A Quote by Judith Martin

The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.

Judith Martin

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Accepted Agreed Artificial Behave Code Commonly Communicate Idea Language Naturally People Rules Silly Society Spoken Spoken Language Without

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Judith Martin
American - Author
Born: September 13, 1938

The idea of absolute freedom is fiction. It's based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there's no such thing. There's no self without other people. There's no self without sunlight. There's no self without dew. And water. And bees to pollinate the food that we eat...So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn't acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it's indulgence.

Peter Coyote

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

V. S. Naipaul

It is the witness alone that can work without any desire, without any idea of going to heaven, without any idea of blame, without any idea of praise. The witness alone enjoys, and none else.

Swami Vivekananda

Death must simply become the discreet but dignified exit of a peaceful person from a helpful society that is not torn, not even overly upset by the idea of a biological transition without significance, without pain or suffering, and ultimately without fear.

Philippe Aries

The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without.

Ross Douthat

It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.

Claude Bernard

Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.

Ken Liu

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Edgar Allan Poe

Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.

Thomas Jefferson

Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.

Frank Zappa

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Wade Davis

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Science without discrimination Human existence without discipline Friendship without gratitude Music without melody A society without morality and justice Cannot be of benefit to the people.

Sai Baba

The whole idea of punk rock is that you're dressing yourself in a crazy leather jacket with safety pins and a Mohawk. The idea of being the rebel is a boring societal idea. It's such a type. And that's what I was, without knowing it.

Michael Ian Black

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

Miguel de Unamuno

Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.

Johann Georg Hamann

A Quote by Judith Martin

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