All Quotes

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.
‐‐ Mason Cooley

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.
‐‐ Bertrand Russell

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.
‐‐ Auguste Comte

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'
‐‐ Anu Garg

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.
‐‐ Frank Delaney

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French.
‐‐ Madeleine Albright

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
‐‐ Angela Davis

To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.
‐‐ Annie Jacobsen

To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.
‐‐ Jeff Goodell

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.
‐‐ Rand Paul

To understand is to forgive, even oneself.
‐‐ Alexander Chase

To understand is to perceive patterns.
‐‐ Isaiah Berlin

To understand me, you have to meet me and be around me. And then only if I'm in a good mood - don't meet me in a bad mood.
‐‐ Avril Lavigne

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.
‐‐ Lukas Foss

To understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to understand artists. Art is freedom - freedom of expression - and its message has resonated through society for centuries.
‐‐ Peter M. Brant

To understand somebody else as a human being, I think, is about as close to real forgiveness as one can get.
‐‐ David Small

To understand someone, find out how he spends his money.
‐‐ Mason Cooley

To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing it with something else, something that we think we understand better. But what we compare it with turns out to have a huge influence on the outcome.
‐‐ Iain McGilchrist

To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
‐‐ Fatema Mernissi

To understand the future properly, it's crucial that we listen to geologists as often as we do computer scientists.
‐‐ Annalee Newitz

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
‐‐ Khalil Gibran

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation - the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built.
‐‐ J. M. G. Le Clezio

To understand the intensity of driving an F1 car, you have to be in it. When you're driving a 750hp machine at 200mph, the noise and the vibrations are incredible. The G-force when you take big corners is like someone trying to rip your head off. You hit the brakes, and it feels as if the skin is being pulled off your body.
‐‐ Jenson Button

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.
‐‐ Dennis Prager

To understand the limits and opportunities of algorithms in the context of artistic creation, we need to understand that the latter usually consists of three elements: discovery, production, and recommendation.
‐‐ Evgeny Morozov

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.
‐‐ Niccolo Machiavelli

To understand the theory which underlies all things is not sufficient. Theory is but the preparation for practice.
‐‐ James Stephens

To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions.
‐‐ Marcus Aurelius

To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.
‐‐ David Gross

To understand this Christmas record, you have to understand our ministry.
‐‐ John Tesh

To understand why dictators fall, it helps to recognise factors that produce a perfect anti-dictatorial storm. Barring missteps such as those that led to Gaddafi's undoing, a dictator's survival can be at risk because of newness in office, poor health, or old age combined with economic trouble.
‐‐ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.
‐‐ Natan Sharansky

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.
‐‐ George Boole

To unwind after training, I love to have a long hot soak in the bath, then veg out on the sofa with a box set. I'm a box-set junkie! I absolutely love 'Grey's Anatomy.'
‐‐ Jessica Ennis

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
‐‐ Thomas Carlyle

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.
‐‐ Norman Thomas

To us, basing stories on christianity is the same as basing stories on Roman mythology, Native American folklore, or unsubstantiated government conspiracies.
‐‐ Richard King

To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.
‐‐ Barbara Bush

To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving.
‐‐ Gregory Benford

To us marriage is first, everything else is second.
‐‐ Julie Benz

To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain.
‐‐ George A. Smith

To us, 'The Amazing Race' takes the whole world and turns it into a giant game. What could be better?
‐‐ Burnie Burns

To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.
‐‐ Chief Seattle

To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.
‐‐ Octavio Paz

To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.
‐‐ Jakob Dylan

To use a word I never thought I'd apply to myself, I've sort of become a Luddite with regard to information. Where everyone else is getting their Twitter feeds from 'The New York Times' and their 'Huffington Post' emails, I live in a little bit of a bubble.
‐‐ Mark Feuerstein

To use for our exclusive benefit what is not ours is theft.
‐‐ Jose Marti

To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see.
‐‐ Black Elk

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.
‐‐ Friedrich Nietzsche