Primary Source Quotes

“After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.”

— Ysabeau S. Wilce

“Pessimism is a primary source of passivity,”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

“Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own ... Stand still, be quiet.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

“And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.
”

— Tim Winton

“By reversing the proper order of things, the non-presuppositional apologist sees submission to God's Word as secondary, rather than primary, sees demonstration as the basis for faith, sees independent argumentation rather than the Holy Spirit as the source of conviction, and therefore advances the destruction of his own defense of the faith.”

— Greg L. Bahnsen

“In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking.”

— Erik Larson

“God is unchanging primary source of love, all the ingredients of love are oozing out of his pure heart and poured into our hearts.”

— Euginia Herlihy

“The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man-and he asks no other man to exist for him.”

— Ayn Rand

“Because I got distracted Googling for information on the nanny murder (a good journalist always checks her facts, particularly when the primary source is Sophie, a girl who spouts gossip like she's auditioning to become the next Perez Hilton). It turns out however that Sophie was correct on all points about the murder, which isn't that comforting.”

— Sarah Alderson

“My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.”

— Reza Aslan

“The primary source of the appeal of Christianity was Jesus - His incarnation, His life, His crucifixion, and His resurrection.”

— Kenneth Scott Latourette

“Teaching, therefore, asks first of all the creation of a space where students and teachers can enter into a fearless communication with each other and allow their respective life experiences to be their primary and most valuable source of growth and maturation. It asks for a mutual trust in which those who teach and those who want to learn can become present to each other, not as opponents, but as those who share in the same struggle and search for the same truth.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Sadly, cinemas with film as the primary source are disappearing. We need to remain open to change. That does not require one to divorce the past but to respect and process both the present and the future.”

— Robert Richardson

“When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.”

— Andrea Barrett

“Earth as the standard by which to judge all actions transacted on our planet. From such a point of view, we all are Earth Citizens before we are a part of any group, nation, or religion. The Earth is the source of life for all forms of life. It is the common ground and primary value we pursue in our lives personally and collectively!”

— Ilchi Lee

“80 percent of our global fish stocks are fully exploited, overly exploited or have collapsed. Two billion people rely on the oceans for their primary source of protein.”

— Barton Seaver

“It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Science is proving it now and the old spiritual books said it centuries ago that negative thoughts are the primary source of all the internal and external diseases/illnesses!”

— Maddy Malhotra

“Because the New Testament provides the primary historical source for information on the resurrection, many critics during the 19th century attacked the reliability of these biblical documents.”

— Josh McDowell

“In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.”

— Tom Vilsack

“When X-rays traverse matter of any kind, this matter becomes a source of a radiation similar in character to that of the primary radiation falling upon it.”

— Charles Glover Barkla

“What I try to do - and I think this is the former librarian in me - is to get primary source material.”

— Theresa Breslin

“8. Santa Claus is concerned about the problem of Arctic ice. The ice is the spouse of the elves, and she is sick. She is the primary source of their magic, as the elves cannot be separated from the place where they live. For many years now, this is all they have asked for for Christmas: that the ice should come back”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.”

— Victor Cousin

“If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.”

— Nikola Tesla

“Social Security, for example - I'm 43. I've paid into the system. You know what? That money has been stolen from me. I know that my parents who are on Social Security - they've got to continue to receive it. They're dependent on it. It is their primary source of income.”

— Joe Miller

“For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.”

— Carson McCullers

“Aren't you failing English?" I asked.
Angeline flushed. "It's not my fault."
"Even I know you can't write an article on Wikipedia and then use it as a source in your own essay." Sydney had been torn between horror and hysterics when she told me.
"I took 'primary source' to a whole new level!"
Honestly, it was a wonder we'd gotten by for so long without Angeline. Life must have been so boring before her.”

— Richelle Mead

“Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.”

— Anonymous.

“A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.”

— David Abram

“If anything, I've found nonfiction a little easier. You don't have to make anything up. Of course, that's the inherent difficulty as well: when you hit an information black hole, you don't get to make it up. That hasn't come up too often with this project though. I'm lucky to have tons of primary source material , reams of letters and diaries and memoirs.”

— Debra Dean

“Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and its empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United State Congress elected
the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.”

— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art ... It is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.”

— Joanna Macy

“Oil is essential for a modern, industrial society. It's unique, first of all, because it's the primary source, at 40 percent, of the world's entire supply of energy, and it's irreplaceable in the transportation field; it provides 98 percent of world transportation energy.”

— Michael Klare

“Those who depend on television as their primary information source are condemned to ... A form of political illiteracy.”

— Bill Kraus

“Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.”

— Harold Land

“The mother is the early care giver and primary source of identification for all children ... A daughter continues to identify with the mother”

— Nancy Chodorow

“The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.”

— Nikolai Berdyaev

“It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know.”

— Karen Abbott

“Human beings are made of body, mind and spirit. Of these, spirit is primary, for it connects us to the source of everything, the eternal field of consciousness.”

— Deepak Chopra

“The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“We are slaves of what we don't know;of what we know we are masters.Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discoverand understand its cause and workings,we overcome it by the very knowing.The primary purpose of meditation is to become more consciousand familiar with our inner life.The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“You might be a redneck if your primary source of income is the pawn shop.”

— Jeff Foxworthy

“I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books.”

— Benedict Cumberbatch

“And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.”

— Pat Buchanan

“I had turned personal validation into my primary source of meaning and value, so that without it I was miserable and depressed.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

“A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger ... The original motive is not pleasure in destruction ... I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live ...”

— Wilhelm Reich

“Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.”

— Havelock Ellis