Famous quotes containing the word basis:
“Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for I wouldn’t. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line—now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It’s just a corner in pork, that’s all.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Our fathers and grandfathers who poured over the Midwest were self-reliant, rugged, God-fearing people of indomitable courage.... They asked only for freedom of opportunity and equal chance. In these conceptions lies the real basis of American democracy. They and their fathers give a genius to American institutions that distinguished our people from any other in the world.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)