Purportedly Quotes & Sayings

The concrete, physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory political judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person's judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict that no purportedly scientific analysis can alleviate. — Thomas Piketty

I've raised my girls in a sort of genderless fashion. I mean, I'll take them to get their nails done - I actually love doing that - but I also play ball with them. As a result, my girls are tough and athletic and game for everything. — Harry Connick Jr.

Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish this desired end. — David O. McKay

As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. — Adam M. Grant

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. ... We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits. — Bryan Fischer

Eager to oppose Thomas Paine's prescription in Common Sense for a huge single-house legislature that purportedly embodied the will of "the people" in its purest form. For Adams, "the people" was a more complicated, multivoiced, hydra-headed thing that had to be enclosed within different chambers. — Joseph J. Ellis

I don't find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life - we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That's how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too. — John Green

E pur si muove.
(Albeit It does move.)
[What Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.] — Galileo Galilei

Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. — Hermann Zapf

He wanted to know something about me. I leaned over and put my mouth to his ear. It was barely a whisper.
'I'm a murderer. — Ruta Sepetys

In an old culture like Europe, everything has already been done. For people who always complain about everything purportedly being so bad, I want to ask why they don't pack up their things and emigrate. — Carie Maas

Black-Jewish Alliance, What Went Wrong?, Murray Friedman explains how the Civil Rights Movement was Jewish. First of all, it was based on what Friedman calls "Jewish science." The Civil Rights Movement was based on a book by the name of An American Dilemma, purportedly written by a Swede by the name of Gunnar Myrdal. As Murray Friedman hints, Myrdal did not and could not have written An American Dilemma. — E. Michael Jones

Reigns of terror are thus the bastard child of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the common good
and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing. The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march towards a glorious culmination, is a malformed theology. — Chris Hedges

I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you? — Harlan Coben

...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream. — Emmanue Levinas

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising
didn't make it to the airport, ...
and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. The cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem, I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. — Philip Roth

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls. — Bruce Sterling

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes. — R. Buckminster Fuller