James Burnham Quotes

#1. An ideologue - one who thinks ideologically - can't lose. He can't lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts.

James Burnham

#2. Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though

Henri Bergson

#3. True poetry is embarrassing.

Julien Torma

#4. God is the most beautiful, and beauty is the expression of God. If you can't appreciate beauty in the world how can you understand God?

Amit Ray

#5. Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

Elizabeth Kenny

#6. The economic egalitarianism of the liberal ideology implies ... the reduction of Westerners to hunger and poverty.

James Burnham

#7. It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#8. 'From Here to Eternity' happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is mistaken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course.

Manny Farber

#9. It was like living with a bad action movie, all excitement and motion, and no character development.

Christina Dodd

#10. He remembered the forceful hand that cast him to the earth. He'd fallen like a shooting star, his flesh burning until his wings fell away. Pain was something he had never known before. But even worse than the physical affliction was the knowledge that he would forevermore be denied Heaven.

James Burnham

#11. When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I'd gotten on my comic. And if I hadn't made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.

Gene Luen Yang

#12. Where there is no alternative there is no problem.

James Burnham

#13. Armaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.

James Burnham

#14. Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.

James Burnham

#15. There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.

James Burnham

#16. A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'

Sophy Burnham

#17. The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.

Cormac McCarthy

#18. I figured my body always would be able to repair itself. I think all of us believe that - until you begin to age and get hit with deteriorating joints.

Lee Majors