The Specialist Quotes

#1. The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#2. ... if the majority of men cannot know what is good for them, each for himself, how can they know what is good for others by proxy? If they are to be controlled by specialists, how and by what standard can they choose the specialist?

Ayn Rand

#3. Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Konrad Lorenz

#4. Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

#5. The ubiquity of full-card simulcasting has made the specialist's lot in life much easier.

Steven Crist

#6. The specialist looks inside your nose and announces: 'Well, all right, I'll take care of your right nostril, but I really don't handle left nostrils;

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#7. This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.

P.G. Wodehouse

#8. The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Marshall McLuhan

#9. To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

Charles Eames

#10. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#11. For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Virginia Woolf

#12. The reality is he's a specialist because eight years without a piece of silverware ... that is failure.

Jose Mourinho

#13. I don't think I see the way bodies move in any special way. People say I do, but everybody moves. I don't see why all of a sudden I'm a specialist in the way bodies move.

Claire Denis

#14. An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist ... Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has neither.

Anton Chekhov

#15. I proudly served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artillery operations specialist in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the Second Infantry Division.

Charles B. Rangel

#16. Monaco is quite a specialist track, and it is very difficult to say if a car will be suited to it or not. It's bumpy on the straights, and it's a very low-grip surface. All these things mean that you never know what to expect.

Romain Grosjean

#17. When none of those seemed to cure her, she moved on to modern medicine: a fertility specialist, who recommended drugs to induce ovulation and daily hormone injections that made her sob over a missed green light, a cookie dropped to the floor, bow-tied pigtails on little girls. The

Sarah McCoy

#18. I had a brain cancer specialist sit in my living room and tell me that he would never take radiation if he had a brain tumor. And I asked him, 'but, do you send people for radiation?' and he said, of course. 'I'd be drummed out of the hospital if I didn't.

Ralph W. Moss

#19. The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

Louis MacNeice

#20. By the age of twenty, any young man should know whether or not he is to be a specialist and just where his tastes lie. By postponing the question we have set on immaturity a premium which controls most American personality to its deathbed.

Bill Vaughan

#21. There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am.

Chris Ofili

#22. I think I am a complete player. I can play well on all the surfaces. For me, the clay might be easiest, but I am not a specialist on clay.

Rafael Nadal

#23. Bill Hicks - blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.

Tom Waits

#24. And what causes orgasm in a man? Kate Daniels, the sex-ed specialist. Kill me, somebody.

Ilona Andrews

#25. On every stem, on every leaf, ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#26. Spare me the people who ask, 'Have you thought about ... losing weight, hiring an assistant, buying a Pentium, working with an etiquette specialist, coloring your hair?

Susan RoAne

#27. Egotist: 1. A person who is his own best friend. 2. An I specialist. 3. A man whose opinions all change, except the one he has of himself.

Evan Esar

#28. Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivity.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#29. God is the most supreme. His power is without comparism. He is the impossibility specialist. All glory to him. Amen

Chinyere Nwakwue

#30. The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.

Eve Ensler

#31. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.

Richard Dawkins

#32. I'm not a specialist in the science but I have followed it fairly closely and it seems to me that there is among the experts a clear consensus that potential climate change is something to worry about.

Martin Rees

#33. They gave me drugs and told me to see a gallbladder specialist to make sure the stone had passed. I told them that hamsters can only blink one eye at a time. I considered this a fair trade but they billed my insurance company anyway.

Jenny Lawson

#34. We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.

Atul Gawande

#35. I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.

Judith Warner

#36. David Garner, an eating disorder specialist, has explained that the best way to gain weight is to go on a diet to lose weight!

Ellen Frankel

#37. Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#38. From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?

Lucio Russo

#39. When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.

John Sulston

#40. In the modern game, you're a clay court specialist, a grass court specialist
or a hard court specialist ... or you're Roger Federer.

Jimmy Connors

#41. I saw a specialist who asked me 'Are you familiar with the phrase faecal impaction?'. I said I think I saw that one with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas.

Bob Monkhouse

#42. Asia is the market and the location where production is inexpensive. The technological expertise and specialist knowledge comes from the industrialized world.

Tulsi Tanti

#43. RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern.

Christopher McDougall

#44. I am not a specialist but a general practitioner in the world of the arts.

Theodore Bikel

#45. And since Italy was involved in the space station as well as signed an agreement with NASA. And when the possibility to enter the 1996 Mission Specialist class.

Umberto Guidoni

#46. The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

Isaac Asimov

#47. I got the chance to be the secretary of state; I'm an international relations specialist. It doesn't get better than that.

Condoleezza Rice

#48. I like to play in the deep register. I was never a high-note specialist. My range goes from the bottom of the horn up to around C or D. High D is about it for me ... about two-and-a-half octaves, I think. But in these two-and-a-half octaves, I can say everything I have to say.

Chet Baker

#49. In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#50. The student develops an analytical as well as finely blended character. He is able to choose from a wide variety of job fields from which to embrace a career, without having to be a specialist in one particular discipline.

Philippe Perrin

#51. He was a specialist in Feng Shui; that is to say, he was consulted as to the correct ubication and orientation of houses and temples, in relation to the spirits of wind and water.

Daniele Vare

#52. And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.

Robert Mueller

#53. What's the problem? In a nutshell?"

"I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

Andrew Pyper

#54. Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room.

Keith Buckley

#55. Never to be outdone, my wife, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence, wrote the following to me: 'Dear Simon, Break a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast. With all my love-hate, Jamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff)

Simon Critchley

#56. Horace was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies
the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He told me what had happened and I looked at the gibbons, meantime rearranging my prejudices.

Robert A. Heinlein

#57. Don't think that even an engineer, when he buys a motor, takes it to bits to scrutinize it. Even he as a specialist buys from the external appearance. A motor ought to look like a birthday present.

Peter Behrens

#58. Norman Cherry wrote on Twitter:

'Recently finished reading War on Wheels: a wonderful account of the people and systems necessary to fight a successful war. I really enjoyed reading it. Thoroughly researched, well written, very accessible and suitable for specialist or general reader.

Philip Hamlyn Williams

#59. No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

George Bernard Shaw

#60. My dad was a Navy munitions officer, and by the end of his career, he was a specialist in nuclear weapons.

James Mercer

#61. As a field archeologist, one usually has to specialize in a particular part of the world or specific culture, whereas if one is a materials specialist, one can jump around to different areas. So I've had experience on excavations all over the place.

Gail Carriger

#62. You must know your faith with the same precision with which a specialist in information technology knows the operating system of a computer.

Pope Benedict XVI

#63. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist's opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a filed for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#64. The theory of the "wisdom of crowds" says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist.

Simon Kuper

#65. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

Mark Twain

#66. After a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.

Walter E. Williams

#67. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is rather that of an eye specialist than of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it, an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.

Viktor E. Frankl

#68. If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.

Peter Watts

#69. And, of course, method is very important as is a high-quality specialist (trainer) working with you to keep you going in the right direction for your improvement and to help create results.

Sergei Bubka

#70. My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

Sally Ride

#71. Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

Ruth Rendell

#72. God is a specialist when the anguish is deep. His ability to heal the soul is profound ... but only to those who rely on His wounded Son will experience relief.

Charles R. Swindoll

#73. I believe we have to put art back at the center of everyday life rather than allowing it to become a specialist activity at the margins of society.

Martin Firrell

#74. I've been working with a holistic specialist, trying to bring my body into balance, and part of making that happen is putting my mom's death into a healthier perspective. I really need to let her go, let her go into the infinite. I can't keep hanging onto this rope that connects us.

Corbin Bernsen

#75. As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes. Many

Jared Diamond

#76. As the greatest of detectives makes the greatest of criminals, a specialist in investigation is also a specialist in murder.

NisiOisiN

#77. Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

Noam Chomsky

#78. My dentist is actually a highly technical specialist, constantly experimenting with the latest dental research. The equipment he has makes my old dentist look prehistoric.

Joelle Carter

#79. The important thing is that if I can get to it and get back out again without being spotted, it will be a useful study aid in my newly chosen specialist field of getting-the-fuck-out-of-here-ology.

Nick Harkaway

#80. What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society.

G.K. Chesterton

#81. None of the great discoveries was made by a 'specialist' or a 'researcher'.

Martin H. Fischer

#82. How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

Woody Allen

#83. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#84. Contrary to the popular misconception, the actor is not necessarily a specialist in imitating or portraying what he knows about other people. On the contrary, the actor may simply be a person who's more willing than others to reveal some truths about himself.

Wallace Shawn

#85. In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

Mark Billingham

#86. My mother is a Senior Casualty Claims Specialist I, which in layman's terms means the head insurance adjuster!

Ciara Renee

#87. The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.

William James

#88. Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses - the whole world over his fence.

John Steinbeck

#89. It is not too farfetched that soon it will be possible for a physician to send the electrocardiogram and the heart sound via communication satellite to a distant heart specialist for diagnosis and consultation.

Hubertus Strughold

#90. The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.

Benjamin Tucker