136 Analysis Quotes

Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.

I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

Our mind is all we've got. Not that it won't lead us astray sometimes, but we still have to analyze things out within ourselves.

The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient.

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

The Sun-Paul must consider only one thing: what is the relation of this or that external reaction of the animal to the phenomena of the external world?

Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

All this contains much that is obviously true, and much that is relevant; unfortunately, what is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is not obviously true.

The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.

'In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.'

'The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.'

'The whole is the false.'

It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly. If John Huss had cackled more like a hen, he might have survived Michaelmas, and been esteemed for his eggs. The last fifty years have laid the axe of analysis to the root of every axiom; they are triflers who content themselves with lopping the blossoming twigs of our beliefs, or the boughs of our intellectual instruments. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.

[Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. [8]

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names.

There is no fire without some smoke.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.

The gaze should be large and broad. This is the twofold gaze 'Perception and Sight'. Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things. It is important in strategy to know the enemy's sword and not to be distracted by insignificant movements of his sword. You must study this. The gaze is the same for single combat and for large-scale combat.

The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

We're sucking the gooey cellulite from modern music. Reductive synthesis. We do it all for you.

Most of my news, I get from the radio news stations. One of the stations' advertising lines is 'Give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.' In 22 minutes, they just have time for the headlines, so they can only really tell you what happened - which, by the way, is the news. They tell you how many people were killed in Iraq today, but they don't then bring on some Republican senator to explain to you how that's good. Or, on the contrary, they don't bring in a bunch of Democrats to tell you why it's bad. They just tell you what happened. That's the news. I am capable of analyzing my own news. What makes these people qualified to analyze my news for me? No matter what side they're on, I never agree with them.

Hockey is not a sport. Hockey is three activities going on at the same time: ice skating, playing with a puck, and beating the shit out of somebody.

Three factors defeated us in the West where I was in command. First, the unheard-of superiority of your air force, which made all movement in daytime impossible. Second, the lack of motor fuel - oil and gas - so that the Panzers and even the Luftwaffe were unable to move. Third, the systematic destruction of all railway communications so that it was impossible to bring one single railroad train across the Rhine.

Rundstedt was a brilliant military leader, quick to grasp the significance of any particular operation, to analyze the obstacles, and then in turn successfully and oftentimes brilliantly to overcome these barriers.

It is hard to ignore the prima facie dumbness that got us bogged down in this nasty war in the first place. This is not going to be like Daddy's War, old sport. He actually won, and he still got run out of the White House nine months later.. . The whole thing sucks. It was wrong from the start, and it is getting wronger by the hour.

If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.

The stock of course, in light of that news up 5 or 6 points this week, ... But we still like the stock a lot, and on any pullback we'd be a buyer.

Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not 'discourse about,' nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.

Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Goodkind is noted for subtle allegories the same way Mt Kilimanjaro is known for floating weightlessly.

You cannot see the wood for the trees.

Humor is like a frog. They both die if you dissect them.

Casual listeners will miss the depth of the music. You must sit down with the lyric sheet and find out what's going on. All the vocal acrobatics and weird sounds click into place when you know what ideas, stories and situations they are expressing. In most rock and pop, the music and words may be linked, but are basically separate. Kate creates, more and more, a fusion between the two - the sounds directly expressing the subject. This is a throwback to Wagner's music-drama, with its leitmotifs, turning music into an idea. The Beatles revived the technique, and bands of the hippy era like Pink Floyd carried the banner. . . Kate is fast becoming a master in the use of this sonic montage, perhaps because the ideas she is using are far more complex, have more 'resonances', than those of her contemporaries.

She's unafraid, too, of tackling more problematic areas of sexuality, as for instance when she dealt with cradle-snatching in 'The Infant Kiss' and incest in 'The Kick Inside'. But not all that seems erotic in her music is about sex, as an EMI employee discovered when he found her working on the hypnotic 'out-in-out-in' chant section of 'Breathing' (from 1980's Never For Ever), and expressed outrage at EMI's young pop princess making such an overtly sexual record. The song is, of course, about breathing. Duhhh!

While one should always be vigilant for traces of totalitarianism in any ideology or movement, the obsession with fascism in the anti-Hindu rhetoric of the secularists is not the product of an analysis of the data, but of their own political compulsions.

I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa.

Gandhi was a pacifist, but we might suspect him to have been something of a 'militant pacifist' at heart: he would have used force to prevent those who sought to make war from carrying out their aims.

Is the right hon. Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p.8)

Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern what they are leaving out. The answers become clear enough, he says. The catch is they won't be the ones we want to hear. [...] Chomsky, as he often does, has a voice problem. He is shrill and sarcastic--chiefly because he's angry with what he sees as rampant American hypocrisy. [...] If there is anything new about our age, it is that the questions Chomsky raises will eventually have to be answered. Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening. --BusinessWeek, April 17, 2000 [189]

How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky -- America's most useful citizen, in my opinion -- are the best answer to that question. --Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 [190]

Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective. --Adrian Hastings, June 2001 [216]

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose. It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. --Peter Beaumont, June 18, 2006 [231]

Analyzing things was fine, but good reflexes could save your life.

Throughout their children's novels, Lewis and Travers bring together heterogeneous collections of characters from all orders of being - humanity, mythology (Greek, Norse, Christian), the animal world (both talking and nontalking beasts), and other fictional sources (for example, nursery rhyme and fairytale figures) - and have them mingle in festival-like gatherings reminiscent of medieval carnival celebrations. ... the interaction among these disparate characters often results in the suspension of hierarchical barriers...

And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn't need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn't want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn't want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn't need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made - which is more or less implicit.

The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.

This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.' I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do.

I was comparing McNabb's reputation on the field to his reputation in the media. The media has portrayed Donovan McNabb as a great quarterback, and they have credited him almost exclusively with the Eagles' success, and I've always thought that there were more components to the Eagles' success than just the quarterback.

I know these people like I know every square inch of my glorious naked body.

Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few 'bad apples' have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose.

The power of Gould's analysis lies in his focus on particulars. Rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims.

All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.

And you can't capture the importance of the environment unless you recognize the interaction between social conditions and cultural conditions.

So there's an interaction there between social, structural and cultural. And if you want to fully capture the environment, you have to show how these things interact.

General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.

What my experience, acquired in the worst possible way, shows is that in aviation no two accidents are alike.

In all the previous cases of wholes, we have nowhere been able to argue from the parts of the whole. Compared to its parts, the whole constituted by them is something quite different, something creatively new, as we have seen. Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts.

I think Kurt was one of the deepest thinkers we've had in popular music over the last 20 years and if anyone deserves to have his songs dwelled upon it's him.

Hitchens maintains that that 'there is a close fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American' in the Middle East - like 'President for Life' Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan...that [referring to 9/11] 'Washington finally grasped that 'there were `root causes behind the murder-attacks' [emphasis in original] (but didn't Hitchens ridicule any allusion to 'root causes' as totalitarian apologetics?)...that 'racism' is 'anti-American as nearly as possible by definition'...that 'evil' can be defined as 'the surplus value of the psychopath'...is there a Bartlett's for worst quotations?

'Elvis Presley has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary compass- the so-called register-, and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion. The voice covers two octaves and a third, from the baritone low-G to the tenor high B, with an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D flat. Presley's best octave is in the middle, D-flat to D-flat, granting an extra full step up or down. Call him a high baritone. In 'It's'now or never', (1960), he ends it in a full voice cadence (A, G, F), that has nothing to do with the vocal devices of R&B and Country. That A-note is hit right on the nose, and it is rendered less astonishing only by the number of tracks where he lands easy and accurate B-flats. Moreover, he has not been confined to one type of vocal production. In ballads and country songs he belts out full-voiced high G's and A's that an opera baritone might envy. He is a naturally assimilative stylist with a multiplicity of voices - in fact, Elvis' is an extraordinary voice, or many voices'

The crisis began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year ago. There was some fighting, leaving hundreds killed according to Human Rights groups. That hardly qualifies as war. Rather, in terms of crimes against peace and against humanity, it falls roughly into the category of the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1978, and the U.S. invasion of Panama. In these terms it falls well short of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and cannot remotely be compared with the near-genocidal Indonesian invasion and annexation of East Timor, to mention only two cases of aggression that are still in progress, with continuing atrocities and with the crucial support of those who most passionately professed their outrage over Iraq's aggression. During the subsequent months, Iraq was responsible for terrible crimes in Kuwait, with several thousand killed and many tortured. But that is not war; rather, state terrorism, of the kind familiar among U.S. clients. The second phase of the conflict began with the U.S.-U.K. attack of January 15 (with marginal participation of others). This was slaughter, not war.

Now to Some it appears not at all worth while to follow out the endless divisions of Nature; and moreover a dangerous undertaking, without fruit and issue. As we can never reach, say they, the absolutely smallest grain of material bodies, never find their simplest compartments, since all magnitude loses itself, forwards and backwards, in infinitude; so likewise is it with the species of bodies and powers; here too one comes on new species, new combinations, new appearances, even to infinitude. These seem only to stop, continue they, when our diligence tires; and so it is spending precious time with idle contemplations and tedious enumerations; and this becomes at last a true delirium, a real vertigo over the horrid Deep

He knew that bean's powers of analysis were extraordinary. So, also, were his powers of deception. Some of bean's guesses weren't right - but was that because he didn't know the truth, or because he simply didn't want them to know how much he knew, or how much he guessed

I'm askin, as if I'm qualified to analyze/You're lookin at a bitch who specialize in tellin lies

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.

As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew.

While the method of the natural sciences is... analytic, the method of the social sciences is better described as compositive or synthetic. It is the so-called wholes, the groups of elements which are structurally connected, which we learn to single out from the totality of observed phenomena... Insofar as we analyze individual thought in the social sciences the purpose is not to explain that thought, but merely to distinguish the possible types of elements with which we shall have to reckon in the construction of different patterns of social relationships. It is a mistake... to believe that their aim is to explain conscious action ... The problems which they try to answer arise only insofar as the conscious action of many men produce undesigned results... If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation... people dominated by the scientistic prejudice are often inclined to deny the existence of any such order... it can be shown briefly and without any technical apparatus how the independent actions of individuals will produce an order which is no part of their intentions... The way in which footpaths are formed in a wild broken country is such an instance. At first everyone will seek for himself what seems to him the best path. But the fact that such a path has been used once is likely to make it easier to traverse and therefore more likely to be used again; and thus gradually more and more clearly defined tracks arise and come to be used to the exclusion of other possible ways. Human movements through the region come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decision of many people, has yet not be consciously designed by anyone.

'This affair must all be unravelled from within.' He tapped his forehead. 'These little grey cells. It is 'up to them' - as you say over here.'

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

'Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.' (Source: The Act of Creation)

'When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived'

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

I tend to over-intellectualize things, to come at them from a structural point.

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

He was one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations.

I think Heath has a natural screen presence, he has a focus that distinguishes him from a lot of young actors. There's a depth and intelligence that is operating that's not only there, but also focused into what he is doing, being clear in what the role is, about what he's trying to achieve with it, this brings a balance with the other cast who are considerably more experienced than him in most cases, that's very important for the story to work. Without that, we would lose center, he brings that focus.