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I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--
I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.

 

Upton Sinclair

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"It is difficult to explain why I cherish a greater imagination for him than any other player live or dead. … And yet Capablanca shoulders them all out of my mind when I am thinking of natural genius. The secret perhaps lies in Euwe's description of him as "the elegant". His easy natural grace of play was extraordinarily pleasant to watch, though very difficult to rival and not so easy to understand." — Harry Golombek "World Champions I have Met."

 

Jose Raul Capablanca

 

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Jack Cardiff once asked Powell "Michael, do you make films for all types of audiences, or just for yourself?" Michael shook his head vigorously. "I make films for myself. What I express I hope most people will understand. For the rest, well, that's their problem."

 

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When I tried to tell McHabe that it would have been more valuable to let Ferone keep his appointment with me than to kick him out, he let me have it:
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Bel Kaufman

 

"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."

 

Andre Maurois