Quotes about birth
page 8

“So it would seem to be true:
when cruel birth debases, we forget.
When cruel death debases,
we believe it erases all the rest
that precedes.
But stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Life, Death, Way, Time

“In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother … a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“February: Good Oak”, p. 15-16.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"

Youth, History, Idea, Nature

“Revolution, in history, is like the doctor assisting at the birth of a new life, who will not use forceps unless necessary, but who will use them unhesitatingly every time labor requires them. It is a labor bringing the hope of a better life to the enslaved and exploited masses.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Method of Guerrilla Warfare (1963)

Life, Hope, History, Time

“The impurity of the mind is greed, and the impurity of the tongue is falsehood. The impurity of the eyes is to gaze upon the beauty of another man's wife, and his wealth. The impurity of the ears is to listen to the slander of others. O Nanak, the mortal's soul goes, bound and gagged to the city of Death. All impurity comes from doubt and attachment to duality. Birth and death are subject to the Command of the Lord's Will; through His Will we come and go.”

Nanak (1469–1539) Founder of Sikhism

Asa di Var

Death, Beauty, Soul, Wealth

“Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
Their life, a general mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storm of terror.”

John Webster (1578–1634) English dramatist

Act IV, scene ii.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)

Life, Death, Fools, Error

“The cold north wind which bows to earth
The lightness of the willow's birth
Bends not the mountain cedar trees;
Folding their branches from the breeze,
They stand as if they could defy
The utmost rage of storm and sky.”

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

Canto I
The Troubadour (1825)

Mountain, Tree, Light, Rage

“some evidence is available to indicate that, in India, an increase in the income of the poorer people leads to an increase in the size of the family; and also that this tapers off after a certain critical level of income is attained, and is followed by a reduction in the size of the family at higher levels of living When a sufﬁcient number of people reach the critical income, there would be a gradual decrease in the average birth rate with further increase in income.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

People, Family

“Verily, the star of Azrael hovers over the birth of a beautiful woman, the King of the Dead laughs aloud, and ravens whet their black beaks.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Road of Azrael" (1976)

Beauty, Star, Dead

“As you must weigh and choose between your love
and filial duty, which will turn the scale?
She put aside all vows of love and troth—
a child first pays the debts of birth and care.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 601–604

Love

“No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored with listening and applauding that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, since the gates were kept barred, or shammed dead and were carried away for burial.”
Cantante eo ne necessaria quidem causa excedere theatro licitum est. Itaque et enixae quaedam in spectaculis dicuntur et multi taedio audendi laudandique clausis oppidorum portis aut furtim desiluisse de muro aut morte simulata funere elati.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Of Nero's public performances in musical competitions.
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Nero, Ch. 23

Women, Men, Reading, Dead

“O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“Characters,” p. 310
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

“She called three gods to father his sons. Dharma, or Yudhisthira, was born of god Yama, also called [[Dharma, the god of death and regulation. A year later the second son Bhima was born of the wind god. He was a giant in stature and powers. The next year, the third son Arjuna was born of Indra, the king of gods. These three sons are called Kaunteya (sons of Kunti) in the Mahabharata. Kunti’s co-wife Madri begged Pandu to ask Kunti to give her a mantra too. Kunti did so. Madri called the twin gods Ashvini and gave birth to twins called Nakula and Sahadeva. They were called Madreya, sons of Madri. All the five children were collectively called Pandavas, the sons of Pandu.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Source: The End Of An Epoch, p. 12.

Death, God, Children

“Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it.”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

Part 7, Chapter 1 (p. 137)
Fiction, The Female Man (1975)

Love, Women, War, World

“His mortal frame has vanished, but his spirit increases with the increasing years the richest legacy of the greatest century. Men show by what they worship what they are. It is no accident that before the great example of American manhood, our people stand with respect and reverence. In Abraham Lincoln is revealed our ideal; the hope of our country fulfilled. He was the incarnation of what America was to be. Through him, the Almighty bestowed upon the nation a new birth of freedom that this dear land of ours might be returned to the health of its fathers.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

Men, People, Health, Hope

“Another sign was seen in heaven. Look! A great fiery-colored dragon, with seven heads and ten horns and on its heads seven diadems; and its tail drags a third of the stars of heaven, and it hurled them down to the earth. And the dragon kept standing before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she did give birth, it might devour her child.”

John the Evangelist (10–98) author of the Gospel of John; traditionally identified with John the Apostle of Jesus, John of Patmos (author o…

Revelation 12:3-4 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/revelation/12/, NWT Revelation

Color, Star

“Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

Envy, Baby, Wealth

“There is a flower, a snow-white flower,
Fragile as if a morning shower
Would end its being, and the earth
Forget to what it gave a birth;
And it looks innocent and pale,
Slight as the least force could avail
To pluck it from its bed, and yet
Its root in depth and strength is set.
The July sun, the autumn rain,
Beat on its slender stalk in vain;—
Around it spreads, despite of care,
Till the whole garden is its share;
And other plants must fade and fall
Beneath its deep and deadly thrall.
This is love's emblem; it is nurst
In all unconciousness at first,
Too slight, too fair, to wake distrust;
No sign how that an after hour
Will rue and weep its fatal power.”

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

Canto IV
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Flowers, Autumn, Sun

“The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth.”

François Furet (1927–1997) French historian

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 4

“I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Travel, Soul, Time

“I'm against abortion as a form of birth control, and I basically hold to the Reagan position.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

“The currently (2010) widely accepted/believed description of the birth and evolution of the universe and of its contents is "Lambda Cold Dark Matter Concordance Cosmological Model" (LCDM CCM) … My own research was very much confined to the early version of the LCDM CCM (mid-1990's) when I began performing numerical experiments on the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. I was quite happy with the CCM, as everyone else, and did not bother with the fundamental issues raised by some. With time, however, it became apparent that the LCDM CCM accounts poorly for the properties of the satellite galaxies and their distribution about the Milky Way. Warm dark matter models fared no better.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

Pavel Kroupa: Dark Matter, Cosmology and Progress website, July 4, 2010 http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_cosmology.html,

Happiness, Way, Universe, Time

“How can reason possibly grasp that immensity beyond all being where the precious food of the Eucharist is, in some marvellous way, made one with us, drawing us wholly to itself and changing us into itself? It is a union more intimate than any that the human mind can conceive, totally unlike any other change, a union more compatible than a tiny drop of water losing itself in the wine-vat and becoming one with the wine, or that of the rays of the sun made one with the sun's splendour; or the soul with the body, the two together making one person, one being. In this union the soul is lifted above the infirmity of its natural state, its own insufficiency, and there it is purified, transfigured and raised above its own powers, its human operations, its very self. Both being and activities are penetrated through and through by God, formed and transformed in a divine manner, the soul's new birth is accomplished in truth, and the spirit, losing all its native incompatibility, flows into divine union.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons, From Our Daily Bread

God, Truth, Food, Way

“There have been a number of instances in the Bible where the Spirit of God has acted in a birth. For instance, in the story of Abraham and Sarah, Sarah was too old and Abraham was also old. But the Bible says God quickened the womb of Sarah so that she could bear a son. In the same way, the Holy Spirit worked with Mary. It was not done in the sense of producing a child from the union of God with man, but in the sense of God participating in the event. Jesus was born of a father and a mother, just as anyone else is, but in his case the Spirit of God was working also.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Master Speaks (1967) Part 7: Bible Interpretation http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Books/sm-mast/MSTRSP-7.htm, (transcriptions of Q&A sessions in March-April 1965)

God, Way, Sense

“The essence of motherhood is not restricted to women who have given birth; it is a principle inherent in both women and men. It is an attitude of the mind. It is love — and that love is the very breath of life. No one would say, ‘I will breathe only when I am with my family and friends; I won’t breathe in front of my enemies.’ Similarly, for those in whom motherhood has awakened, love and compassion towards everyone is as much part of their being as breathing.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Awakening of Universal Motherhood (2002)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

Women, Religion, Freedom

“One way in which feminists try to remedy the disparity is to legally mandate paid leave for female employees who give birth, even if a company is struggling to stay afloat. Such laws provide powerful incentives for bosses-male or female-not to hire women to begin with. Of course, it's easy to support such legislation until you end up getting laid off because your boss was losing too much money by paying absent employees.”

Stephen Miller (1985) political advisor for policy

Opinion column entitled Sorry feminists http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2005/11/sorry-feminists (22 November 2005) 2000s

Women, Money, Law, Way

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

War, People, Democracy, Sense

“There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort … The need of work is in me.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

As quoted in Contemporary Portraits (1920) by Frank Harris, p. 263

Life, Men, Happiness, Health

“Trust yourselves, my brethren, to the immortal love and perfect work of the Divine Saviour, and by His dear might your days will advance by peaceful stages, whereof each gathers up and carries forward the blessings of all that went before, to a death which shall be a birth.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 590.

Love, Death, Peace, Perfection

“The only substantial difference between them, and the one that divided them politically almost since birth, was their system of labor.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 20

“Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 5, “Teeth” (p. 109)

Age, Sense, Universe

“If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.

On the other hand, if there be no such principle as justice, or natural law, then every human being came into the world utterly destitute of rights; and coming into the world destitute of rights, he must necessarily forever remain so. For if no one brings any rights with him into the world, clearly no one can ever have any rights of his own, or give any to another. And the consequence would be that mankind could never have any rights; and for them to talk of any such things as their rights, would be to talk of things that never had, never will have, and never can have any existence.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 12–13
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter II. The Science of Justice (Continued)

Life, World, Justice, Law

“Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy […] articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin and secular education were her favourite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others […] The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for.”

Mary McCarthy book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Source: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Ch. 1

Marriage, War, Education, Feeling

“Impressionism owes its birth to Constable; and its ultimate glory, the works of Claude Monet, is profoundly inspired by the genius of Turner.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. 4.

“The whole of time would not be long enough to tell you of my joy in being married to you. Joy is not measured just by lovely things: the birth of babies, the song of birds heard together, the fun of holidays — the lyrical-love of lying with you. Joy is to be found, too, in the relief after pain shared, in the good news following bad, in the knowledge of greater closeness after disaster.”

Valerie Hobson (1917–1998) actress

David Profumo, "Bringing the House Down", (John Murray, 2006), serialised in the Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2006.
In her 10th Wedding Anniversary letter to her husband John Profumo, written in 1965, two years after the scandal in which his adultery was revealed.

Love, Pain, Lying, Knowledge

“If you have a choice of selling shoes to ladies or giving birth to a flaming porcupine… look into that second, less painful career.”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

Platypus Man

Pain, Shoe

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.

Lie, Literature, Idea, Question

“The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light… It's just bizarre… a particle has it's own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light… there's no time. That's bizarre … that we can, right now, as you know, see — interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So … from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation.”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

MeaningofLife.tv interview, 2007

Travel, Light, Learning, Universe

“This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Context: And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Dreams, Solitude, Time

“Usual messages from the heads of the establishment. The Queen from Windsor, the Pope from Rome: Pilate and Caiaphas celebrating the birth of Christ.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Sunday 25 December 1966 (p. 38)
The Orton Diaries (1986)

Christ

“In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood,--the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 13 Discovery of Lake Huron
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

“The White Protestant's ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather than with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, control, and direct, these Protestants who are the center of power in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when it is only the Square logic of the past.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

Sex, Science, Past

“Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry…”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

Loneliness

“Enough! There are no true men in the state: no one to understand me.
Why should I cleave to the city of my birth?
Since none is worthy to work with in making good government,
I will go and join Peng Xian in the place where he abides.”

Qu Yuan (-343–-278 BC) ancient Chinese poet

Source: "Encountering Sorrow" (trans. David Hawkes), Lines 186–188

Men, Understanding

“I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.”

Joe Haldeman (1943) American science fiction writer

Source: For White Hill (1995), p. 257

“Because if you're not born in the United States, you cannot be president. And, there is a real question. And if this birth certificate exists, you know what I get a kick out of? The Governor of Hawaii says, "I remember when he was born 50 years ago." I doubt it. I think this guy should be investigated. I doubt it. He remembers when Obama was born? Give me a break! He's just trying to do something for his party. The fact is, if you're not born in the United States, you cannot be president. He is having a hard time — he spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue, millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue. And I'll tell you what, I brought it up just routinely and all of a sudden, a lot of facts are emerging, and I'm starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.”

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

About Barack Obama's birth certificate.

2010s, 2011

Guy, Question, Thinking, Time

“Dialogue in Hell:
Fourth Dialogue
There are tremendous populations riveted to labor by poverty, as they were in other times by slavery. What difference, I ask you, do your fictions make to their happiness? Your great political movement has after all only ended in the triumph of a minority privileged by chance as the ancient nobility was by birth. What difference does it make to the proletariat bent over in its labor, weighted down by the heaviness of its destiny, that some orators have the right to speak, that some journalists have the right to write? You have created rights which will be purely academic for the mass of the people, since it cannot make use of them. These rights, of which the law permits him the ideal enjoyment and necessity refuses him the actual exercise, are the people only a bitter irony of defeat.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Happiness, People, Law, Exercises

“By birth, she is a Yadava and her brother’s son is Krishna, one of the major shapers of epic action.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Five Holy Virgins, Five Sacred MythsOf Kunti and Satyawati Sexually Assertive Women of the Mahabharata

“As you know, very recently the secretary of state proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes — of being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust. The secretary of state, in attempting to justify his continued devotion to the man who sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world, referred to Christ's Sermon on the Mount as a justification and reason therefore, and the reaction of the American people to this would have made the heart of Abraham Lincoln happy. When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.
He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.”

Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) Wisconsin politician

Speech in Wheeling, West Virginia (9 February 1950), as quoted at Civics Online http://www.civics-online.org/library/formatted/texts/mccarthy.html

Happiness, People, World, Communication

“The neoliberal utopia of unrestrained capitalism is being created by a war against the poor and the commons. In fact, the "new enclosures" are a sign that the struggles that marked the birth of capitalism are still very much alive.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 69

War

“Just as, in the case of the sunlight, on one who has never from the day of his birth seen it, all efforts at translating it into words are quite thrown away; you cannot make the splendour of the ray shine through his ears; in like manner, to see the beauty of the true and intellectual light, each man has need of eyes of his own; and he who by a gift of Divine inspiration can see it retains his ecstasy unexpressed in the depths of his consciousness; while he who sees it not cannot be made to know even the greatness of his loss. How should he? This good escapes his perception, and it cannot be represented to him; it is unspeakable, and cannot be delineated. We have not learned the peculiar language expressive of this beauty. … What words could be invented to show the greatness of this loss to him who suffers it? Well does the great David seem to me to express the impossibility of doing this. He has been lifted by the power of the Spirit out of himself, and sees in a blessed state of ecstacy the boundless and incomprehensible Beauty; he sees it as fully as a mortal can see who has quitted his fleshly envelopments and entered, by the mere power of thought, upon the contemplation of the spiritual and intellectual world, and in his longing to speak a word worthy of the spectacle he bursts forth with that cry, which all re-echo, "Every man a liar!"”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

I take that to mean that any man who entrusts to language the task of presenting the ineffable Light is really and truly a liar; not because of any hatred on his part of the truth, but because of the feebleness of his instrument for expressing the thing thought of.
On Virginity, Chapter 10

Truth, World, Beauty, Effort

“Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the Thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory.”

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) Italian patriot, politician and philosopher

On the Duties of Man (1844-58)

Love, Idea, Sense, Country

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

Death, Fate, World

“"No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy.
This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.
Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be."
But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.
But I don't have to like it —and I don't.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

War, Way, Feeling, Question

“Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.”

Neil Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death

Ch1: Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 12
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

“Our Republican Party platform is opposed to all methods of birth control, both preventative contraception and the morning after pill. Remember that in Texas they oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage. That's why our state has the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies of the country. So they're creating a welfare dependent populace, but they also want to abolish all social welfare programs that these struggling kids will need. This will not only create unnecessarily stressful conditions for both parents and children, it will also ultimately eliminate the middle class. Our republicans want to do away with all government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development, and they include pre-school and kindergarten in that list, but they don't stop there. They also want to abolish the Department of Education, because why would a religious organization want people to be educated? The real reason is because our secular government (which this country still is) will not permit state-funded schools to promote one religion over any other, and that is exactly what Texas republicans want to do.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Republican Theocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjNg7nQvB0 (November 4, 2012)

Marriage, Children, People, Education

“Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 227

Faith, Religion, Sincerity, Training

“May God help us to prepare a dwelling place for this noble birth, so that we may all attain spiritual motherhood”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Quoted in "Johannes Tauler: Sermons" translated by Maria May God help us to prepare a dwelling place for this noble birth, so that we may all attain spiritual motherhood Shardy

God, Help

“Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Death, Beauty, Dreams, Way

“On the empiric plane the Gītā teaches theism; it is not, then, surprising to find—still on the empiric plane—an emphasis on ethics absent from the earlier Upaniṣads. Krishna is never weary of telling Arjuna to be virtuous; his own sympathies are decidedly on the side of righteousness; it is to reestablish right when wrong prevails that he takes birth as man.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 45. (24. Good and Evil)

“Of a woman are we conceived,
Of a woman are we born,
To a woman are we betrothed and married,
It is a woman who keeps the race going,
Another companion is sought when the life-partner dies,
Through a woman are established social ties.
Why should we consider woman cursed and condemned,
When from woman are born leaders and rulers.
From woman alone is born a woman,
Without woman there can be no human birth.
Without woman, O Nanak, only the True One exists.
Be it man or be it woman,
Only those who sing His glory
Are blessed and radiant with His Beauty,
In His Presence and with His grace
They appear with a radiant face.”

Nanak (1469–1539) Founder of Sikhism

Raag Aasaa Mehal 1, p. 473; in Aad Guru Granth Sahib (1983 edition by Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee); also in Guru Nanak and His Times (1971) by Anil Chandra Banerjee, p. 78

Life, Beauty, Appearance, Singing

“When I set off in yoga, I had no understanding of the greater glory of yoga. I too was seeking its physical benefits, and it was these that saved my life. When I say that yoga saved my life, I am not exaggerating. It was yoga that gave me a new birth with health from illness and firmness from infirmity.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xvii

Life, Health, Understanding

“I have come out in favor of birth control but sterilization is a crippling of a vital body function.”

Billy Graham (1918–2018) American Christian evangelist

Statement prior to 1963, as quoted in Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980, (2011), Rebecca M. Kluchin, p. 44 https://books.google.com/books?id=fbXeTqBPiP8C&pg=PA44&dq=%22i+have+come+out+in+favor+of+birth+control%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgn5DY277MAhUEJiYKHQ6CBUoQ6AEINTAA#v=onepage&q=%22i%20have%20come%20out%20in%20favor%20of%20birth%20control%22&f=false

“The fanatics have another name for fetuses. They call them the pre-born. Now we're getting creative. If you accept pre-born, I think you would have to say that, at the moment of birth, we go instantly from being pre-born to being pre-dead. Makes sense, doesn't it? Technically, we're all pre-dead.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Source: Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004), p. 162

Thinking, Sense, Dead

“Truth is Thy primal word; at thy behest
The generations pass - O aid our quest
For Thee, and set my host of songs on high,
And let my psalmody come very nigh.
My praises as a coronal account,
And let my prayers as Thine incense mount.
Deem precious unto Thee the poor man's song,
As those that to thine altar did belong.
Rise, O my blessing, to the lord of birth,
The breeding, quickening, righteous force of earth.
Do Thou receive it with acceptant nod,
My choicest incense offered to my God.
And let my meditation grateful be,
For all my being is athirst for Thee.

from Millgram, A. E., Anthology of Medieval Hebrew Literature, Abelard, 1961.”

Yehuda he-Hasid (1140–1217) German philosopher

Shir Hakovod, trans. from the Hebrew by Israel Zangwill

God, Truth, Literature

“A fellow with a great voice shouted, "Hearken now to the words of the President of the Confederate States of America, the honorable Woodrow Wilson." The president turned this way and that, surveying the great swarm of people all around him in the moment of silence the volley had brought. Then, swinging back to face the statue of George Washington- and, incidentally, Reginald Bartlett- he said, "The father of our country warned us against entangling alliances, a warning that served us well when we were yoked to the North, before its arrogance created in our Confederacy what had never existed before- a national consciousness. That was our salvation and our birth as a free and independent country." Silence broke then, with a thunderous outpouring of applause. Wilson raised a bony right hand. Slowly, silence, of a semblance of it, returned. The president went on, "But our birth of national consciousness made the United States jealous, and they tried to beat us down. We found loyal friends in England and France. Can we now stand aside when the German tyrant threatens to grind them under his iron heel?" "No!" Bartlett shouted himself hoarse, along with thousands of his countrymen. Stunned, deafened, he had trouble hearing what Wilson said next: "Jealous still, the United States in their turn also developed a national consciousness, a dark and bitter one, as any so opposed to ours must be." He spoke not like a politician inflaming a crowd but like a professor setting out arguments- he had taken one path before choosing the other. "The German spirit of arrogance and militarism has taken hold in the United States; they see only the gun as the proper arbiter between nations, and their president takes Wilhelm as his model. He struts and swaggers and acts the fool in all regards."”

Harry Turtledove book The Great War: American Front

Now he sounded like a politician; he despised Theodore Roosevelt, and took pleasure in Roosevelt's dislike for him.
Source: The Great War: American Front (1998), p. 32

People, Pleasure, Fools, Way

“God saw everything and it was very good; that's perfect; that's the way I want it. Satan's plan is to put it back to zero. He wants to reduce human population with reduced birth rates by abortion. […] Birth control, homosexuality, lower cholesterol (that lowers fertility), high cost of living, smaller families, eugenics, high infant mortality rate with vaccines, SIDS, child pornography, reduced population, high death rate among teens, suicide, drugs, alcohol, sexually transmitted diseases. Just kill everybody with chemtrails or wars or genetically modified foods that will lower disease resistance or with drugs. Islam teaches "if you don't join us, we have to kill you." 100 times in the Koran it says they are required to kill anyone who won't convert. It's required. People say, "It's a peaceful religion."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Well there may be some peaceful people in it, but their religion isn't peaceful. Satan wants to reduce the population.
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Death, God, War, People

“Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat in vain.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. I, Ch. 7
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Life, Death, Age, World

“As far as I can see, this is a system that has enriched multiple companies and that pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples, and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency as Brad Pitt had for Fight Club.”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

Last Week Tonight: Standardized Testing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k Last Week Tonight: Standardized Testing (3 May 2015) Last Week Tonight (2014&ndash;present)

Children, Teachers, Fight

“The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience. Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place. Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. […] The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 37

Death, Fear, Dreams, Imagination

“I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

Joan Chittister (1936) Roman Catholic nun, activist, writer and academic

interview with Bill Moyers, PBS, 2004, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives/chittister_now_flash.html quoted in Catholic nun exposes the hypocrisy of ‘pro-life’ Republicans in one simple quote http://deadstate.org/catholic-nun-exposes-the-hypocrisy-of-pro-life-republicans-in-one-simple-quote/, Deadstate, July 30, 2015.

Life, Money, Education, Thinking

“Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite, who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in The Times (11 October 1909), p. 6
Chancellor of the Exchequer

People

“I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

World, Forgetting

“And you, my fine poet, who thought that the earth
To another such minstrel could never give birth,
Already your works are all thrown on the shelf,
And their author condemn'd as an ignorant elf.—
Yes; look thro' the world, and this truth you will find
That, once out of sight, you are soon out of mind.”

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

Fable (Imitated from the French of La Motte.)
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Truth, World

“The question is not whether to take risks, but which ones to take. The peril of being reasonable is that you will miss all the fun. It’s not enough to cautiously edge your way toward the cliff. Learn to revel in taking risks for the sake of your soul. Every choice you make gives birth instantly to certain risks as surely as your shadow follows you.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

The Pathfinder (1998)

Way, Soul, Question, Learning

“In the very lowest class it is well to be bred up amid those scenes wherein our future is cast; nothing ever supplies the place of those early associations — nothing ever knits the heart to the place of its birth like the remembrances of childhood — nothing can give the entire knowledge of a people, but having been brought up among them.”

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

No.19. The Abbot — MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.
Literary Remains

People, Knowledge, Future, Heart

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 38 The Victory

Life, Death, Way, Feeling

“I, for one, remain unpersuaded that a crisis of major proportions has been identified, but at the same time I am open to the possibility that such a crisis has been glimpsed, though perhaps only subliminally, by Bell and his great predecessors: Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohm and Wigner. This is a roster which should give us all pause. To my understanding, however, this crisis has not yet been formulated with sufficient precision to facilitate the birth of a great offspring.”

Kurt Gottfried (1929) American physicist

Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)

Understanding, Time

“In life it is training rather than birth which counts.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book I, ch. 3.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Life, Training

“When birth control pills were available in Europe but not in the United States, American women created an uproar about how the unwillingness to make the pill available showed a contempt for the lives of women… When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released birth control pills with high dosages of hormones that were later found to be unnecessarily high, they were attacked for not caring about women enough to do the necessary tests.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 195.

Women, Food

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea, Reality, Time, Country

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.”

Jean Genet book The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Perfection

“Now is the time for celebration, for South Africans to join together to celebrate the birth of democracy. I raise a glass to you all for working so hard to achieve what can only be called a small miracle. Let our celebrations be in keeping with the mood set in the elections, peaceful, respectful and disciplined, showing we are a people ready to assume the responsibilities of government.
I promise that I will do my best to be worthy of the faith and confidence you have placed in me and my organisation, the African National Congress. Let us build the future together, and toast a better life for all South Africans.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Victory speech (1994)

Life, People, Peace, Faith

“Our lives consist of two numbers: date of birth and date of death.”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (October 1995), p. 3

Death

“O Twilight! Spirit that dost render birth
To dim enchantments; melting heaven with earth,
Leaving on craggy hills and running streams
A softness like the atmosphere of dreams.”

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1808–1877) English feminist, social reformer, and author

The Winter’s Walk (c. 1840).

Dreams

“A moral coward, you see, is simply someone who has read the fine print on the back of his Birth Certificate and seen the little clause which says "You can't win."”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976), Ch. 16.

Reading

“If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Article 25 "Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

Love, Idea, Chance, Personality

“Increase in the wealth per capita fosters democracy; but the latter, at least according to what we have been able to observe up to now, entails great destruction of wealth and even eventually dries up the sources of it. Hence it is its own grave-digger, it destroys what gave it birth.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 300.
Manual of Political Economy

Democracy, Wealth

“I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days,
A happy English child.”

Jane Taylor (1783–1824) British poet

"A Child's Hymn of Praise," from Hymns for Infant Minds (1810).

Happiness, Smile

“White America is an endangered species. By 2020, whites over 65 will out-number those 17 and under. Deaths will exceed births. The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

Death

“Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) writer and salonist

In "Samples from Almost Illegible Notebooks", ADAM International Review, No. 299 (1962)

Youth, Question

“Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble. (…) Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge –liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream. Enquiry also wakes you up. You need not wait for suffering; enquiry into happiness is better, for the mind is in harmony and peace.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Liberation
Source: "I am That." P.68.

Death, Happiness, Peace, Dreams

“Ramanuja is first and last a Master of Vedic personality that is the vital breadth of Indian Society from its every birth.”

R. Nagaswamy (1930) Indian academic

"Ramanuja Myth & Reality A Critical Study Of Ramanujas Life & Works

Personality

“So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Feeling, Fashion, Bird, Tree

“The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/catwoman-2004 of Catwoman (23 July 2004) Reviews, One-star reviews

“Donald Trump (clip): I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding.
Meredith Vieira (clip): You have people now, down there searching—
Trump (clip): Absolutely.
Vieira (clip): I mean, in Hawaii?
Trump (clip): Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they're finding.
Wolf Blitzer: All right, tell us what your people who were investigating in Hawaii, what they found.
Trump: Oh, we don't have to go into old news. That's old news.
Blitzer: Well, what did they find?
Trump: There's been plenty found. You can call many people. You can read many, many articles on the authenticity of the certificate. You can read many articles from just recently as to what the publisher printed in a brochure as to what Obama told him, as to where his place of birth is. And that's fine, Wolf.
Now, it's appropriate, I think, that we get to the subject of hand, which is — at hand, which is jobs, which is the economy, which is how our country is not doing well at all under this leadership, which is how are we going to do something about energy, which is really that things that I wanted to talk to you about, but you like to keep going back to the place of birth.”

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

The Situation Room CNN 2012-05-29, quoted in * 2012-05-29 Wolf Blitzer Spars With Donald Trump Over Obama's Birth Certificate Elizabeth Flock US News & World Report http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/05/29/wolf-blitzer-spars-with-donald-trump-over-obamas-birth-certificate Referring to a 1991 promotional booklet by literary agency Acton & Dystel with bios of 89 authors, that erroneously described Barack Obama as "born in Kenya". http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp 2010s, 2012

People, Search, Thinking, Study

“Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 57.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Children

“Upon completion of the centennial of your birth – and this time only – we have come to address some remarks at your graveside. We report to you, Rosh Betar, that Jerusalem, the city that has become bound together, the eternal capital of Israel and of the Land of Israel, shall not be subjected to any division and is our liberated and indivisible capital and so it shall remain from generation to generation.
The western part of the Land of Israel is entirely under our control and it shall not be partitioned anymore. No part of this land shall be given over to a foreign administration, to foreign sovereignty.
We believe that a day will come when the two parts of the Land of Israel shall establish, peacefully, in agreement and understanding a covenant of alliance, a free confederation, for the purpose of join cooperation”

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) Israeli politician and Prime Minister

Prime Minister Menachem Begin Speech At The Grave Of His Boss Ze’ev Jabotinsky http://www.jewocity.com/blog/prime-minister-menachem-begin-speech-at-the-grave-of-his-boss-zeev-jabotinsky-never-before-published/4566 For the New Year: Words at the Grave of Jabotinsky http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12196

Understanding, Time, Parting

“Don't be afraid. Human birth is full of suffering and one has to endure everything patiently, taking the Name of God. None, not even God in human form can escape the sufferings of the body and mind.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[Thus Spake the Holy Mother, 72-73]

God, Suffering

“[.. according to Gauguin ] the impression of nature must be wedded to the aesthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies and synthesizes. The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination.... begotten in a union of his mind with reality. Gauguin insisted on a logical construction of composition, on a harmonious apportionment of light and dark colors, the simplification of forms and proportions, so as to endow the outline's of forms with a powerful and eloquent expression.... He also insisted upon luminous and pure colors.”

Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) French painter

Paul Sérusier's quote in 1888, about Paul Gauguin; in Pierre Bonnard, John Rewald; MoMA - distribution, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1918, p. 13
Sérusier encountered in his summer vacation in Pont-Aven in Brittany [Summer 1888], briefly Paul Gauguin. He also made there a small landscape, painted under Gauguin's direction. Back in Paris, October 1888, Sérusier explained his Nabis friends (Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Vuillard) the artistic lessons Paul Gauguin taught him - as reported by John Rewald in his book Pierre Bonnard, p. 13-14

Color, Imagination, Nature, Reality

Quotes about birth page 8

Quotes about birth
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