Edward Said
Literary Theorist, Critic, and Author
"No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents."
Abstract quotes
Abstract
160 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Karl Marx
Philosopher, Economist
"Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker."
Ada Lovelace
Mathematician, Writer
"The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations."
Terry Pratchett
Author
"You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger."
Clive James
Writer
"She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short."
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Abstract quotes (page 1 of 8)
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"The abstract kills, the concrete saves."
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"I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically."
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"When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength."
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"I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens."
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"To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought."
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"You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it."
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"Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all."
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"He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving."
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"The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract."
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"Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later."
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"I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable."
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"There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete."
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"While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."
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"I don't like [to] make a woman ... an abstract concept of the fashion. I don't like [to] say, "You must wear that." ... I am not a dictator."
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"Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!"
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"In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself."
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"A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own."
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"Human intellect is incurably abstract."
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"Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!"
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"In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration."
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