Weekend Words: Scale
"No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water."
As America debates which way the scales of justice will tip, it’s time to wish a happy 225th birthday to Carl Czerny (February 21, 1791–July 15, 1857), whose many studies for the piano are still widely used by students to improve their playing of scales, arpeggios, and other techniques.
What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.
—Joseph Joubert
Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.
—Plutarch
Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes it were.
—André Malraux, Les Noyers d’Altenburg
A clever theft was praiseworthy among the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale.
—Herbert Spencer, Social Statics
I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.
—Virginia Woolf, Diary, 1932
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
—Umberto Eco
The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can’t disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.
—Jean Baudrillard
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
—Philip Roth
I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.
—Mahatma Gandhi
No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he’s got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
—William S. Burroughs
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.
—Karl Marx
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
