Quotessence
Home / Topics / Function Quotes

Function Quotes

Browse 2701 quotes about Function.

Related topics

Function Quotes

“There must be a union between the spirit in wood and the spirit in man. The grain of the wood must relate closely to its function. The abutment of the edge of one board to an adjoining board can mean the success or failure of a piece. () Gradually a form evolves, much as nature produces the tree in the first place. The object created can live forever. The tree lives on in its new form. The object cannot follow a transitory “style”, here for a moment, discarded the next. Its appeal must be universal. Cordial and receptive, it should invite a meeting with man”

“We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.”

“I believe that "government", as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a "Grameenized private sector", a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.”

“Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.”

“Recognising that an ostentatious cult of heroism and state service served an important propaganda function for the British elite does not mean, of course, that we should dismiss it as artificial or insincere. All aristocracies have a strong military tradition, and for many British patricians the protracted warfare of the period was a godsend. It gave them a job, and, more important, a purpose, an opportunity to carry out what they had been trained to do since childhood: ride horses, fire guns, exercise their undoubted physical courage and tell other people what to do.”

“If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.”

“if networks of women are formed, they should be job related and task related rather than female-concerns related. Personal networks for sociability in the context of a work organization would tend to promote the image of women contained in the temperamental model - that companies must compensate for women's deficiencies and bring them together for support because they could not make it on their own. But job-related task forces serve the social-psychological functions while reinforcing a more positive image of women.”

“the patriarchal family, with its division of functions between a providing and protective father and a home-making, submissive mother, however satisfactory it may have been in its time, has outlived its day. Bread-winning is no longer a monopoly of men, and home-making should no longer be the monopoly of women.”

“If anybody wants to engage in any kind of sexual activity with any consenting partner, that is their business. Anybody can do anything they damn well please, as long as the relationship isn't exploitive. And I don't feel that legality should have anything to do with it. There are certain bodily functions of mine which I will not allow to be supervised.”

“There's generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist's work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

“It is ordinarily said that criminal law is designed to protect property and to protect persons, and if society's only interest in controlling sex behavior were to protect persons, then the criminal codes concerned with assault and battery should provide adequate protection. The fact that there is a body of sex laws which is apart from the laws protecting persons is evidence of their distinct function, namely that of protecting custom.”

“I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.”

“Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.”

“. . . the membership relation for sets can often be replaced by the composition operation for functions. This leads to an alternative foundation for Mathematics upon categories -- specifically, on the category of all functions. Now much of Mathematics is dynamic, in that it deals with morphisms of an object into another object of the same kind. Such morphisms (like functions) form categories, and so the approach via categories fits well with the objective of organizing and understanding Mathematics. That, in truth, should be the goal of a proper philosophy of Mathematics.”

“You love the person for who they are, flaws and all. You can't help who you love, either. It comes from a different side of your brain than the logic part that tells you that this person is horrible for you - "You should walk away!" While you're walking away, the other part of your brain is trying to gain control of your bodily functions. "Turn around! She's the one!"”

“My stories usually begin with the characters and some elements of how power (personal, political, magical) functions in the world. The rest develops as I write, and research helps a great deal with that. If you're going to write about an agrarian economy, research agrarian economies. If your main character is starving, then you should know what it means for a malnourished body to break down.”

“A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can't buy that because the word doesn't exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.”

“Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.”

“A famous, very often quoted phrase says: "That government is best, which governs least." I do not believe this to be a correct description of of the functions of a good government. Government ought to do all the things for which it is needed and for which it is established. Government ought to protect the individuals within the country against the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, and it should defend the country against foreign enemies. These are the functions of government within a free system, within the system of the market economy.”

“It is scripture alone, not conservative Evangelical tradition or any other human authority, that must function as the normative authority for the definition of what we should believe. The authority of the scripture means that all the words in scripture are God's words in such a way that to disbelieve or disobey any word of scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God.”

“A worldview is not the same things a formal philosophy, otherwise it would only be for philosophers. Even ordinary people have a set of convictions about how reality functions and how they should live. Some convictions are conscious while others are unconscious but together they form a consistent picture of reality.”

“...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”

“Cities should function more like ecosystems, or even metabolisms. When we build, we should be thinking about how we can integrate into the ecosystems around us, but without sacrificing all the niceties of civilization like good restaurants, concert halls, and high-speed Internet access. I'm saying that partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm also deadly serious. The future of technology is sustainable ecology.”