People Quiz: Words of Wisdom, Words of Might: 10 Questions | Quotes

Answer: Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln had accepted an offer to speak at the Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn in October of 1859. His law partner, William Herndon, advised that he'd not known of a speech that had taken so much of Lincoln's time to research and assemble. He went on to elaborate that the speech was constructed with accuracy and simplicity in mind and that it was "devoid of any rhetoric imagery". Lincoln had critically scrutinized the opinions of the 39 signatories to the US Constitution and noted that the majority of them had agreed that Congress should control slavery in the territories. This made his view (read the Republican view) in line with those of the Founding Fathers and this point was important. Why? There were a number of southern radicals who were threatening to secede should a Republican be elected President - Lincoln, at the time, had not been announced as a Presidential candidate.

The speech was a success and it gained Lincoln valuable support in William Seward's home state and go a long way towards showing inconsistencies in the position of his rival Senator Stephen Douglas. More revealing were the words of one of the listeners at that event; "When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall, tall, -- oh, how tall! and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man." However, once Lincoln warmed up, "his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man."

Answer: Quantum physics

Einstein had previously stated that "God does not play dice with the universe" and he took the opportunity to vary that statement to support his arguments about quantum physics. His thoughts were recorded in a series of letters to Caltech theoretical physicist Paul Epstein in 1945. Epstein was well aware of Einstein's regular debates with Niels Bohr. Bohr's claims were that, in the quantum world, particles behaved differently when they were being observed. Einstein stood by the view that particles, no matter how small, need to adhere to certain rules and that they should not change randomly, just because they are being observed.

The three letters that he'd written to Epstein totaled eight pages of script and hand drawn diagrams.

Answer: Mark Twain

The date was November 20, 1900. The gathering was that of the Nineteenth Century Club, meeting at Sherry's in New York. Mark Twain was responding to a toast on the "Disappearance of Literature". In his reply he advised that this was nothing new, that fashions came and went and that, like the tailor who had to change his cut to survive in his industry, so too did authors.

In the process, he was subtle in his rebuke of Professor Winchester, who'd claimed that there were no modern epics like "Paradise Lost" (John Milton, published 1667).

He suggested "I guess he's right. He talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust.

It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". (Ouch).

Answer: Buddha

The "Dhammapada" is a collection of the sayings of Buddha and they represent a summary of the key principles of his teachings. The main idea from the above saying is that there be non-harm to others. These phrases are delivered in verse form and are recorded as a response to unique situations in the life of the prophet, as they occurred. Regarded as the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha lived in ancient India (c. 6th to 5th century BCE).

Answer: Frank Zappa

Nicknamed Tipper since her childhood, Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson Gore, the wife of former Vice President Al Gore, waged a successful campaign to have record albums labelled that contained explicit sexual material. Her concerns arose when she listened to Prince's "Purple Rain" (1984) album with her daughter and was confronted with the song "Darling Nikki," which described a girl masturbating. A range of artists, as diverse as the above-named Frank Zappa and country singer John Denver, protested strongly claiming it was an infringement upon their First Amendment rights, that radio stations would refuse to play material labelled accordingly and worse, stores would refuse to carry such stock.

Zappa's facetious comment was initially made in respect to a Congressional hearing on explicit lyrics held in September of 1985. Whilst it may have mocked that hearing it did make a valid point, indicating that his audience had enough intelligence about how to respond to messages within his lyrics. The song, by the way, was called "Montana" and can be found on his album "Over-Nite Sensation" (1973).

Answer: Niels Bohr

The Bohr-Einstein debates were a series of disputes between the two renowned scientists, about quantum physics, that lit up the early part of the twentieth century. Bohr would eventually table his version of those famous arguments in the above-named essay. In one of the passages, he elaborates "In the Institute in Copenhagen, where through those years a number of young physicists from various countries came together for discussions, we used, when in trouble, often to comfort ourselves with jokes, among them the old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belong statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called "deep truths," are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth."

Whilst Bohr is credited with the quote in the question the above passage tells us two things; (a) Bohr does not claim authorship of it by calling it "an old saying" and (b) he treated the phrase as little more than a joke.

Answer: Spike Milligan

Though not specifically words of wisdom or words of might they do highlight the genius of Spike. Usually when one announces that their father had a profound influence upon them it would follow that words of praise would come in its footsteps. Milligan, as he so often did, turned it on its head and produced the unexpected... "he was a lunatic".

To be fair to Milligan it was done in a complimentary manner. In Graham McCann's book, "Spike & Co: Inside the House of Fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton & Simpson" (2006)), he records that Milligan's father, as a member of the armed forces, was constantly away from home during Spike's formative years. To make up for his absences he would make himself an "exuberant presence" when he was there. This included "telling jokes, singing songs, doing silly little dances and dressing up in cowboy outfits in order to play games of 'let's pretend' with his two young boys" to make up for lost time. It isn't difficult to see how Spike's father played a strong role in shaping his son's future.

Spike Milligan would go on to be the main creative force behind "The Goon Show", a radio comedy programme that ran on the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960. His comedic style would, in turn, have a profound influence on the team of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Answer: John von Neumann

Hungarian born John von Neumann was deemed, by some, to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians". He wrote in excess of 160 papers in respect to mathematics, quantum physics, economics and architecture, among others. One of those articles was entitled "Can We Survive Technology?", which he wrote as a response to a call from the editors of Fortune magazine. The magazine had invited a range of prominent individuals to write pieces that looked to predict what the future will hold in the 1980s. The resultant essays were published as part of the book "The Fabulous Future America in 1980" which was released in 1956.

If I may indulge, I recall, from my university days, writing an essay that started with the line "Progress is the art of losing innocence", indicating that the more we learn, the more we changed, the less innocent we could claim to be. Without gloating, I thought to myself "wow... I have depth", however, I have to take my hat off to Neumann and bow to the level of depth he achieves in such a brief statement. The article he wrote was about nuclear weapons, climate control, and automated systems, and the full sentence read as follows; "For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment."

Answer: Yes

The "Holodomor", or "Great Famine", was a famine during 1932 and 1933 that took the lives of millions of Ukrainians. The term "Holodomor" points to the famine being man-made and also intentional. Whilst some argue that it was the result of the sudden industrialization of the Soviet Union, there are many more who contend that it was genocide and set up by Stalin as a means of ending a push for Ukrainian independence.

The above quote has been attributed to Stalin and the story came to light in an article in the Washington Post by Leonard Lyons in 1947. In this story he tells of a meeting between Stalin and other high ranking commissars in which the famine in the Ukraine was discussed. Whilst Lyons' sources are not known he goes on to reveal the following; "One official arose and made a speech about this tragedy - the tragedy of having millions of people dying of hunger. He began to enumerate death figures ... Stalin interrupted him to say: 'If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that's only statistics.'"

Answer: His son Sean

The line is a lyric in Lennon's song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" which appears as a track on his 1980 album "Double Fantasy". The song, which is an ode to the joys of parenthood starts out with Lennon comforting his son, presumably from a nightmare, and moving on to an expression of love for him. Both Lennon and Yoko Ono had children from previous relationships and were desperate for a child of their own. Sean was born in 1975 and Lennon withdrew from the music industry in order to be the doting father for his son.

Lennon had previously been a father, to son Julian, who was born in 1963. Sadly, his commitments to touring and life with the Beatles meant that he'd spent very little time with him. One can only wonder if the above quote arose from thoughts of the neglected child. Though Lennon made the quote, "Life is what happens...", it is not an original thought. It had previously appeared in an edition of Readers' Digest in 1957 and was attributed to cartoonist and writer Allen Saunders. Lennon was murdered three weeks after the release of the album "Double Fantasy" which, simply, adds another layer of poignancy to the quote.