Quotes on Function

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.

The quality of your life is a function of who you go through life with.

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

The function of good journalism is to take information and add value to it.

A coach's primary function should be not to make better players, but to make better people

Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing.

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions, _x000D_ but actually, the opposite is true. _x000D_ _x000D_ The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to _x000D_ answer your questions, but to question your answers.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.