T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.”
“The telephone gives us the happiness of being together yet safely apart.”
“The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.”
“The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.”
“The telephone is a great knee-jerk machine, but if you really want to tell someone how you feel, you need the slowness of the letter. In a society where everything is fast, it's like going out in the country and looking up at the stars.”
“The telephone is an antiquity - you never know who is calling, there is no image, it is an outmoded product which constantly disrupts work.”
“The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.”
“The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.”
Source: An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas
“The telephone is the most important single technological resource of later life.”
“The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.”
“The telephone operator has one of the biggest roles in creating your organization's image....indeed, many people may come into contact with no one except your operator.”
“The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.”
“The Telephone
When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't for I heard you say
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said '
'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'
'Having found the flower and driven a bee away
I leaned my head
And holding by the stalk
I listened and I thought I caught the word
What was it
Did you call me by my name
Or did you say
Someone said "Come"
I heard it as I bowed.'
'I may have thought as much but not aloud.'
Well so I came.”
Source: The poetry of Robert Frost
“The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent.”
“The Telephone will democratize hierarchic relations.”
Source: Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment
“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
Source: The Common Reader
“The telescope destroyed the firmament, did away with the heaven of the New Testament, rendered the ascension of our Lord and the assumption of his Mother infinitely absurd, crumbled to chaos the gates and palaces of the New Jerusalem, and in their places gave to man a wilderness of worlds.”
Source: Some Mistakes of Moses
“The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten billion years before Earth even formed.”
Source: The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects
“The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten years before Earth even formed.”
Source: The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects
“The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.”
Source: The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton
“The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God.”
“The Telescope, the Fluxions, the invention of Logarithms and the frenzy of multiplication, often for its own sake, that follow'd have for Emerson all been steps of an unarguable approach to God, a growing clarity,- Gravity, the pulse of time, the finite speed of Light present themselves to him as aspect of God's character. It's like becoming friendly with an erratic, powerful, potentially dangerous member of the Aristocracy. He holds no quarrel with the Creator's sovereignty, but is repeatedly appall'd at the lapses in Attention, the flaws in Design, the squand'rings of life and energy, the failures to be reasonable, or to exercise common sense,- first appall'd, then angry. We are taught,- we believe,- that it is love of the Creation which drives the Philosopher in his Studies. Emerson is driven, rather, by a passionate Resentment.”
Source: Mason & Dixon
“The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.”
“The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.”
“The television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.”
“The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.”
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. (128)”
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
“The television has two instruments that control it.
I get confused.
The washer asks me, do you want regular or delicate?
Honestly, I just want clean.
Everything is like that.
I won’t even mention cell phones.
I can turn on the light of the lamp beside my chair
Where a book is waiting, but that’s about it.
Oh yes, and I can strike a match and make fire.”
Source: Blue Horses
“The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.”
Source: Innocent Blood
“The television industry claims they are only reflecting society with their programming and have no influence on behavior. If that is the case then why do businesses spend millions on TV ads that have no influence?”
“The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.”
“The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.”
“The Television is the monster of hell.”
“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”
Source: Middlesex
“The television reports gave me my first inkling of a world beyond my own, a world that wasn't fair or equal, a world of poverty, war, disease and famine. But I also realized that this state of affairs wasn't necessarily a given, and that we have it in our power to make a difference, to make the world a better place for all. We have that choice. One thing's for sure, though - if we do nothing, it will be a given.”
“The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge.”
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
“The television set then came after her, chomping its teeth. Upon reaching the living room, the television succeeded at eating her body bit-by-bit: first the legs, then the body, and finally her flailing arms.”
Source: The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction
“The television set's on while the family's sitting around having dinner or talking. Nobody's watching TV; it's there; they're aware of it, but they're not participating. That's passive.”
“The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn’t Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn’t that like saying things were more like today than they’ve ever been.”
Source: The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories
“The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”
“The telkine growled and muttered as he tapped on his keyboard. Maybe he was messaging his friends on uglyface.com”
“The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.”
Source: Essays of Elia: To which are Added Letters, and Rosamund, a Tale
“The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.”
Source: A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
“The telling of a good story, especially one that is real and true, is always exciting.”
“The telling of a lie is not only a sin or disgrace; it is the beginning of a disorder in the soul set in by the puncturing from a spear coated by guilt”
“The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”
Source: The Miracle at Speedy Motors
“The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.”
“The telling of stories creates the real world.”