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Quote by Dan Rather

“[My job is] a very high trapeze act, frequently with no net.”

Quote by Dan Rather

Author

Dan Rather is a renowned American journalist, known for his significant contributions to the television news industry. Throughout his career, he held several key positions, including the role of CBS News anchor, and became a iconic figure in American television news during the 1970s and 1980s. more

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“The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.”

Eye Sound Millions Groups Pages Hundred Ears Tongue Fixed Fascinated Recalls Bores Verses Printed Fading Deathless Bards

Book:Philosophy

Source: Philosophy

“Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.”

“Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.”

Thinking Form Disease Complexes Vulnerable Code Suggestions Liable Infectious Diseases

Author:Arthur Koestler

“Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.”

Reality Order Space Sky Creation Periods Glory Discovery Aspect Scientist Absolutes Chaos Painter Composer Observers Vans Frame Of Reference

Book:The Act of Creation

Source: The Act of Creation

“Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.”

“Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.”

Men Political Infinite Treated Symbols Mathematical Operations Behave Zero Units Arithmetic

Book:Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War

Source: Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War

“We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.”

Needs Firsts Ideas Seems Values Sight Mere Obvious Practicals Sections Geometry Mutation Whimsy

Author:Arthur Koestler

“If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality.”

Ifs May Self Stories Reality Produce Lessons Aspect Symbols Consistent Manipulation Predictions Representing Ensemble

Author:Arthur Koestler

“If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.”

“All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations.”