Archive for July 15th, 2011
Quotes by “famous” women? Part 2.
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 15, 2011
Quotes by “famous” women? Part 2
Katia Chapoutier published a French book on 100 “Unforgivable women”. I am interested in the few quotes of famous women.
Pearl Buck (1892-1973): “Everything is possible as long as it was not proven to be otherwise. Even in this case, what is impossible is just temporary. If there is no other life after death, this life gave me the opportunity to be born as a human being.” Pearl Buck receive the Nobel Prize of literature in 1938. Have you read “The Chinese Land”, “East wind, west wind”…?
Anais Nin (1903-1977): “Eroticism is one of the bases for self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.” Her diary of 15,000 pages was published integrally in 1986. She was elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Anna de Noailles (1876-1933): “Dream and love are the only real elements. A sleeping remembrance ceases of being guilty as long as it keeps a stable face: Lie is a noble secret.” Anna founded the Fermi Prize in 1904 (exclusive to women authors) and was a model for the famous sculptor Rodin.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962): “Little spirits discuss of people, average spirits discuss of events, and great spirits discuss of ideas. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, she was the dynamo in the first session of the UN in San Francisco of 1946, and read the universal declaration of human rights in 1948. She headed the presidential commission on the status of women in 1961.
Hattie McDaniel (1895-1952): “I prefer being paid $700 a week playing house servant rather than receiving $7 per day as a real servant” said this black actress who got the Oscar in 1940 for her role in “Gone with the wind”. Hattie acted in Show Boat in 1936 and in the radio program “The Beulah Show” (1947 to 1951)
Greta Garbo (1905-1990): “I was pretty naive to think that I could travel without being discovered and followed up close. Why can we not live without supervision? People love Anna Karenina, Anna Christie, Queen Christine and not this Garbo that you are currently seeing.” Greta received an Oscar for life achievement in 1954. Have you seen “The Torrent”, “The legend of Gosta Berling”…?
Mother Teresa (1910-1997): “Poor people need us, but we need the poor even more. The biggest poverty is for feeling not being loved.” Mother Teresa created 610 missions in 123 States. (My own quote: “I decided to be consistent in my life. My life was emotionally poor; should work to be materially poor as well”
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975): “It is in the void of the thought that evil is inscribed. If you manage to appear the way you wish to be viewed, that is all that judges require of you.” Have read “The origin of totalitarianism”, “The condition of modern man”…?
Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962): “I know that I will never be a big artist. I can with hard work be a good one.”
Grace Kelly (1929-1982): “I didn’t like Hollywood. It is a heartless city. I am not aware of any other location in the world where so many people suffer nervous depression and alcoholism. There is no happiness in Hollywood.” Grace married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, a prince Estate crumbling under heavy debts. Have you seen the Hitchcock movie “The crime was almost perfect”, “Window on courtyard”, “A suburb girl” for which she received an Oscar in 1955?
Romy Schneider (1938-1982): “Talent is a question of love. I always had in horror the word “Star” and the noise generated around it. A life has to be overflowing with passion. Life is too short to feel contented of living but one life” Have you seen “White Lilac”, “Sissi”, “Le proces”, “The importance is to love”…
Brigitte Bardot (1934-): “And my ass? Do you love my ass?” One of the replies in the movie “Le Mepris”. Bardot said: “I am not one to faking. I do not compose. Never. If I have to say something, I just let it out. With me, there are no surprises: You know who I love and who I don’t like…” Bardot created the Foundation for animal defense. Have you seen “Le Trou Normand”, And God created the woman”…? She filmed 48 movies and 80 songs within a 20-year career. Bardot withdrew from the celebrity scene in 1973.
Edith Piaf (1915-1961): “Even as we lost our lover, love that we have known keeps the taste of honey. Love is eternal” Have you listened to “Non, je ne regrette rien”, “Les Momes de la cloche”, “C’est la rose l’ important”, “La vie en rose”…? The French boxer Marcel Cerdan was her life love.
Jane Fonda (1937-): “Man can feel pleasure all the seasons in life, woman only in springtime”
Francoise Giroud (1916-2003): “A woman will be really the equal to man, if one day, an incompetent woman is designated to an important position.”
Wangari Maathai (1940-): “If we want to safeguard nature, we better start safeguarding mankind: They constitute part of the biodiversity.” She founded the “Green Belt Movement” in 1977 and received the Nobel Prize of Peace in 2004.
Aung San Suu Kyi (1945-): “It is not power that corrupt, but fear: Fear of losing the power by those who exercise power, and fear of being beaten for those that the power-to-be oppress. Truth and justice are the sole defenses against heartless power…” Aung received the Nobel Prize of Peace in 1991.
Rigoberta Menchu (1959-): “Man is far worth than his diplomas. I want to remain a student all my life.” Rigoberta published her autobiography “Yo Rigoberta” in 1983. She defended the autochtone (indigenous) minorities and safeguarded their rights in Latin America and Guatemala. She received the Nobel prize of Peace in 1992.
Margherita Hack (1922-): “We all have a common origin: We are the product of the universe evolution and of the stars. The stars are democratic: they are accessible and the show is free to all. Nature is the utmost liberal: Nature never oppose your will to know and your intellectual faculties. Why seek miracles and dwell on superstition, while there are so many poems and fascination outside?” She founded the magazine Astronomy in 1979 and discovered an asteroid that carries her name in 1995.
(Margherita Hack said it all poetically. I had written: “Is one eternity not good enough for us? We are all, animate subjects and inanimate objects, constituted of the same fundamental basic elements. We are constantly transformed in this vast universe”)
Note: Link to first part: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/quotes-by-famous-women/
Quotes by “famous” women?
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 15, 2011
Quotes by “famous” women?
Katia Chapoutier published a French book on 100 “Unforgivable women“. I am interested in the few quotes of famous women.
Marie Curie (1867-1934): “We never pay attention on what has been done. We see but what is left to be done. In life, nothing is to be scared of, everything is to be comprehended.” Marie received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for discovering two new radioactive elements the polonium and radium.
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927): “Nudity is the truth, the beauty, and the Art.” She created a new dancing school: bare feet, nude body, an ingenious pedagogical contemporary method that endures.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919 assassinated in Berlin): “Liberty: It is always the liberty of the one thinking differently” She was jailed during WWI in Germany for being engaged against the war. Rosa founded the non-violent Spartacus movement after the war and the movement took to the streets.
Coco Chanel (1883-1971): “The mode is outmoded, style never! Luxury is not anathema to poverty, but to vulgarity!”
Josephine Baker (1906-1975): “I have two love: My country and Paris. Since I personify the savage on the scenes, I try my best to be civilized in life. One day, I realized that I was living in a country (USA) that made be afraid of being black. I suffocated in the USA. Many of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we could no longer suffer this climate of discrimination. I felt liberated in Paris”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941, suicide): “Life is a dream. It is being awake that kills. Each one of us has his past locked inside, as old pages of a book he memorized, but close friends only read the title. There is a solitude between wife and husband, a chasm that we have to learn to respect. I have this certitude that I am becoming mad: I feel that we will not be capable of suffering one of these terrible periods…I am hearing voices and can no longer take it. Thus, I am doing what is the proper good thing to doing.” Have you read “Mrs. Dalloway”, “The Years”…
Anna Freud (1895-1982), daughter of Sigmund Freud: “The first years of life are like the preliminary steps in a chess game arrangement. Those first years guide our orientation, the style of the game. But, as long as we are not cornered Checkmate, there are still many good fights in the game. Creative minds always survive bad treatments.” Anna was also a qualified psychoanalyst and founded a specialised therapeutic clinics for children.
Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969): “Dogs bark, cats miau: It is their nature. My nature is to doing philosophy. Select a star, never quit it from your eyes. This star will advance you very far, without pain or feeling fatigued.” At the age of 18, she rode her bicycle and toured Spain without warning her folks. Alexandra kept exploring remote countries, with obsession. She visited Tibet, the Gobi desert, China, Mongolia…and wrote diaries of her adventures. At the age of 100, Alexandra renew her passport for another long trip.
Louise Brooks (1906-1985): “The grand art of films is not composing facial and body movements, but the movements of the thoughts and soul that are transmitted in intense isolation. There are no other occupations that resemble closely slavery as the career of a movie star.” She quit acting in 1937. Have you seen “Loulou”, “A girl in every seaport”…? She wrote her autobiography “Lulu in Hollywood” in 1982.
Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). Engles (the early theoretician of communism) said: “In the family, man is the bourgeois; the woman plays the role of the proletariat”. Zetkin adopted that quote as the basis of her struggle for equal rights to women.
Note: Second part of quotes: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/part-2-quotes-by-%E2%80%9Cfamous%E2%80%9D-women/
What do they share: Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Adele, Rihana…?
I am not into music. It happened that the French weekly magazine “Courrier International” issued a special number on women: Women in power, in sciences, in music…On the ground that if power corrupt, it can also corrupt people willing to take advantage of people in power…
It happened that I read the piece on pop music, and I leave it to you to judge on the good content of the article. The Guardian wrote: “The market for pop music is not big enough to for more than four pop singers. Somehow, it is expected that a couple of the top female singers will make room for two fresh faces in a year or two. Soon, we might realize that only one female singer held her ground and become of the same stature as Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, Britney Spears, or Mariah Carey…It is as we ask talent hunters to get busy on the street and fetch new young and photogenic faces for the pop music industry…”
Miranda Sawyer of The Observer responded: “Girl solo singers are easier to manage than a bunch of boy brats. Consequently, it is more profitable to focus on female singers.” Leonie Cooper of New Musical Express simplified the equation: “As more women and girls attend concerts and do buy magazine dedicated to music, it is logical that female divas of the pop are more numerous”
It appears that Lady Gaga and Rihana are expected to stay on the scene for longer than the other top pop singers. It does not mean that the other singers will vanish into thin air and vacate the place, but they won’t grab as much of the market.
Medias tend to generalize and simplify singers into two categories: One category is for the coquettish and sexy pin-up (Kylie Minogue, Beyonce, Britney, Christina Aguilera, or Duffy…); the other category is reserved for the rebel and moderately engaged pin-up such as Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stephani, P!nk, Lady Gaga, or Amy Whinehouse…)
Most of the pop singers tried to change category at different seasons and were successful in increasing their share of the market. There is a new trend of author-interpreter pop singers and have the last word on their public image such as Lady Gaga, Jessie J, Nicki Minaj, or Clare Maguire…) The Swedish electropop Robyn owns her own label company and got out three albums within a year, while resuming her concert contracts.
Rihana special voice is conducive to dancing songs. One common factor that all pop singers share is that “sex doped sell” and they make good use of sex to increase selling. For example, “Baby one more time” of Britney sold over 10 million since 2000.
The blog “Hipster runoff” created the word “slutwave” for this sex trend in crude songs and bare bodies, and Rolling Stone magazine adopted the term. The female hip-hop trio group “Yo Majesty” reproduced the macho attitudes and grabbed their pussies…Lady Gaga said: “A few women opt to run after men, others after their dreams. If you hesitate to choose, remember that your career will never remind you when you wake up that it does no longer love you.”
The idea of promoting a pop icon as representative of a life-style is very strong. For example, Cheryl Cole is current ambassador of L’Oreal, Lady Gaga for MAC cosmetic, Rihana for Nivea…One more advantage for female top singers is that they have no difficulties integrating commercial successes and individual integrity
Note: The authors of the piece “Les filles donnent le La” are Ines Munioz Martinez-Mora and Lucas Arrault.
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