Diagram

“I have always believed that all Members of this House should be sufficiently articulate to express what they want to say without diagrams.”

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence...”

“Schematic diagrams are more abstract than pictorial drawings, showing symbolic elements and their interconnection to make clear the configuration and/or operation of a system.”

“A diagram is a graphic shorthand. Though it is an ideogram, it is not necessarily an abstraction. It is a representation of something in that it is not the thing itself. In this sense, it cannot help but be embodied. It can never be free of value or meaning, even when it attempts to express relationships of formation and their processes. At the same time, a diagram is neither a structure nor an abstraction of structure.”

“To show this diagram properly, I would really need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could manage to provide only a two dimensional screen.”

“I've had enough of breakdowns and diagrams — judging from picture books, apparently Heaven is a partly cloudy place.”

“Many different types of pictorial representations are used in instruction. On a scale of very concrete to very abstract, first comes the photograph. Next are true-to-life drawings which lose some detail compared to the photograph. Diagrams are more abstract, but generally depict recognizable objects and preserve spatial relationships. Lastly graphs and plots are completely abstract representations of sets of data.”

“A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon; but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing.”

“The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the chowty dar [chowkidar] (village watchman in India), who just puts down what he damn pleases.”

“He was the kind of man who kept a diagram showing where you sat when you dined with him and what you ate, lest he serve you the same dish when you came again.”