ye haena roses o Pierie. In Hades' howff a gangrel ghaist ye'll flee, amang derk ghaists stravaigan sichtlesslie."

"Everyone has to take part in this war against cholera, we’re almost there, there’s just a little bit left and if we all work together we’ll be able to get rid of cholera in Angola."

"This is a journey marked by immense challenges but also by unwavering courage and the conviction that no obstacle is greater than guaranteeing vaccination and every child’s right to a healthy future."

"We celebrate the achievements and reaffirm our unwavering commitment to completing this journey. May this honour serve as an eternal tribute to all who, yesterday and today, have dedicated their lives to the cause of public health in Angola."

"There will be no radical shakeup."

"You don't fix what works well."

"improve and change things where there is a need to do so."

"At the time there was a critical shortage of doctors in the country and so we had to cope with the huge demand for medical care."

"I thought that rather than looking at patients in the hospital it was better to go out into the communities and check and look at the issue in a broader view. I then made up my mind to shift from internal medicine to public health."

"It is a technical organisation and we operate on the basis of the health and technical needs of member states and we do things according to our organisation's interests and mandate."

"We need to ensure the main donors are aware of the poor distribution of funds."

"We're hoping new donors will come along - it's important to diversify,"

"All the elements are in the pipeline - a vaccine, insecticides, diagnostics. The more results we see, the more we think it is possible."

"But the malaria parasite is always changing and adapting; you need to always be developing new tools to stay ahead of it."

"What is faith? Is it a belief in otherworldly realities, in which imagination reigns supreme, and perhaps in truths expressed by sacred scriptures defined outside of all rationality, whose interpretation allows us to deduce everything and its opposite? Or is it the path of intelligence, indeed of the whole being, towards the Absolute, which precisely for this reason removes everything relative, all pretended knowledge, empties our soul and leads us into nothingness, into that “night” , from which alone the dawn can rise, or rather, the eternal light can reveal itself? These two questions belong, I believe, to every thinking consciousness of all time, but even more so in our time, that is, after the Enlightenment, after contemporary philology, which makes that faith as belief and that adherence to Scripture that was perhaps possible for a man of the Middle Ages extremely problematic. Must we pretend to believe in the existence of biblical characters and events that have been shown to have the same historical reality as the Homeric heroes and the Trojan War?"

"The depths of the soul are not a faculty, a “power” of the soul, but rather the place where uncreated grace operates, God himself who “works with the soul to such an extent that he frees it from itself, as a creature, so that nothing remains but God and the soul itself, without mediation.”"

"For me, Meister Eckhart is truly Meister, magister, as his contemporaries called him. He is the Christian who most deeply understood the Gospel message and, at the same time, the medieval philosopher who was able to gather the best of the classical heritage. His works are all equally important, both those in the vernacular, intended for the people, and those in Latin, created for the university environment. From a more philosophical-theoretical point of view, however, it can be said that the ‘'Commentary on the Gospel of John’' is the most dense and relevant work, while for a more immediate access to his thought and experience, it is certainly the works in the vernacular, the ‘'Sermons’' or the so-called ‘'Treatises’' that are most useful. They are also the most fascinating, profound and at the same time simple works, accessible to all, as only a great teacher of life – ‘Lebemeister’, and not just ‘Lesemeister’, or professor, as Heidegger noted about him – can be."

"Almighty God the Father is the one who can be prayed to, and prayed to for help, both for eternal life and – above all – for the needs and desires of this earthly life. It is therefore not surprising that religions continue to thrive, particularly in those parts of the world and among those sections of the population that feel the harshness of existence most acutely. In this sense, Karl Marx's old definition of religion as the opium of the people and the groaning of the oppressed creature is still valid, and is necessarily expressed precisely through the image of Almighty God the Father. The picture is completely different among the educated classes. Since the Enlightenment, since the days of Reimarus and Lessing, historical criticism and philological analysis have destroyed that image, as they have dismantled the supernatural claim of the Bible, the foundation of that image throughout our world, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From this perspective, God is truly dead, as in Nietzsche's famous passage, and the fact that businesspeople have not noticed this does not detract from the fact itself: the biblical God died the moment people realized that they themselves had constructed his image."

"Interviewer: Professor Vannini, how did your interest in mysticism come about? Vannini: It arose spontaneously, from the religious education I received in childhood (this was before the Council!) and, at the same time, from my encounter with and passion for philosophy, which developed during my adolescence. It was precisely by following my own disordered but passionate paths of research that I discovered, in the Marucelliana Library in Florence, the little book edited by Professor Giuseppe Faggin, La nascita eterna (The Eternal Birth), which was the only anthology of Eckhart available in Italian at the time. Although I was only a high school student, I was certain that I had stumbled upon something extraordinary, infinitely deeper (or higher) than anything I had known – or been taught – until then, a certainty that today, half a century later, is, if possible, even stronger for me. Obviously, I did not understand everything, and in order to understand, I began to study philosophy and then theology, devoting myself in particular to the authors and currents that most related to this field. Thus, little by little, I became familiar with that world which, somewhat improperly and, above all, unfortunately in a very ambiguous way, is called “mysticism.”"

"I don't believe there is a “calling” to mystical experience. I think that what is rather ambiguously called mysticism is nothing more than the experience of the spirit, or rather the experience of the truest and deepest reality of man: something that each of us is “called” to accomplish if we want to become what we really are. Of course, this requires a precise willingness not to be satisfied with the relative, to move towards the Absolute _ therefore a strong religious and philosophical need _ , but this also seems to me to be something absolutely “normal,” even if, perhaps, it is not so from a statistical point of view, so to speak."

"The question of whether or not Henry was a great king in the fifteenth century, or subsequently, is a distraction. A man’s character may be obscured as much by the acclamation of greatness as by neglect."

"This brings us to an important point about Henry. He was probably the nearest to an intellectual among all the medieval kings of England."

"I think it is possible to speak of “a Christian philosophy” as long as it is understood in the sense in which the Fathers of the Greek Church, Origen, or Gregory of Nyssa could understand it. Certainly, Christianity, in the strong sense, is itself philosophy, but not because there is a Christian philosophy ideologically placed alongside others, but because the life of the Christian as such is profoundly “philosophy.” The expression “Christian philosophy,” therefore, taken in a certain sense, does not bother me at all, precisely because I believe that Christianity is the true philosophy, without prejudice to the universal and absolute value given to both terms, Christianity and philosophy."

"Interviewer: How do philosophy and theology coexist in you? Vannini: Since the age of reason, I have felt a certain love and interest for deeply philosophical and theological issues, according to the Hegelian interpretation that philosophy has the absolute in common with religion."

"It must be understood that the silence referred to by the adjective ‘mystical’ is not external, esoteric silence, intended to conceal secret truths from the ‘uninitiated’, but rather inner silence, which consists in silencing one’s thoughts, however profound they may be, and therefore in detachment, especially from all our supposed knowledge. Detachment is the work of intelligence, which incessantly recognizes the finiteness of its own contents and, at the same time, of the will, which incessantly recognizes in those same contents the presence of egoism, of that amor sui that is truly the root of all evil."

"Philosophy in the strong, classical sense shares with religion the object, truth, the Absolute in and of itself, and is therefore properly a stripping away, a removal of everything that is relative and accidental, in order to get to the essential. This concerns first and foremost ourselves, according to the precept of the Delphic Apollo: ‘Know thyself’. It is the ‘sculpting of one's own statue’ that Plotinus speaks of, removing the marble that covers it and prevents it from coming to light."

"Recalcati reconstructs in all its facets the development, far from linear, of a thought, such as that of Lacan, formed at the point of convergence and tension between existentialism and structuralism, capable of absorbing, translating them into a highly original mixture, the influences of Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre and Kojève, Saussurre and Jakobson – not to mention Freud, who remained his privileged interlocutor until the end."

"There is no real escape from this vortex. The only way to become immune to the plague is to expose oneself to its contagion. But this inevitably means becoming prey to it in an endless cycle. The plague generates itself, reproducing tirelessly, despite and precisely because of attempts to eradicate it—in reality, hiding it, crushing it against the fragile wall of oblivion and repression. Humanity is nothing more than that thin strip of land that stretches between one wave of the plague and another – emerging into the open only when the tide recedes, before rising again and submerging us once more. That in some seasons the plague – this plague in man and of man – disappears, recedes, vanishes, is our impression. It has always been there, lurking, waiting to return and explode stronger than before, like the dark shadow that stretched across the burning heart of Western civilization in the 1930s."

"The plague is a metaphor for evil. Of evil that comes from outside, or from above, like the arrows shot by Apollo at the Greeks leaving for Troy. But also, and above all, of evil that arises and grows within us. Within the world and from the world. Rooted in that nature that both envelops us and constitutes us as finite, fragile beings, exposed to the icy wind of death."

"But the question of the plague—in its not only pathological but also moral, ontological, and metaphysical meaning—had already been raised by Lucretius and, before him, by Anaximander. The plague is destiny, but also, when measured by ethical standards, the fault of a man who, being part of nature, shares its evil or, at least, senseless character."

"Despite the risks of explosion, lithium-ion batteries remain the best on the market."

"Without them, there would be no Smartphone or electric vehicle."

"I believe that the disorder is a fundamental state of the universe because it contributes to its harmony."

"I could not be able to persevere in my field if I did not have a great passion for what I was doing."

"Passion is the fuel that still keeps me moving even in the absence of tangible results."

"If the statue of liberty was a prominent symbol of freedom since the 19th century, the lithium battery becomes the one of the 21st century."

"To succeed in one’s career, we also need to be tolerant towards others."

"You must have observed how the mere act of standing and sitting is difficult for me. Thankfully, people now pay much less attention to my physical handicap, as they focus more on the challenging things that I have hurdled and continue to face as leader of one of the largest provinces in the Philippines, the province of Isabela."

"At this point, I see no walls anymore. When tragic situations stretch your emotions and mental capacity, you discover a strength you didn’t know you had. You realize that you can become bigger than your situation. I no longer live in doubt or worry—I carry a quiet knowing in my heart that I am meant for great things. That’s why I was given another day, another chance, to share my stories from behind bars and turn pain into purpose."