“Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him....In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.” MenWayHumansPoliticalHateAbilitySituationCareersStreetsCircumstancesSpeechAmbitionIntellectualEnvyConfusedOrganizedDesperateBitternessOrientationBurstingAcclaimTavernsFlotsam Author:Albert Einstein
“I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.” I CanSidesMy OwnViewsCareersSeriousCircumstancesMajorsIntellectualCommitmentTraditionBaseballAccidentsBackgroundsFortunateFeaturesMentalityEasternDestinedLifelongCapriciousOdysseyContingencyFamily Tradition Author:Stephen Jay Gould
“By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.” ThinkingHelpingSeemsCircumstancesIntellectualIsolationHelp MeExpectingInclination Author:Eric Hoffer
“In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.” ChildrenCertainBeliefAttitudeTypeDevelopmentCircumstancesIntellectualAdultsImportanceExperimentsFormerAcquireCooperatingIntellectual Development Book:The Moral Judgement of the Child Source: The Moral Judgement of the Child
“More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.” ShouldMeanIdeasPastAttentionMastersNeededCircumstancesIntellectualScientistTrackHistorianDeliberateBiologistHistory Of ScienceRight TrackMilieuWrong Turn Author:Ronald Fisher
“One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle.” MayMadeHappensCertainCausesSpaceMistakeCircumstancesUniqueIntellectualProgramUniversalTime And SpaceMeasurementSpatial Author:Kedar Joshi
“Kids coming from very difficult economic circumstances in urban areas are in some ways discriminated against in ways that are similar to the way people with intellectual disabilities are discriminated against. People are afraid of them. People sometimes assume that they don't have skills, gifts or abilities to contribute.” PeopleWaySometimesKidsDifficultAbilityEconomicCircumstancesSkillsIntellectualAreasAssumingDisabilityUrbanUrban AreasIntellectual Disability Author:Timothy Shriver
“The American Heritage Dictionary defines crucible as "a place, time, or situation characterized by the confluence of powerful intellectual, social, economic, or political forces; a severe test of patience or belief; a vessel for melting material at high temperatures." A crucible was the vessel in which medieval alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold. That the alchemists inevitably failed in their audacious attempts doesn't denigrate the power of the crucible as a metaphor for the circumstances that cause an individual to be utterly transformed.” PoliticalTurnsIndividualBeliefForceSocialCausesPowerfulSituationEconomicMaterialsCircumstancesIntellectualGoldTestsMetaphorHeritageMetalsTransformedSevereVesselDictionaryTemperatureMedievalMeltingAlchemistCrucibleAudaciousConfluence Author:Warren G. Bennis