Quotes About Foundations

Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.

France had the intellectual foundations for modern industry without the commercial and financial complements.

For now, suffice it to say that the foundations for our modern democratic world originated, not in Europe, but in the northeastern corner of North America.

Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? (..) Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared (..) Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.

Repression, as we have seen, is not directed solely against sexuality, but against the instincts in general, which are the vital foundations, the laws governing all life.

Even the most absurd things are nothing other than symbols for thoughts which are not only understandable in human terms but dwell in every human breast. In intensity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundations of our own being, the matrix of those vital problems on which we are all engaged.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Machiavelli wrote, "The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow." This is a better definition of realism than the realists have given us.

People who read mainly the Grounding and the Critique often criticize Kant for having his head in the clouds and for not being convincingly capable of dealing with concrete cases. A reading of the Metaphysics of Morals will show anyone how unfounded such criticisms are.

Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen.

I started from zero and went back to the basics in gymnastics.

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.

What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal's "possession" as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.

The foundations of a strong economy don't rest alone on the decisions of Chancellors or the spending programmes of government.

As I like to put it, we have hit pay dirt. The effort to cure the resource curse is a good example of what private foundations working with NGOs can accomplish.

But two and two do equal four. Unless you give some strange, special meaning to equal. You can count it off for yourself: one two three four. If two and two really equalled three then everything would collapse into chaos. We would be in another universe, with other physical laws. In the existing universe two and two equal four. It is a universal rule, independent of us, not man-made at all. Even if you and I were to cease to be, two and two would go on equalling four.

The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom.

There can be no more laying of foundations, any more than there can be other incarnations or crucifixions of Christ or rebaptism.

at dawn rabbits bring their kittens out from the foundations to play on ancient graves.

The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and because you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

Real friendship needed to have firm foundations laid before the conditions of everyday life had reached the extreme point beyond which human beings have nothing human about them except mistrust, anger, and lies.