Will Rogers Most Famous Quotes

I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3: ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever. And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it: BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves? JEEVES: No, Sir. BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling? JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us. BERTIE: Animal? What animal? JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner. BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?" JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir. BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile. Who can say which method is superior?" (As reproduced in Plum, Shakespeare and the Cat Chap )

In 1855, at the height of the Crimean War, Roger Fenton’s photograph, ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, published in The Times, poignantly captured the aftermath of British retreat in the face of the Russian army with a single image of an empty battlefield. There was only one problem. Fenton had constructed the entire scene, moving cannon balls artfully until he had the perfect image. In 1945, on the beach of Iwo Jima, legendary war photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the most famous image of battle ever taken: the raising of the Stars and Stripes as American soldiers took the summit from the Japanese. It won him the Pulitzer Prize. Both are a lie.

JOANNE!” he cried. Somehow, he had figured out my name, or an approximation of it. I wondered, for a moment, if Roger had corrected him. Or Pam. “How’s the poetry?” I flushed. “Good,” I said. “Good.” “You’re writing every day?” he asked, lowering his voice. I flushed again. Suddenly I understood Roger’s nervousness. It was strange to feel the force of a famous person’s attention. “First thing in the morning.” “I am.” This was mostly true. “That’s what you do,” he said.

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking. Liberals

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’. That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that ‘a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’.

I suppose that this viewpoint-that physical systems are to be regarded as merely computational entities-stems partly from the powerful and increasing role that computational simulations play in modern twentieth-century science, and also partly from a belief that physical objects are themselves merely 'patterns of information', in some sense, that are subject to computational mathematical laws. Most of the material of our bodies and brains, after all, is being continuously replaced, and it is just its pattern that persists. Moreover, matter itself seems to have merely a transient existence since it can be converted from one form into another. Even the mass of a material body, which provides a precise physical measure of the quantity of matter that the body contains, can in appropriate circumstances be converted into pure energy (according to Einstein's famous E=mc^2)-so even material substance seems to be able to convert itself into something with a theoretical mathematical actuality. Furthermore, quantum theory seemst o tell us that material particles are merely 'waves' of information. (We shall examine these issues more thoroughly in Part II.) Thus, matter itself is nebulous and transient; and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that the persistence of 'self' might have more to do with the preservation of patterns than of actual material particles.

One thing that we conclude from all this is that the 'learning robot' procedure for doing mathematics is not the procedure that actually underlies human understanding of mathematics. In any case, such bottom-up-dominated procedure would appear to be hopelessly bad for any practical proposal for the construction of a mathematics-performing robot, even one having no pretensions whatever for simulating the actual understandings possessed by a human mathematician. As stated earlier, bottom-up learning procedures by themselves are not effective for the unassailable establishing of mathematical truths. If one is to envisage some computational system for producing unassailable mathematical results, it would be far more efficient to have the system constructed according to top-down principles (at least as regards the 'unassailable' aspects of its assertions; for exploratory purposes, bottom-up procedures might well be appropriate). The soundness and effectiveness of these top-down procedures would have to be part of the initial human input, where human understanding an insight provide the necesssary additional ingredients that pure computation is unable to achieve. In fact, computers are not infrequently employed in mathematical arguments, nowadays, in this kind of way. The most famous example was the computer-assisted proof, by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, of the four-colour theorem, as referred to above. The role of the computer, in this case, was to carry out a clearly specified computation that ran through a very large but finite number of alternative possibilities, the elimination of which had been shown (by the human mathematicians) to lead to a general proof of the needed result. There are other examples of such computer-assisted proofs and nowadays complicated algebra, in addition to numerical computation, is frequently carried out by computer. Again it is human understanding that has supplied the rules and it is a strictly top-down action that governs the computer's activity.

Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself… and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.

Berlin wrote songs for a number of Astaire films of the period: Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, On the Avenue, Carefree. The two men became close personal friends for the rest of their lives. But the choice of Astaire as a Hollywood leading man is, at first glance, puzzling. Certainly, he was an extraordinary dancer, and songwriters appreciated his accuracy and clarity when singing their songs, even if his voice was reedy and thin. But a leading man? Essentially, Astaire epitomized what Berlin and other Jews strove to achieve. He was debonair, polished, sophisticated. His screen persona was that of a raffish, outspoken fellow, not obviously attractive, whose audacity and romanticism and wit in the end won out. It didn’t hurt that he could dance. But even his dance—so smooth and elegant—was done mostly to jazz. Unlike a Gene Kelly, who was athletic, handsome, and sexy, Astaire got by on style. Kelly was American whereas Astaire was continental. In short, Astaire was someone the immigrant might himself become. It was almost like Astaire was himself Jewish beneath the relaxed urbanity. In a film like Top Hat he is audacious, rude, clever, funny, and articulate, relying mostly on good intentions and charm to win over the girl—and the audience. He is the antithesis of a Clark Gable or a Gary Cooper; Astaire is all clever and chatty, balding, small, and thin. No rugged individualist he. And yet his romantic nature and persistence win all. Astaire only got on his knees to execute a dazzling dance move, never as an act of submission. His characters were largely wealthy, self-assured, and worldly. He danced with sophistication and class. In his famous pairings with Ginger Rogers, the primary dance numbers had the couple dressed to the nines, swirling on equally polished floors to the strains of deeply moving romantic ballads.

Most of the Olympians in this large study, born between 1900 and 1904, died aged around 80, despite the fact that they led healthier lives even after the end of their competitive career. An athlete normally does not smoke, follows a controlled diet (high in calories though) and has a good, or even excellent, quality of life. Let’s take, for instance, some of the cyclists who have won the Giro d’Italia or the Tour de France. None of these has ever reached 100 years of age. The famous Gino Bartali, nicknamed ‘the iron man of Tuscany’, died at 85 years, Alfredo Binda at 83, Philippe Thys at 81 and Roger Lapébie at 85.

When L.P. Hartley wrote ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there in the opening lines of his 1953 novel 'The Go-Between', he created one of the most memorable and famous opening lines in English Literature. The distant past is indeed a foreign country for any mature person considering their youth, and every one of us has an unchangeable past that looks very different now than it did then. As memories accumulate and tumble in upon each other, and unresolved, discordant issues jostle, protrude and disturb the mind’s peace, the past all too often becomes an uncomfortable, grief-littered and unwelcoming country. The past, however, might as well be set in stone as there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can do to shade it differently to what it actually is ... and actually was.

The goddess Kuan Yin is perhaps the most famous bodhisattva in East Asia. She is the graceful lady of the Orient. She's related in iconographical background to Isis in the ancient world, or the Virgin Mary in our modern Western World.

our most famous universities as esteemed as ever.

Most people can't understand why they want to read so much. Likeminded types understand that they wish they had more time to read. When studying famous intellects, a pattern emerges of phases of insatiable reading for several years followed by a personal transformation into great achievements.

One of the most famous earthquake-resistant buildings in the world is the Transamerica Pyramid in downtown San Francisco.

With patience and resources,” Mr. A would come to say often on his weekly calls with Peter, “we can do almost anything.” Tolstoy had a motto for Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace—“ Patience and Time.” “There is nothing stronger than those two,” he said, “. . . they will do it all.” In 1812 and in real life, Kutuzov gave Napoleon an abject lesson in the truth of that during a long Russian winter. The target, Nick Denton, is not a patient man. Most entrepreneurs aren’t. Most powerful people are not. One of his editors would say of Denton’s approach to stories, “Nick is very much of the mind that you do it now. And the emphasis is to get it out there and be correct as you can, but don’t let that stand in the way of getting the story out there.” Editorially, Nick Denton wanted to be first—which is a form of power in itself. But this isn’t how Thiel thinks. He would say his favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca, and remind himself of the man’s famous dictum: To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing. History is littered with examples of those who acted rashly in pursuit of their goals, who plunged ahead without much in the way of a plan, and suffered as a result. One could argue that the bigger of Nixon’s two blunders wasn’t his attacks on the Democratic Party but the decision to go after Katharine Graham and the media, and yet both decisions were the product of a fundamental lack of patience and discipline. Or consider the late head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who responded to a series of Gawker articles and attacks by allegedly hiring private detectives to follow the reporters around. Not only did he find nothing of practical value, but these heavy-handed tactics came back to embarrass and discredit him at his most vulnerable moment. In fact, two weeks after the news of this disturbing conspiracy broke, he would be dead. How ought one do it then?