"For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty."
Ideas quotes
Ideas
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Ideas quotes (page 193 of 821)
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"The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again."
"There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it."
"One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about."
"I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas."
"The idea of 'ferie,' or summer break, is a long tradition of which all Italians, including myself, participate. It's a time to relax, reflect and recharge."
"You play ensemble things that you had no idea you were going to play two minutes before."
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are!"
"When it was seen that many of the wicked seemed quite untroubled by evil conscience ... then the idea of future suffering was advanced."
"The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans."
"Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things."
"I felt as if I was the brunt of some massive joke at my expense: Can you believe this loser can be connected to Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn? But through the years I have learned to tolerate and sometimes embrace the idea. People have asked me if I consider it an honour. Well, all it indicates is that I've been in a lot of movies with a lot of people. And besides that there are plenty of other actors that would work."
"All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul."
"In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential."
"For some reason, some of my best solutions and ideas are triggered in those dark theaters, usually totally unrelated to what's going on onscreen. I also enjoy hiking in the foothills and mountains close to Sacramento. I always have to bring a pen and paper to jot down sudden thoughts and ideas. So inspiration arises from countless sources."
"Great ideas are fish in a stream. Your pen/pencil is a spear. If you don't spear them, they'll swim on by. Be ready."
"I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?"
"My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point."
"I like the idea of going out with a woman and not doing anything, and just eating dinner and talking, and that's cool, too. So, someone might look at me and say, "No way, man. He's just banging strippers." And I do that, but not all the time."
"I'm of the opinion that the Democrats have the ideas I agree with more often than not. Reenergizing the middle class and giving people a break."