1908 Quotes & Sayings

My dad was born in Chicago in 1908 ... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business. — Bob Balaban

As a boy I had liked both drawing and physics, and I always abhorred the role of being a spectator. In 1908, when I was 15, I designed, built and flew a toy model airplane which won the then-famous James Gordon Bennett Cup. By 16 I had discovered that design could be fun and profitable, and this lesson has never been lost on me. — Raymond Loewy

These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living — Michael Crichton

I was born in August, no July, 1908. — Satchel Paige

Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be. — Andre Geim

Looking over the grave of the Garcias I did not tell him that 1908 was also when they found the caves at La Chapelle, when they found an apelike man, a Neanderthal fifty thousand years old, who had been carefully buried in a sepulcher, a haunch of meat and several flint knives left to protect him in the afterlife. That is how long we have been hoping for a next world. Since before we were truly men. — Philipp Meyer

In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me. — Jelly Roll Morton

It's barely changed since the faceless colour committee originally selected it in 1908 when the first map of the Underground was designed and the Bakerloo conclusively became brown, a very early twentieth-century brown, which brings something of the nineteenth century with it - the colour of Sherlock Holmes's pipe, a Gladstone bag, a grandfather clock. — Paul Morley

In 1908, Abdulhamid II established an Islamic university in Beijing, China, to serve China's Hui Muslims. — Firas Alkhateeb

1908: A massive explosion over Tunguska, Siberia, leveled sixty to eighty million trees over 2,150 square kilometers. Blamed on an asteroid or comet, or Nikola Tesla's Coil. The Bermuda Triangle J — Catherine Coulter

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old. — Robertson Davies

This next house is a classic. It was built in 1908." Ms. Knight was a realtor trying hard to sell us a house, and my parents thought that the one she just showed us had stunk. My mom made a note on her clipboard — Carrie Cross

Women made up 44% of Olympic competitors at London 2012 - the greatest show of gender equality in Olympic history. By comparison, in the 1908 Games men outnumbered women 53 to 1. — Donna De Varona

But what can be learned from trivia? A history of inventions reveals we made the gun silencer (1908) before air conditioning (1911), the kaleidoscope (1817) before Braille printing (1829), cocaine (1860) before penicillin (1929). It's a story about pleasure before usefulness, about ingenuity in killing before improving our everyday lives."
The Beautiful Miscellaneous, — Dominic Smith

The key point of the Tunguska Event is that there was a tremendous explosion, a great shock wave, an enormous forest fire, and yet there is no impact crater at the site. There seems to be only one explanation consistent with all the facts: In 1908 a piece of a comet hit the Earth. — Carl Sagan

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. — E. M. Forster

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908) — Auguste Rodin

The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. — Arthur C. Clarke

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.
We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748) — Doris Kearns Goodwin

But as no two (theoreticians) agree on this (skin friction) or any other subject, some not agreeing today with what they wrote a year ago, I think we might put down all their results, add them together, and then divide by the number of mathematicians, and thus find the average coefficient of error. (1908) — Hiram Maxim

While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

So why is it helpful to explore this story, this 'experience' from the point of view of science? Why not just rely on personal experience? Exploring complexity theory allows a direct challenge to the implicit assumptions many people hold that science implies the world is 'mechanical', that it is indeed predictable and controllable. The fact that complexity is a 'new science' has power. Indeed, it reframes science and emphasizes that the only reliable way to investigate the way things are, and certainly the way things change, is through paying attention to the local detail - to the 'minutely organized particulars', as William Blake (1908) called them. — Jean G. Boulton

If someone has copyright over some piece of your stuff, you can sell it without permission from the copyright holder because the copyright holder can only control the 'first-sale.' The Supreme Court has recognized this doctrine since 1908. — Marvin Ammori

The last time the Cubs won the World Series was 1908. The last time they were in one was 1945. Hey, any team can have a bad century. — Tom Trebelhorn

I started the movement of SF in America in 1908 through my first magazine, 'MODERN ELECTRICS.' At that time it was an experiment. Science fiction authors were scarce. There were not a dozen worth mentioning in the entire world — Hugo Gernsback

Even the simplest of cottages often picked up the decorative elements of the more formal styles as is evident in this Italianate cottage. Almost square, the one-story frame cottage at 543 Coombs duplicates the symmetry of the larger Italianates. Note also its low-pitched roof and projecting eaves supported by elaborate pierced and scrolled brackets. The molded window hoods supported by brackets top tall, narrow sash windows. The front porch could grace a much larger house with its molded cornice, columns, brackets, pierced arches, and turned balusters. In 1908, auctioneer J.T. Gamble lived — Anthony Raymond Kilgallin

What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement ... The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again. — Charles Whibley

In 1908, there was a persuasive demonstration of the power of high-speed, low-mass asteroids in rural Siberia. The Tunguska impactor iced millions of pine trees and about a zillion mosquitoes - and was no larger than an office building. — Seth Shostak

My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me. — Elliott Carter

Like its Senate counterpart, H.R. 1908 is the product of years of bipartisan collaboration. And now, by passing S. 1145, the U.S. Senate has a similar opportunity to restore our patent regime to its rightful position of protecting inventors' property rights and spurring innovation. These are values that all Americans should rally behind. — Viet D. Dinh

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots. — Burt Rutan

The crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.46 Then, as now, the authorities reacted to a liquidity crisis by printing money. — Niall Ferguson

The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task. — Sigmund Freud

After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a hard day's work with less food than did their ancestors 500 years ago. Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want. Capitalism — Yuval Noah Harari

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908 — G.K. Chesterton

Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right. — George Will

Olson's case, he would later say, amounted to "one big Brandeis brief," a term that refers to twentieth-century litigator Louis Brandeis, who in 1908 pioneered a style of argument that rejected the conservative notion of the law as a static set of truths etched into stone at the time of the nation's founding. and instead demanded that it respond to changing realities, taking into account not only the framers' original intent and precedent but new facts that could be gleaned from sociological and scientific study. — Jo Becker

between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo's population). — Yuval Noah Harari

I am determined to bring even more severity, clarity, and reserve into my life (she wrote in 1908). — John Peter Nettl

The distinctive crimes of this generation are crimes of subtlety and finesse.
- ALEXANDER S. BACON 1908 — J.M. Carlisle

In 1908, you could easily earn $20 to $200 as a cartoonist. What's amazing is that it's still true! — Art Spiegelman

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam. — Prem Kishore

In these days [1908], when all things and memories of the past are at length become not only subservient to, but submerged by, the matters and needs of the immediate present, those paths of knowledge that lead into regions seemingly remote from such needs are somewhat discredited; and the aims of those that follow them whither they lead are regarded as quite out of touch with the real interests of life. Very greatly is this so with archaeology, and the study of ancient and curious tongues, and searchings into old thoughts on high and ever-insistent questions; a public which has hardly time to read more than its daily newspaper and its weekly novel has denounced - almost dismissed - them, with many other noble and wonderful things, as 'unpractical,' whatever that vague and hollow word may mean. — Battiscombe G. Gunn

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908. — Jeff Bezos

I do believe that where there is a choice between cowardice and non-violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. — Mahatma Gandhi