Interchangeable Quotes
Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.
Walter A. Shewhart
[T]he male .... tries to convince himself and women - he's succeeded best at convincing women - that the female function is to bear and raise children and relax, comfort and boost the egos of the male, that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplacable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.
Valerie Solanas
It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want-or what they are told they want-is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts.
Sinclair Lewis
I tried to tell which was Randall, but I could not; in their gowns and masks, they all looked the same, impersonal, interchangeable. That was not true of course. One of those four men had responsibility for everything, for the contact of all sixteen workers present. And responsibility for the seventeenth person in that room, the man whose heart was stopped.
Michael Crichton
The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose - a one joke movie, if it had one joke. The two characters wander witlessly past the bizarre backdrops of Las Vegas (some real, some hallucinated, all interchangeable) while zonked out of their minds. Humor depends on attitude. Beyond a certain point, you don't have an attitude, you simply inhabit a state. I've heard a lot of funny jokes about drunks and druggies, but these guys are stoned beyond comprehension, to the point where most of their dialog could be paraphrased as "eh?"... As for Depp, what was he thinking he made this movie? He was once in trouble for trashing a New York hotel room, just like the heroes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What was that? Research? After River Phoenix died of an overdose outside Depp's club, you wouldn't think Depp would see much humor in this story - but then, of course, there *isn't* much humor in this story.
Roger Ebert
Glenn Beck: How many people here identify themselves as African Americans?
[audience raises hands]
Glenn Beck: Why?
Panelist: It's interchangeable.
Glenn Beck: Why not identify yourself as Americans?
Panelist: But people can look at you and tell you're black, you can't escape that.
Glenn Beck: Yeah, but I don't identify myself as white or a white American.
Glenn Beck
I suggest that the hon. gentleman may be a good corporation lawyer, but he is slipping badly in his history. The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.
Tommy Douglas
Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn't make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren't always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it-and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.
David Mitchell (author)
