Famous quotes containing the words activity, tentatively and/or assigned:
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“If I had not come to America, where I felt free to formulate tentatively insights at which I had empathically arrived, I would have accomplished very little. I would never have begun to publish, to teach, to undertake research. Because if one does not find an assenting echo to one’s ideas, if one is passed over, as I was in Vienna, then one cannot create. To create, after all, is to believe that what one says will count.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)