Quotes about birth
page 6

Narendra Modi photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Anish Kapoor photo

“It is almost as if the 49-year-old global Indian was an alien in his place of birth.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

Donald J. Trump photo

“An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/232572505238433794, quoted in * 2017-02-24 Meghan Keneally Even though he bashes anonymous sources, Trump uses them himself ABC News https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bashes-anonymous-sources-trump/story?id=45715113
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Donald Trump / Quotes / Donald Trump on social media / Twitter
2010s, 2012

James Buchanan photo

“All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance. Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. Nor has the danger yet entirely ceased. Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people. Time is a great corrective. Political subjects which but a few years ago excited and exasperated the public mind have passed away and are now nearly forgotten. But this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation, which since the recent legislation of Congress is without any legitimate object.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Inaugural address (4 March 1857).

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“All the fairest things of earth,
Art's creations have their birth —
Still from love and death.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Subjects for Pictures. II. The Banquet of Aspasia and Pericles
The Monthly Magazine

Joan Rivers photo

“Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa, you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

As quoted in On Being Blonde: Wit and Wisdom from the World's Most Infamous Blondes (2004), by P. Munier, p. 83

Emily St. John Mandel photo
Vera Farmiga photo

“It's just an incredible gift, giving birth. I never felt so empowered, so powerful, so womanly as I did after I gave birth. I felt more feminine than I ever had in my life.”

Vera Farmiga (1973) American actress

As quoted in " Vera Farmiga's New Role: The Gal Who Dumps George Clooney http://parade.com/40183/jeannewolf/1203-vera-farmiga/" by Jeanne Wolf at Parade (December 3, 2009)

Margaret Sanger photo

“Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“There is no such thing as slow freedom. Freedom is like a birth. Till we are fully free we are slaves.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (15 December 1921)
1920s

Robert Erskine Childers photo

“I am a birth, domicile, and deliberate choice of citizenship an Irishman…”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

His own words from his last military trial on 17 November 1922, cited in The Freeman's Journal Newspaper, 27 November 1922.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)

Michio Kaku photo

“I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization… The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. …capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology… And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? …so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well…”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

"Will Mankind Destroy Itself?" http://bigthink.com/videos/will-mankind-destroy-itself (29 September 2010)

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
André Breton photo
Stendhal photo

“Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who has been surrounded by flatterers since birth.”

La vanité piquée peut mener loin un jeune homme riche et dès le berceau toujours environné de flatteurs.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 13

John Calvin photo

“The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship. Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,—i. e., by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its contact with the school of Plato,—a Christianity which entirely rejected the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and attractive myths of Persia and India,—that gave birth to the images.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1549), p. 13

Sigmund Freud photo

“Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in a footnote Freud added to the Second Edition in 1909 (see Psychoanalytic Pioneers, p. 46 http://books.google.com/books?id=Fro5MZry5FcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA46#v=onepage&q&f=false.)
1900s

Lawrence Lessig photo
Kunti photo
Edmund Burke photo
Henry Cabot Lodge photo
Phillips Brooks photo

“O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God the King,
And peace to men on earth.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

O little Town of Bethlehem, 2nd stanza http://books.google.com/books?id=Uh03AAAAMAAJ&q=%22O+morning+stars+together+Proclaim+the+holy+birth+And+praises+sing+to+God+the+King+And+peace+to+men+on+earth%22&pg=PA15#v=onepage (1868).

Thornton Wilder photo
Frederik Pohl photo
David Lloyd George photo

“What has caused confusion and misunderstanding about his Hinduism is the concept of sarva-dharma-samabhAva (equal regard for all religions) which he had developed after deep reflection. Christian and Muslim missionaries have interpreted it to mean that a Hindu can go aver to Christianity or Islam without suffering any spiritual loss. They are also using it as a shield against every critique of their closed and aggressive creeds. The new rulers of India, on the other hand, cite it in order to prop up the Nehruvian version of Secularism which is only a euphemism for anti-Hindu animus shared in common by Christians, Muslims, Marxists and those who are Hindus only by accident of birth. For Gandhiji, however, sarva-dharma-samabhAva was only a restatement of the age-old Hindu tradition of tolerance in matters of belief. Hinduism has always adjudged a man’s faith in terms of his AdhAra (receptivity) and adhikAra (aptitude). It has never prescribed a uniform system of belief or behavior for everyone because, according to it, different persons are in different stages of spiritual development and need different prescriptions for further progress. Everyone, says Hinduism, should be left alone to work out one’s own salvation through one’s own inner seeking and evolution. Any imposition of belief or behaviour from the outside is, therefore, a mechanical exercise which can only do injury to one’s spiritual growth. Preaching to those who have not invited it is nothing short of aggression born out of self-righteousness. That is why Gandhiji took a firm and uncompromising stand against proselytisation by preaching and gave no quarters to the Christian mission’s mercenary methods of spreading the gospel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Thomas Gray photo

“Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth.
And Melancholy marked him for her own.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

The Epitaph, St. 1
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Charles Lyell photo
Czeslaw Milosz photo

“Earth, what have I to do with thee?
With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births?
So why this gracious melancholia?
Is it because anger is no use?”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"A Portal" (1976), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Lester B. Pearson photo
Georges Bernanos photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Margaret Sanger photo
Anne Brontë photo

“Kautilya has elaborated in his Arthashastra the psychological principles which alienate some people from their own society, and lead them straight into the lap of those who are out to subvert that society. The first group of people who can be alienated are the maneevarga, that is, those who are conceited and complain that they have been denied what is their due on account of birth, brains or qualities of character. (…) the Church was instinctively employing the psychological principles propounded by Kautilya. …Christian missionaries could find quite a few and easy converts amongst these upper classes precisely because the Church had declared war on their society. … By the time the French, the British and the Dutch appeared on the Eastern scene, Christianity had been found out in the West for what it had always been in facto power-hungary politics masquerading as religion. The later-day European imperialists, therefore, had only a marginal use for the christian missionary. He could be used to beguile the natives. But he could not be allowed to dictate the parallel politics of imperialism. … The field for the Christian politics of conversion has become considerably smaller in Asia due to the resurgence of Islam, and the triumph of Communism… It is only in India, Ceylon and Japan that the missionary continues to practice his profession effectively.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Genesis and History of the Politics of Conversion, in Christianity, and Imperialist ideology. 1983.

E.E. Cummings photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
André Maurois photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Francis Galton photo
Adélard Godbout photo

“Posterity, until now, has been truly inequitable regarding Godbout. It is true, he was responsible […] of renunciations, if you will, renunciations that this absolutely infernal pressure of wartime made probably inevitable. But it is quite unjust that people forgot that these few years of the Godbout government were also punctuated by three crucial decisions that almost constitute the act of birth of contemporary Quebec. In a few brief years, in only one government mandate, the creation of Hydro-Quebec, the establishment of obligatory instruction and […] the women's vote.”

Adélard Godbout (1892–1956) Canadian politician

By René Lévesque, June 14, 1984.
Reference: René Lévesque, Mot à Mot, Les Éditions internationales Alain Stanké, 1997.
Original: La postérité, jusqu'à nouvel ordre, a été vraiment inéquitable à l'égard de Godbout. C'est vrai, il a été responsable [...] de démissions, si on veut, démissions que cette pression absoluement infernale du temps de guerre probablement rendait inévitables. Mais c'est assez injuste qu'on ait oublié que ces quelques années du gouvernement Godbout ont été ponctuées également par trois décisions cruciales qui constituent quasiment l'acte de naissance du Québec contemporain. En quelques brèves années, dans un seul mandat de gouvernement, la création de l'Hydro-Québec, l'instauration de l'instruction obligatoire et [...] le vote des femmes.

Erich Fromm photo

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968)

“A society that put more emphasis on birth than ability was likely to breed ability out of its ruling class.”

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 19 (p. 190)

“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

The Portable Door (2003)

Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders…”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

National Character of Americans—first impressions (1831) Oeuvres complètes, vol. VIII, p. 233 https://books.google.de/books?id=x9pnAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA233&q=ciel.
Original text:
Né sous un autre ciel, placé au milieu d'un tableau toujours mouvant, poussé lui-même par le torrent irrésistible qui entraîne tout ce qui l'environne, l'Américain n'a le temps de s'attacher à rien; il ne s'accoutume qu'au changement, et finit par le regarder comme l'état naturel à l'homme; il en sent le besoin; bien plus, il l'aime : car l'instabilité, au lieu de se produire à lui par des désastres, semble n'enfanter autour de lui que des prodiges...
1830s

Sonny Bill Williams photo

“[Her birth] was the best moment of my life, by far, and it didn't do it justice watching it on Skype…When I saw my child for the first time it just switched the switch, you know. That's when you realise you love something more than you love yourself.”

Sonny Bill Williams (1985) New Zealand rugby player and heavyweight boxer

Williams on birth of his first child. Noble name for SBW's baby http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11369071, by Rachel Glucina, NZ Herald, dated 5 December 2014.

Frederick Douglass photo

“We all know what the negro has been as a slave. In this relation we have his experience of two hundred and fifty years before us, and can easily know the character and qualities he has developed and exhibited during this long and severe ordeal. In his new relation to his environments, we see him only in the twilight of twenty years of semi-freedom; for he has scarcely been free long enough to outgrow the marks of the lash on his back and the fetters on his limbs. He stands before us, today, physically, a maimed and mutilated man. His mother was lashed to agony before the birth of her babe, and the bitter anguish of the mother is seen in the countenance of her offspring. Slavery has twisted his limbs, shattered his feet, deformed his body and distorted his features. He remains black, but no longer comely. Sleeping on the dirt floor of the slave cabin in infancy, cold on one side and warm on the other, a forced circulation of blood on the one side and chilled and retarded circulation on the other, it has come to pass that he has not the vertical bearing of a perfect man. His lack of symmetry, caused by no fault of his own, creates a resistance to his progress which cannot well be overestimated, and should be taken into account, when measuring his speed in the new race of life upon which he has now entered.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Michael Swanwick photo

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

Septimius Severus photo

“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

Francis Bacon photo
Barney Frank photo

“… [they] believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth…”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Speaking of anti-abortion legislators
[Charles P., Pierce, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/10/02/to_be_frank/?page=4, To Be Frank, The Boston Globe, p. 4, October 2, 2005, 2008-03-05]

Indro Montanelli photo
Francesco Petrarca photo

“And so on earth
our destiny is with us from our birth.”

Cosí nel mondo
sua ventura à ciascun dal dí che nasce.
Canzone 303, st. 4 (tr. Mark Musa)
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola photo

“Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother’s womb” all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.”
O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis foelicitatem! Cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt (ut ait Lucilius) e bulga matris quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia planta fiet, si sensualia obrutescet, si rationalia caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.

6. 24-31; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Alternate translation of 6. 28-29 (Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo.):
The Father infused in man, at birth, every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life. These seeds will grow and bear their fruit in each man who will cultivate them.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Joseph Merrick photo
Edward O. Wilson photo
Max Heindel photo
Donald J. Trump photo
John Gray photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Luis A. Ferré photo

“Not only are Puerto Ricans citizens by birth, but one would be hard-pressed to find a Puerto Rican without a sister in New York or a son in Chicago, a cousin in Orlando or a daughter in Honolulu or Oklahoma City.”

Luis A. Ferré (1904–2003) American politician

On the subject of the Puerto Rican diaspora to a United States Senate committee in 1998, as quoted by the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/us/luis-a-ferre-dies-at-99-pushed-puerto-rican-statehood.html.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Peter D. Schiff photo

“The Founding Fathers, those who wrote the Constitution and founded the American Republic, they understood the benefits of sound money and the evils of paper money. They’ve put America on a gold standard from the very birth of the republic and we should heed their wise - they were very learned men. I think they were much more educated and understanding about economics then the people who lead the U. S. today. So, to try to suggest that we will have less robust economy if we went back to gold standard - mostly, that’s propaganda from Central Bankers and politicians, who want to scare us from going back to something that works, because when you go back to free market, the politicians and bankers will lose their power, and they want to maintain their power by scaring people into thinking that if we just go back to freedom and market forces, that’s somehow is going to be bad and we have to surrender our freedoms to politicians and bankers because they know much better than the market. They can define the proper rate of interest and they can manage the money supplier, centrally planning the economy, and it’s going to be more effective than free market capitalism - and that is just not the case.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/peter-schiff-for-us-senate/http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/190800-economy-dollar-financial-armageddon/
Economic Views

Robert Charles Wilson photo
Colin Wilson photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Jane Roberts photo
Pliny the Elder photo
Machado de Assis photo

“For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.”

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) Brazilian writer

Algum tempo hesitei se devia abrir estas memórias pelo princípio ou pelo fim, isto é, se poria em primeiro lugar o meu nascimento ou a minha morte. Suposto o uso vulgar seja começar pelo nascimento, duas considerações me levaram a adotar diferente método: a primeira é que eu não sou propriamente um autor defunto mas um defunto autor, para quem a campa foi outro berço; a segunda é que o escrito ficaria assim mais galante e mais novo. Moisés, que também contou a sua morte, não a pôs no intróito, mas no cabo: diferença radical entre este livro e o Pentateuco.
Source: As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Ch. 1 (opening words), p. 7.

Carl Sagan photo
Sadao Araki photo
Joseph Addison photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

Jacques Lacan photo

“The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Interview in 1957

Ann Coulter photo
William Cobbett photo

“It would be tedious to dwell upon every striking mark of national decline: some, however, will press themselves forward to particular notice; and amongst them are: that Italian-like effeminacy, which has, at last, descended to the yeomanry of the country, who are now found turning up their silly eyes in ecstacy at a music-meeting, while they should be cheering the hounds, or measuring their strength at the ring; the discouragement of all the athletic sports and modes of strife amongst the common people, and the consequent and fearful increase of those cuttings and stabbings, those assassin-like ways of taking vengeance, formerly heard of in England only as the vices of the most base and cowardly foreigners, but now become so frequent amongst ourselves as to render necessary a law to punish such practices with death; the prevalence and encouragement of a hypocritical religion, a canting morality, and an affected humanity; the daily increasing poverty of the national church, and the daily increasing disposition still to fleece the more than half-shorne clergy, who are compelled to be, in various ways, the mere dependants of the upstarts of trade; the almost entire extinction of the ancient country gentry, whose estates are swallowed up by loan-jobbers, contractors, and nabobs, who, for the far greater part not Englishmen themselves, exercise in England that sort of insolent sway, which, by the means of taxes raised from English labour, they have been enabled to exercise over the slaves of India or elsewhere; the bestowing of honours upon the mere possessors of wealth, without any regard to birth, character, or talents, or to the manner in which that wealth has been acquired; the familiar intercourse of but too many of the ancient nobility with persons of low birth and servile occupations, with exchange and insurance-brokers, loan and lottery contractors, agents and usurers, in short, with all the Jew-like race of money-changers.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (27 October 1804).

Emma Orczy photo

“When the colonialists heard about the birth of Golola Moses, they immediately granted Uganda independence.”

Moses Golola (1980) Kick Boxer, Eating Champion

Joke by Golola in his Letter http://www.observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=27455:golola-moses-of-uganda-replies-pablo&catid=47:pablo-humour to Pablo, a Ugandan Stand-up Comedian who also marketed the Stand-up Comedy Industry with his jokes

Bill Maher photo
Harry Harrison photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“There is a certain dignity of manner independent of fortune, a certain distinctive air which seems to mark us out for great things. It is a value we set upon ourselves without realizing it, and by means of this quality we claim other men’s deference as our due. This does more to set us above them than birth, honors, and merit itself.”

Il y a une élévation qui ne dépend point de la fortune: c’est un certain air qui nous distingue et qui semble nous destiner aux grandes choses; c’est un prix que nous nous donnons imperceptiblement à nous-mêmes; c’est par cette qualité que nous usurpons les déférences des autres hommes, et c’est elle d’ordinaire qui nous met plus au-dessus d’eux que la naissance, les dignités, et le mérite même.
Maxim 399.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Warren Farrell photo

“Raising children was not designed for single parents. (Which is why divorce was such a taboo prior to birth control.)”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 187.

John le Carré photo
Donald J. Trump photo