Rapidity Quotes & Sayings

Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light
instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth. — Alphonse De Lamartine

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity. — Richard Flanagan

Let the fools hold on to their treasured stupidity
Let yourself be safe in wisdom with much rapidity — Munia Khan

How one realizes the shortness of life by the rapidity of sensations! I have only known Marguerite for two days, she has only been my mistress since yesterday, and she has already so completely absorbed my thoughts, my heart, and my life. — Alexandre Dumas-fils

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

The year 1896 ... marked the beginning of what has been aptly termed the heroic age of Physical Science. Never before in the history of physics has there been witnessed such a period of intense activity when discoveries of fundamental importance have followed one another with such bewildering rapidity. — Ernest Rutherford

With unparalleled rapidity, the Igbos advanced fastest in the shortest period of time of all Nigeria's ethnic groups. Like the Jews, to whom they have frequently been likened, they progressed despite being a minority in the country, filling the ranks of the nation's educated, prosperous upper classes. — Chinua Achebe

In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. — Sun Tzu

Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done." "My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault - because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution." Darcy smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers." Here — Jane Austen

She opened the door within two seconds of his pressing the doorbell, letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of furry purringness. The exact quantity could have been as low as three or as high as one hundred eight; no one could ever tell as they were all so dangerously hyperactive. — Jasper Fforde

The fundamental difficulty in myothermic observations is the smallness of the changes involved and their rapidity. — Archibald Hill

Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe's defense, but his shorter reach stood him in ill stead, and he could not drive the steel home — J.M. Barrie

Strange- the barometer is falling, but there's no wind yet, just silence. Up there above, where we can't hear it, it's already begun, the storm. The rainclouds are racing along at full speed. There aren't many of them yet- scattered serrated fragments. It's as though some city had fallen up there and now the pieces of the walls and towers are flying down, the heaps of them grow with horrible rapidity before your eyes, and they come closer and closer, but still have days to fly through blue emptiness before they crash down here to the bottom, with us. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Tis evident that all reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another, unless they be connected together, either mediately or immediately ... Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving toward it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any which we know, either by sensation or reflection. — David Hume

Now, the external work of man is of the most varied kind as regards the force or ease, the form and rapidity, of the motions used on it, and the kind of work produced. — Hermann Von Helmholtz

Afterward, describing his division's accomplishments to Washington, Lafayette commended "Colonel Hamilton, whose well known talents and gallantry were on this occasion most conspicuous and serviceable." He wrote, "Our obligations to him, to Colonel Gimat, to Colonel Laurens, and to each and all the officers and men, are above expression. Not one gun was fired . . . and, owing to the conduct of the commanders and the bravery of the men, the redoubt was stormed with uncommon rapidity. — Sarah Vowell

The complexity of the language of images is disguised by the ease and rapidity with which we read them. I've tried to make work that is as transparent and simple as possible. No matter how much I strip away the result is always more complex to me than I expect. — Michael Craig-Martin

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won. — Alexander Alekhine

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being. — George Eliot

The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society.
Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern times, this is because there is something in human nature to which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral energy. — Roger Scruton

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity. — John Ruskin

The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invited the popular middle school phenomenon of saying "cha-cha-cha" after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song- an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity. — Marina Keegan

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice! — Marquis De Sade

The taste for luxuries increases with marvelous rapidity under indulgence.
("A Night In An Old Castle") — George Payne Rainsford James

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. — H.G.Wells

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition! — Paul Lafargue

Alexis de Tocqueville took note of this fact in his Democracy in America, published in 1835: "In America," he wrote, "parties do not write books to combat each other's opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity and then expire."25 And he referred to both newspapers and pamphlets when he observed, "the invention of firearms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace." 26 — Neil Postman

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is true that private friends have sometimes, after listening to my effusions, gone the length of remarking, "Really, Smith, that's not half bad!" or, "You take my advice, old boy, and send that to some magazine!" but I have never on these occasions had the moral courage to inform my adviser that the article in question had been sent to well-nigh every publisher in London, and had come back again with a rapidity and precision which spoke well for the efficiency of our postal arrangements. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The educator wants the child to be finished at once and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour - habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. — Ellen Key

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. 7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on. [That is, with rapidity. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. Only — Sun Tzu

Military security has to rest, ultimately, on economic and polit
ical stability. One of the effects of the rapidity of change in the
world today is that there can no longer be static stability; there
can only be dynamic stability. A nation or society that fails to
keep pace with change is in danger of flying apart. It is important
that we recognize this, but equally important that in trying to
maintain a dynamic stability we remember — Richard M. Nixon

If asked how to cope with a great host of the enemy in orderly array and on the point of marching to the attack, I should say: "Begin by seizing something which your opponent holds dear; then he will be amenable to your will." Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots. — Sun Tzu

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away. — Marcus Aurelius

As someone who has shot in most disciplines, I can tell the House that when one is lying on ones stomach in Bisley with a sling round ones arm to hold the rifle steady, it is hard enough to hit the target on the right spot even when it is obligingly staying still. Foxes do not stay still. They move with remarkable rapidity. — Richard Page

One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems. — Thomas Little Heath

Nature's laws must be obeyed, and the period of decline begins, and goes on with accelerated rapidity. — Warren De La Rue

My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many woman's do. They have not the same force of rapidity and do not possess the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault
because I would not take the trouble if practicing. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'
Darcy smiled and said, 'You are perfectly right. — Jane Austen

With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent slum on earth. — Eric Sevareid

They look quite promising in the shop; and not entirely without hope when I get them back into my wardrobe. But then, when I put them on they tend to deteriorate with a very strange rapidity and one feels so sorry for them. — Joyce Grenfell

Darcy: 'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.'
Elizabeth:'My fingers do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault
because I would not take the trouble of practicing. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution. — Jane Austen

The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas ... and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful. — Alfred Lansing

Telegraphs are machines for conveying information over extensive lines with great rapidity. — Charles Babbage

As educators, our challenge is to match the needs of our learners to a world that is changing with great rapidity. To meet this challenge, we need to become strategic learners ourselves by deliberately expanding our perspectives and updating our approaches. — Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Does not all the world know that when in autumn the Bismarcks of the world, or they who are bigger than Bismarcks, meet at this or that delicious haunt of salubrity, the affairs of the world are then settled in little conclaves, with grater ease, rapidity, and certainty than in large parliaments or the dull chambers of public offices? — Anthony Trollope

In our business, the windows of opportunity open and close with dazzling rapidity ... I constantly have to remind people to seize the moment. — Mark McCormack

Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar. — Lionel Trilling

Hear him now as he toils. He has a long garden-implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death-rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity. "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay Ta-ra-ra BOOM - " And the boom is a death-knell. As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change. — P.G. Wodehouse

From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling. — Henry Charles Carey

At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it. — Rebecca West

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once. — Alan W. Watts

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

The children are taught more of the meanest state in Europe than of the country they are born and bred in, despite the singularity of its characteristics, the interest of its history, the rapidity of its advance, and the stupendous promise of its future. — Henry Lawson

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable. — Marcus Aurelius

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing. — Eliphas Levi

The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmly established by experience — Charles Dickens

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. — Richard Jordan Gatling

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility. — Nikola Tesla

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. — Marianne Williamson

It is rarely [Americans] dine in society, except in taverns and boarding-houses. Then they eat with the greatest possible rapidity, and in total silence ... — Frances Trollope

Rapidity does not always mean progress, and hurry is akin to waste. The old fable of the hare and the tortoise is just as good now, and just as true, as when it was first written. — Charles Warren Stoddard

They're on a cusp; a highly heterogeneous but highly connected
and stressedly connected
civilization. I'm not sure that one approach could encompass the needs of their different systems. The particular stage of communication they're at, combining rapidity and selectivity, usually with something added to the signal and almost always with something missed out, means that what passes for truth often has to travel at the speed of failing memories, changing attitudes, and new generations. Even when this form of handicap is recognized all they ever try to do, as a rule, is codify it, tidy it up. Their attempts of filter become part of the noise, and they seem unable to bring any more thought to bear on the matter than that which leads them to try and simplify what can only be understood by coming to terms with its complexity. — Iain M. Banks

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum ... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. — Roberto Bolano

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments. — Leo Tolstoy

Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her. — Charles Dickens

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. — Paul R. Halmos

Here the vast bed of waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents. — Edgar Allan Poe

Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies. — Charles Caleb Colton

I may venture to affirm the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. — David Hume

Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more -- every thing presses on -- whilst thou are twisting that lock, -- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make! — Laurence Sterne

If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

One of the fundamental characteristics of striated muscle, and the one involving the greatest difficulty in investigation, is the great rapidity with which changes take place in it. — Archibald Hill

They walked on in silence. Katie's heart was beating with a rapidity that forbade speech. Nothing like this very direct young man had ever happened to her before. She had grown so accustomed to regarding herself as something too insignificant and unattractive for the notice of the lordly male that she was overwhelmed. She had a vague feeling that there was a mistake somewhere. It surely could not be she who was proving so alluring to this fairy prince. The novelty of the situation frightened her. — P.G. Wodehouse

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you. — Sun Tzu

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

Climate change is not a major issue because it will cause sea level rises or temperature increases, since we know how to live at higher elevations and regulate the temperature within our homes. It is a major issue because ecosystems are finding it difficult to adapt to the rapidity of the climate and environmental changes and are dying off, thereby accelerating the species extinction that is already underway due to our consumption habits. — Shailesh Rao

It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared, either in scope or in rapidity. — Charles De Gaulle

The psychological substance of the whole thing has altered; the marble has turned to ice; and the ice has melted with most amazing rapidity. The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule. — G.K. Chesterton

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York! — Jules Verne

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age. — Henry David Thoreau

A vague worry has started alongside my self-satisfaction: I have established, with amazing rapidity, a reputation for maniacal, self-destructive courage. — William Boyd

After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably, environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics. — Murray Bookchin

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth. — Alice Sebold

Those clocks are sophisticated instruments that calculate time by measuring electrical charges called coulombs
given the rapidity and volume of electrons that move through the measuring device the calibrator must adjust at certain points which was the delay you see
the delay is just recalibrating for the clock moving too quickly during the 10
10ths of a second before the delay
this insures that the actual playing time during a period is exactly 20 minutes That is not an opinion
that is science
amazing devise quite frankly. — Dean Lombardi

Order is ... the true key to rapidity of reaction. — Maria Montessori

Avoid the eye that discovers with rapidity the bad, and is slow to see the good. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

An India free from exploitation from within and without must prosper with astonishing rapidity. — Mahatma Gandhi

For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club. — Thomas Szasz

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised. — George Henry Lewes

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs; are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. — Arthur Helps

Rapidity is the essence of war. — Sun Tzu

What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? In such moments, when the thoughts of two happy beings penetrate into each other's souls through the eyes, the spoken word is halting, rude, and weak - it is as the harsh, slow roar of the thunder compared with the rapidity of the dazzling lightning flash, expressing feelings already recognized, ideas already understood, and if words are made use of it is only because the heart's desire, dominating all the being and flooding it with happiness, wills that the whole human organism with all its physical and psychical powers give expression to the song of joy that rolls through the soul. To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer. — Jose Rizal

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity. — Noam Chomsky

A young person, to achieve, must first get out of his mind any notion either of the ease or rapidity of success. Nothing ever just happens in this world. — Edward Bok

Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting. — Tom Cardamone

Honest folks, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever _ at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. — George Eliot