Marvin L. Cohen famous quotes

Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplomacy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things--amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Loyalty #Truth #Ambition

My friend had a brilliant idea. This impressed me. It reflected an immense deal of credit on his brain. But when he expressed it,it lost all value, and enjoyed but a commonplace status. My friend blamed this devaluation on the language. "I hate English," he said. So he studied another language. He mastered it so perfectly that there was no room left in his brain for a brilliant idea. Now he has a grudge against words. He refuses to use them. He prefers to shrug or grunt. A new crop of ideas is growing. They show promise of future refinement.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Hate #Ideas #Brain

My friend devotes himself to his life, whenever he can find the spare time. His motto is: 'Don't just sit there: live!' So he's too busy to stand, to walk, to do anything, except to live. He even refused to kiss a girl, when invited, on the grounds that it was time again to be living. Schedules are sacred to him.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Life #Girl #Kissing

I've gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Class #Rose #Achievement

Your views are now my own.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Views #Argument #My Own

The museum is full of interesting things. All kinds of paintings are there. And then paintings too thick to put in a frame, that they call sculpture. And then there are spectators. with their scorecards, rooting for culture. And spectators of the spectators, looking for love's introduction. And art students taking notes. And old women trying to remember the past. And old men with too much to forget. And tourists, thinking that a museum represents a city. And loafers so poor, they study their soberness here.
-- Marvin L. Cohen

#Art #Men #Thinking

I met with Martha and Sharon to see if there are any opportunities in syndication. My vision says her customers and fans are still loyal to her. I don't think the Martha Stewart brand loyalty has changed.

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

Loyalty is the pledge of truth to oneself and others.

I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.

For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.

Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.

It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.

Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able to return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you.