Grand Narratives Quotes & Sayings

You cannot lead by following. — Alex Ferguson

If you cannot allow people to do their jobs ... nobody with substance and creativity will work for you. — Condoleezza Rice

I want to be a contemporary artist and at the same time a romantic! — Luis Gonzalez

The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past. - Corliss Lamont, humanist philosopher — Dale McGowan

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community. — Edward W. Said

I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head. — Noah Baumbach

Chapter 5-"Now THAT'S Leverage" discusses the idea of "software leverage," where reusing components results in greater impact. We see how the use of shell scripts achieves a high degree of leverage. — Mike Gancarz

We are nothing with all our gifts be they ever so great, except God assist us. — Martin Luther

The crucial question, therefore, is not how to accomplish the final reconciliation. That messianic problem ought not to be taken out of God's hands. The only thing worse than the failure of some modern grand narratives of emancipation would have been their success! Merely by trying to accomplish the messianic task, the have already done too much of the work of the antichrist. In demasking anti-messianic projects that offer universal salvation, Lyotard helps us ask the right kind of question, which is not how to achieve the final reconciliation, but what resources we need to live in peace in the absence of the final reconciliation. — Miroslav Volf

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World — Kevin Dunn

There is no plan. There is no actual grand narrative. Think about what may happen later, but live, learn, and act in the now. Look into the dark corners that narratives want to forget and that make you uncomfortable. Don't ignore the truth just because it doesn't agree with the world you want, because it's the world you're going to get. — Vinay Gupta

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing ... his very gestures express enchantment. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago? — Jon Oringer

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone. — Colm Toibin

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. — David Halberstam

Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. — William Shakespeare

A player's first move isn't necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I'll get, but it's often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move - when you come to the bridge - you haven't had a chance to get much sense of the game's rhythms, so you're awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player's imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who's asking it how to live. — John Darnielle

during transitions to democracy, nations often undergo political convulsions that make them hard to govern, thus feeding nostalgia for their old authoritarian order. — Moises Naim