Seminal Quotes

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk. (Umberto Eco)
Conservatives - or better, pro-corporate apologists - hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right ... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove - the reputed brain of George W. Bush - as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today. View quote
Bill Moyers
If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. View quote
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Harold and Maude' was a seminal movie for me because it's not only a beautiful love story, but it's also about the moment when misfits find each other. View quote
Stephen Chbosky
The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in. View quote
Dick Wolf
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. View quote
Sonia Sotomayor
Around 1958, I became aware of H. A. Simon's seminal papers on bounded rationality and was immediately convinced by his arguments. I tried to construct a theory of boundedly rational multigoal decision making. Together with Heinz Sauermann, I worked out an "aspiration adaptation theory of the firm" which was published as a journal article in 1962... More and more I came to the conclusion that purely speculative approaches like that of our paper of 1962 are of limited value. The structure of boundedly rational economic behavior cannot be invented in the armchair, it must be explored experimentally. View quote
Reinhard Selten
There is I suppose, historically, this seminal moment in the lives of African Americans where one becomes black. Frantz Fanon and everyone talks about it. There is a moment when you go from subject to object and I guess that was my moment... View quote
Kara Walker
If they don't act, we will. Shame on them but we cannot sit around and watch our environment deteriorate and put this world in jeopardy. We are willing to stand up, we think it is one of the seminal issues of our time. View quote
Michael Bloomberg
Or say it is Pentecost: the hawthorn-tree, set with coagulate magnified flowers of may, blooms in a haze of light; old chalk-pits brim with seminal verdue from the roots of time. Landscape is like revelation; it is both singular crystal and the remotest things. Cloud-shadows of seasons revisit the earth, odourless myrrh bourne by the wandering kings. View quote
Geoffrey Hill
The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology. (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'. View quote
Siddhartha Mukherjee
James Buchanan ... produced several seminal contributions to the literature prior to the appearance of The Calculus, and a continual stream of books and articles afterward. I view Buchanan's Nobel Prize as a reward for this great body of work, and not just limited to The Calculus. Pursuing this line of reasoning, Gordon Tullock's prodigious research output following the publication of The Calculus also justifies a Nobel Prize. Indeed, Tullock's (1967c) seminal analysis of rent seeking, and his subsequent work on this topic might be regarded as sufficient achievements for the awarding of a prize. View quote
Dennis Mueller
Among the seminal discoveries in biology in the twentieth century were the chemical nature and the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. View quote
Albert L. Lehninger
The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism-replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous. View quote
James K. Morrow
One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater. View quote
Arthur Penn
From time to time, you have seminal personalities who really change the way the world sees itself - people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Warren Buffett is that kind of person in the business world. View quote
Guy Spier
I happened to fall into a job that wound up being a seminal piece of television history, which was a show I did on HBO called 'The Wire.' That experience really set the bar for me and opened a lot of doors. It also gave me a lot of street cred in terms of my phone ringing and job offers. View quote
Deirdre Lovejoy
America's 'social contract' is equal opportunity... yet we have failed in achieving that seminal goal. View quote
George Kaiser
The seminal elements of what makes a story great - challenge, struggle, resolution - are the same whether we're talking about story content for a movie such as 'Rain Man,' or telling a purposeful story to forge new business relationships or conclude a fruitful transaction, such as acquiring an NBA franchise. View quote
Peter Guber
Human sexuality is . . . a long way from the depositing of seminal fluid, like squirting jam in a donut. (Brian J. Ford)
If we can recover the naturalistic ambitions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, ... philosophy becomes relevant because the world-riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment-desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it. And by taking these three seminal figures of the Continental traditions as philosophical naturalists we show their work to be continuous with the naturalistic turn that has swept Anglophone philosophy over the past several decades. ... The antipathy to naturalism often thought to be constitutive of "the Continental tradition” is simply an artifact of cutting the joints of that tradition in certain places. View quote
Brian Leiter
Together, we join two distinguished South Africans, the late Chief Albert Lutuli and His Grace Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to whose seminal contributions to the peaceful struggle against the evil system of apartheid you paid well-deserved tribute by awarding them the Nobel Peace Prize. It will not be presumptuous of us if we also add, among our predecessors, the name of another outstanding Nobel Peace Prize winner, the late Rev Martin Luther King Jr. View quote
Nelson Mandela
During the following decade [of the 1950s] modern economic history took a dramatic swing away from the liberal-left consensus established by the Hammonds, Tawney and the Webbs. The seminal text for this change of direction was the 1954 collection of essays compiled by F. A. Hayek, "Capitalism and the Historians". View quote
Friedrich Hayek
The Ageless Wisdom teaching was first made available to the general public around 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in her seminal works: The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled. Blavatsky established the Theosophical Society to introduce this `new' perspective on history and human evolution. The intermediate phase of the teaching was revealed by Alice A. Bailey who, from 1919 to 1949, collaborated with a Master of Wisdom known as `the Tibetan'. Through a process of telepathic overshadowing, the Master Djwhal Khul communicated a vast body of information about the world and its future. View quote
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky