#practical

I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory. ↗

— Marie Curie

#be kind #dark #day #dress #enough

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits. ↗

— Richard Foreman

#any #audience #because #broadway #broadway shows

And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted - steal, you know, lie, whatever. ↗

— Milos Forman

#afford #also #anything #brilliant #communist

Practically every day, there is a story in the newspapers about a new breakthrough drug on Parkinson's. ↗

— Mort Kondracke

#breakthrough #day #every #every day #new

And it is practically the same in the case of the four or five million poor peasants in France, and also for Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and two of the Scandinavian countries. Everywhere small and medium sized industry prevails. ↗

— Herman Gorter

#belgium #case #countries #everywhere #five

I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail. ↗

— Alma Guillermoprieto

#detail #fixated #i #i may not #like

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#addicted #being #book #buy #could

Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him: "What are you doing? could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, "Nothing. I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like"? And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot, What you know, you know, so terrifying for, by then, Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything. And why shouldn’t Iago do this? After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge. What makes it impossible for us to condemn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. […] We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, "What can I know?" we ask, "What, at this moment, am I meant to know?" – to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to – that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say to Iago – "No, you mustn’t. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#knowledge #practical-joker #science #experience

Not only has this subject been long associated with the ideas of thinking men over the ages but its practical importance is attested to by the huge resources of men and material thrown into this type of work. ↗

— Robert Hofstadter

#associated #been #huge #ideas #importance

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture. ↗

— Johan Huizinga

#culture #history #human #human culture #novel