Quotes About Representation

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few.

I'm not interested in teaching books by women... Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

He tried to draw a woman and it looked like a house. He tried to draw a man and it looked like a really old house. He tried to draw a house and it looked like a fucked-up cow.

Egyptian rulers, in these early periods, never represent themselves as heroic figures in this sense. They could not, conceivably, lose. As a result, wars are not represented as 'political' contests, which imply a match between potential equals. Instead, combat and the chase alike were assertions of ownership, endless rehearsals of the same sovereignty the king exercised over his people and which ultimately derived from his kinship with the gods.

Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.

The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker.

For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon.

They are consequently conjoined with each other in the conception; and the general idea of a line, notwithstanding all our abstractions and refinements, has in its appearance in the mind a precise degree of quantity and quality; however it may be made to represent others, which have different degrees of both.

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and greater; or, in other words, of a senate and people. The people . . . would want wisdom, without the senate: The Senate, without the people, would want honestly.

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and greater; or, in other words, of a senate and people. The people . . . would want wisdom, without the senate: The Senate, without the people, would want honesty.

Why would the genealogy highlight only four women and then make such unusual choices? Why not choose Hannah or Sarah or Rachel or Rebecca?

What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God.

As the print of the seal on the wax is the express image of the seal itself, so Christ is the express image - the perfect representation of God.

Men always makes gods in their own image.

I play to represent God, something bigger than baseball.

God has called us to be His representatives in our nation and in our world. Select candidates who represent your views and work for their election.

All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.

It was necessary that the Devil should have a representation upon the Earth, as well as God.

I take it very seriously when I take the pulpit. That I'm representing God.