Defining Empty Sums

Famous quotes containing the words defining, empty and/or sums:

“The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”
—David Blankenhorn (20th century)

“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

“If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
—Jewish proverb, quoted in Claud Cockburn, Cockburn Sums Up, epigraph (1981)