#capable

Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others. ↗

— Henry Fielding

#happiness #others #person #scarcely #tasting

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. ↗

— Henry Steele Commager

#censorship #creates #defeats #discretion #end

I didn't want to kill a man. I'm not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant. ↗

— Oriana Fallaci

#i #kill #killing #man #tyrant

When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public. ↗

— Elena Kagan

#appropriately #becomes #ceases #confirmation #discussion

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion. ↗

— Louise J. Kaplan

#adolescence #after #capable #children #compassion

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis. ↗

— Paul Krugman

#borrow #capable #crisis #currency #debt

At least I know that one film-maker in my career has had the initiative to come to me and thought of me as being capable of doing interesting and complicated work, and so I have a new-found belief that other film-makers will see me in a different way, the way that Patty did. ↗

— Charlize Theron

#belief #capable #career #come #complicated

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily. ↗

— Paul Westerberg

#best #better #contemplate #darkness #despair

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. ↗

— George C. Williams

#capable #circumstances #darwin #empirical #every

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man! ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#deep-thoughts #humor-inspirational #ignorance #ignoring-issues #incapable-of-interpreted