Hendrik Quotes & Sayings

Distance is nothing when you are something. — Zarry Hendrik

The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership - who will have the courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seamanship. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education, they should know that their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. — Hendrik Verwoerd

The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made 'knowledge and understanding' the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The plants in the garden - the aloes, the almond tree, the rose tree and the iris - were afraid of her. The flowers withered under her breath and the touch of her hand was leprous for the leaves. The plants whose growth is belief, whose breathing is hope, whose immobility is confidence and whose calyx is prayer, the plants who kept watch into the night, hated this women with the secret force of stars. — Hendrik Cramer

Robert Kennedy, on his own, left no great legislative legacy, founded no great institution, led no great movement. His most extraordinary accomplishment - and it was extraordinary - was to embody in himself, and create in others, a kind of transcendent yearning for the possibility of redemptive change. — Hendrik Hertzberg

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. - Hendrik Willem Van Loon — Randall Munroe

The main application of Pure Mathematics is to make you happy. — Hendrik Lenstra

[If the Democratic nominee turns out to be] Walter Mondale, I hope he picks Representative Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. It would be a desperate move, but that's what it'll take to get rid of Reagan. Ms. Ferraro is no more unqualified than a lot of Vice Presidential candidates have been, and anyhow Mondale's in good health. — Hendrik Hertzberg

The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate. — Hendrik Hertzberg

Count your blessings - not your troubles. — Hendrik De Vries

Teeth actually turn out to be one of a couple of good sources of ancient DNA. The teeth, actually the enamel, is quite good at preserving the DNA, so it is a bit of time capsule so to speak. — Hendrik Poinar

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number - entirely without merit ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached. — Hendrik Tennekes

Typically, there's a drive in science to do something just to say you've done it. — Hendrik Poinar

History is the mighty tower of experience, which time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. - Forward — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

I can't agree that what we're seeing is a matter of the American bourgeoisie confronting workers everywhere. It's more like the international plutocracy eliminating the American middle class while inadvertently creating a bourgeoisie in India, China, etc. I do agree that Soros's role is paradoxical, but if all billionaires (or even a few more) were like Soros, the dialectic would give us global social democracy PDQ. — Hendrik Hertzberg

I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I'm not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It's just a matter of working out the details. — Hendrik Poinar

A math lecture without a proof is like a movie without a love scene. This talk has two proofs. — Hendrik Lenstra

If we brought the mammoth back to Siberia, maybe that would be good for the ecosystems that are changing because of climate change. — Hendrik Poinar

This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Life means progress, and progress means suffering. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Unfair in practice is not the same thing as wrong in principle, but sometimes it has to do. — Hendrik Hertzberg

A person's character is what it is. It's a little like a marriage - only without the option of divorce. You can work on it and try to make it better, but basically you have to take the bitter with the sweet. — Hendrik Hertzberg

Till now it was believed that time and space existed by themselves, even if there was nothing else--no sun, no earth, no stars--while now we know that time and space are not the vessel for the universe, but could not exist at all if there were no contents, namely, no sun, earth and other celestial bodies. — Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

I'm not sure the Russians would be happy that their iconic wooly mammoth has North American origins. — Hendrik Poinar

An ignorant person is, by the very fact of his or her ignorance, a very dangerous person. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague. — Hendrik Poinar

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal. — Hendrik Poinar

There's no environment I can think of that would have remained constant enough to preserve dinosaur DNA. — Hendrik Poinar

The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state. — Hendrik Verwoerd

In Munich, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a rare European NATO leader who has a clear picture of events, told Merkel that the choice was "surrender or arm Ukraine" - to no effect. — Anonymous

On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The Boeing 747 is the commuter train of the global village. — Hendrik Tennekes

It's a strange sort of attack, to be sure: a wonderfully pacific attack, a supportive attack, an attack without the slightest intention or capacity to cause harm, consisting, as it does, of the earnest wish of certain loving couples to join themselves to that very institution and thus to feel themselves, and be accepted as, full members of the American (and human) family. — Hendrik Hertzberg

Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps. — Hendrik Tennekes

It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. — Hendrik Poinar

There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park? — Hendrik Poinar

The "freedom movement" is a racist movement as such. But it's a virulent example of identity politics. "Whiteness" is part of the identity, but not the most important part. — Hendrik Hertzberg

For tolerance (and you must remember this when you grow older), is of very recent origin and even the people of our own so-called "modern world" are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very much. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old. — Hendrik Hertzberg

When Death lurks at the door, the physician is considered as a God. When danger has been overcome, the physician is looked upon as an angel. When the patient begins to convalesce, the physician becomes a mere human. When the physician asks for his fees, he is considered as the devil himself. — Hendrik Goltzius

Nuclear DNA encodes all the proteins and enzymes that make you you, basically. — Hendrik Poinar

In history as in life it is success that counts. Start a political upheaval and let yourself be caught, and you will hang as a traitor. But place yourself at the head of a rebellion and gain your point, and all future generations will worship you as the Father of their Country. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

You can go into caves, and they can maintain constant conditions of temperature and humidity over long periods of time, even though the outside temperature may be way above what it is inside the cave. — Hendrik Poinar

Music is part of Number Theory. Nowadays when a number-theorist applies for a grant, he says that it is good for security, but in those days, way before America, he would say that it's good for music. I will not comment whether we have progressed ... — Hendrik Lenstra

The so-called scientific basis of the climate problem is within my professional competence as a meteorologist. It is my professional opinion that there is no evidence at all for catastrophic global warming. It is likely that global temperatures will rise a little, much as IPCC predicts, but there is a growing body of evidence that the errant behavior of the Sun may cause some cooling in the foreseeable future. — Hendrik Tennekes

I cannot but regard the ether, which can be the seat of an electromagnetic field with its energy and its vibrations, as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary matter. — Hendrik Lorentz

In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining? — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Wind power is a green mirage of the worst kind. — Hendrik Tennekes

There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour ... What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live. — Hendrik Verwoerd

We know African and Asian elephants can interbreed, and they're separated by 5 million to 6 million years. — Hendrik Poinar

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? — Hendrik Hertzberg

The study of evolution is an evolution in itself. — Hendrik Poinar

A "communist/socialist/progressive" is an oxymoron, like an "atheist/evangelical Christian/Muslim." — Hendrik Hertzberg

Marriage should be between a spouse and a spouse, not a gender and a gender. — Hendrik Hertzberg

A few drops of science will often disinfect an entire barrel full of ignorance and prejudice. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home. - Page 22 — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Recreational number theory [ ... ] is that part of number theory that is too difficult to study. — Hendrik Lenstra

Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species. — Hendrik Poinar

Great art ... is the result of the labours of thousands of faithful craftsmen who know that they are doomed to remain for ever outside the gates of the Paradise of Perfection, but who nevertheless will give the very best there is in them because the work they do means more to them than anything else in this world. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon