A Quote by Theodore Dalrymple
The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
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Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank”. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.
What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
She glanced up at him, and in that moment he pulled his wet shirt over his head. She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky. He came to the fire and crouched before it. He rubbed the water from his bare arms and flicked it in the flames. She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine. It was a chilly evening; she thought about that. The goose would be delicious, they must eat as much of it as possible, they must not waste it; she thought about that.
I was blown away when I figured out that none of the great integrative moves that I studied came as a result of starting with a blank sheet of paper - as many innovation coaches suggest. Integrative solutions came directly from mining the existing models for the best of their nuggets. So I never start with a blank sheet of paper anymore.
The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.
Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.
The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.
God is a blank sheet upon which nothing is found but what you yourself have written.
It's funny what [producer Richard Zanuck said about even though you can't quite place when the book or the story came into your life, and I do vaguely remember roughly five years old reading versions of Alice in Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone knows the characters and they're very well-defined characters, which I always thought was fascinating. Most people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and reference them.
[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.
When I think about the most exotic, beautiful places, Porto is at the front of my mind. It's incredible, man. You have an idea of what Europe is like as an American, and people talk about Paris, Berlin and Stockholm, which are all great, but it wasn't until I went to Porto that I felt that idea of this exotic, beautiful, timeless place.
Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.
I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.
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