Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent - the power to do the right thing the first time.
In the Studio Museum in Harlem, when I was dealing with that community and dealing with my peers in the streets, it allowed for me to get outside of Yale, to get outside of art-speak, and to really think about art as a material practice that has very useful and pragmatic material precedent.
In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.
I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.
What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?
When I talk about people wrapping themselves in the flag and hiding behind Jesus - that's an anti-intellectual thing to do in the political process, because legally, allegedly we have a separation between church and state. That's a legal precedent that's never observed. When people are trying to do something that's not in your best interest, they will wrap it in the flag and hide behind Jesus, which is a corrupt thing to do.
It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.
The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.
I am sorry they began their deliberations by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of their members. Nothing can justify this example but the innocence of their intentions and ignorance of the value of public discussions. I have no doubt that all their other measures will be good and wise. It is really an assembly of demigods.
It was a sight surpassing all precedent, and one we never dreamed of seeing.
Everything I write has a precedent in truth.
It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others.
As federal lawmakers, we have a responsibility to set a precedent for energy efficient practices.
Society likes to file you away, put you in this or that category. And I never fit any category. Maybe that's why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.
There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.
All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.
We have the precedent of Collin Powell ten years ago, when he showed the evidence, it was false, and it was forged.
Don’t let the urgent take precedent over the important.