Tabula Quotes

#1. The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.

David Grinspoon

#2. Following Locke's doctrine that the mind is a tabula rasa, Helvetius considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction.

Bertrand Russell

#3. She was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying lightening is hazardous. It's a statement of fact that will always be a given.

Patricia Cornwell

#4. The mind of a baby is a tabula rasa; society writes information on his mind.

Debasish Mridha

#5. Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

Murray Rothbard

#6. The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

Richard Powers

#7. If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest?

Greg Rucka

#8. To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates.

David Foster Wallace

#9. The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Theodore Dalrymple

#10. I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

Seymour Hersh

#11. If the clinician, as observer, wishes to see things as they really are, he must make a tabula rasa of his mind and proceed without any preconceived notions whatever.

Jean-Martin Charcot

#12. Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

Stanislav Grof

#13. It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction.

Kenneth Frampton

#14. What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa.

Audrey Niffenegger

#15. I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

Thom Mayne

#16. In the chalky trough under the blackboard
are lessons dusted and already forgotten.
The teacher is squawking away once more,
scratching into the dark Welsh tabula rasa
the truths so far about God and arithmetic
with the expungible white of fossil shells.

Richie McCaffery

#17. We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives from within.

Earl Nightingale

#18. She would never know she was still alive because of me.

Rita Dinis

#19. But men are funny about their wars, they act as if they own them, and perhaps they do, for I don't think women ever start them.

Pippa Goldschmidt

#20. Well, this is it ... I choose you ... Come what may, you are what I choose.

Ann Brashares

#21. A heart given freely is the most vulnerable and selfless thing one can offer another human being. It can be as fragile and needy as a newly born infant, or as solid and self-supporting as a granite pillar, yet it is the hands of the recipient that determines its ultimate fate.

Mark W. Boyer

#22. Good positions don't win games, good moves do

Gerald Abrahams

#23. It would be absurd for me to diagnose Sarah Palin with a sprained ankle, let alone any sort of mental illness.

Nicolle Wallace

#24. We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.

Maria Montessori

#25. If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.

Thom Yorke

#26. Firefighter is one of the few jobs kind enough to warn me away by containing two words I'm not interested in, unlike the deceptive bookkeeper.

Joel Stein

#27. Why doesn't pope say to every Mexican living in America, "Go back to Mexico! That's your home! Socialism is preferable." Why does he want them to stay? Because they are going to convert this place, folks. That's what this is all about.

Rush Limbaugh

#28. This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too.

Janet Fitch