Quotes about books
page 31

“The Passions and the Interests does not have the policy urgency that a contribution to public decisions may enjoy (as Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development eminently does), nor the compulsive immediacy that the exigencies of practical reason generate (as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty superbly portrayed). What then is so special about this book? […] The answer lies not only in the recognition that Hirschman makes us see the ideological foundations of capitalism in a fresh way, but also in the remarkable fact that this freshness is derived from ideas that are more than two-hundred-years old. The basic hypothesis— the articulation and development of which Hirschman investigates—makes the case for capitalism rest on the belief that "it would activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones."”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

1990s, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests (1996)

Way, Idea, Decision, Passion

“If Nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven's wonders and delights —
Yet, when each of us in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there far unlike his books.”

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) English politician

Chorus of Priests.
Mustapha (1609)

God, Way, Nature, Heart

“There is a flower, a purple flower
Sown by the wind, nursed by the shower,
O'er which Love has breathed a power and spell
The truth of whispering hope to tell.
(According to the Lady’s Book of Flowers, 1842, this is the centaury)”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Love, Truth, Hope, Flowers

“Then I was almost thirty years old when I wrote Macho!, and finally got published after 265 rejections. Immediately, I returned to this book you’re reading, thinking I could now pull it off, but I was wrong.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Thinking, Reading

“It was in November 1919 that I made my first contact with The Tibetan… I heard what I thought was a clear note of music which sounded from the sky, through the hill and in me. Then I heard a voice which said, "There are some books which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?" Without a moment's notice I said, "Certainly not. I'm not a darned psychic and I don't want to be drawn into anything like that." I was startled to hear myself speaking out loud. The voice went on to say that wise people did not make snap judgments, that I had a peculiar gift for the higher telepathy and that what I was being asked to do embodied no aspect of the lower psychism. I replied that I didn't care, that I wasn't interested in any work of a psychic nature at all. The unseen person who was speaking so clearly and directly to me then said that he would give me time for consideration; that he would not take my answer then and that he would come back in three weeks' time exactly, to find out what I intended to do.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter IV - Part 2

People, Music, Nature, Time

“Werner, nobody will read this book if I don't write bad stuff about you. If I wrote that we get along well together, nobody would buy it. The scum only wants to hear about the dirt, all the time.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

As quoted by Werner Herzog, in My Best Fiend, (1999)

Time, Reading

“Formally this work is divided into four parts, but in a sense it consists of two short treatises. One is an exposition of a theory of cooperation and organization and constitutes the first half of the book. The second is a study of the functions and of the methods of operation of executives in formal organizations.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Preface
The Functions of the Executive (1938)

Sense, Study, Parting

“The "meaning" in the title of the book acknowledges the close and familiar connection between intentionality and meaning. The connection holds between the meaning of the sentence Smith utters when he utters "Bigmouth has struck again" and his belief that Bigmouth has struck again. The idea of this close relation is not intended to convey the obvious falsehood that the meanings of the sentences which an agent utters always express the contents of his beliefs. Utterances which are lies or metaphors, for instance, spoil the generality of that relation. Rather, the relation is conveyed by the fact that a sincere, non-self-deceived, utterance of (or assent to) a sentence by an agent is an utterance of something whose literal meaning gives the content of the belief that is expressed by that utterance. The fact that sentences are often not uttered this way does not spoil the connection between belief and meaning, though it obviously makes it necessary to produce an appropriately nuanced formulation of the connection for those utterances. The underlying effect of acknowledging the connection, of course, is to make the study of an agent's mind integral to the study of his meanings, and vice versa.”

Akeel Bilgrami (1950) Indian philosopher

Source: Belief and Meaning (1992), Ch. 1 : Belief, Meaning, and the External World

Way, Idea, Study, Sincerity

“I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

As quoted in Funny Ladies : The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) by Bill Adler, p. 51

Reading

“Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, 'The hell with that. I'm out there. I'm exposed with this book.”

William Julius Wilson (1935) American sociologist

Interview with Mother Jones.

Hell, Support, Appearance

“Montaigne speaks of an “Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, “bookful blockheads, ignorantly read.” There have always been literate ignoramuses, who have read too widely, and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all “sophomores.””

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 11

Age, Knowledge, Learning, Reading

“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 79

World

“Every play which is produced—and for that matter, every book that is published, every picture which is exhibited, every film which is turned—is subjected to the Board of Censors… Romantic love in even its purest phases is not thought to be a fitting subject for consideration of citizens of a communist state;... the sex play is unknown in modern Russia… There remains as the ubiquitous theme for plays: revolution, with all the patriotic and nationalistic connotations which have grown up around it; heroism, sacrifice for the nation and class; consciousness of solidarity with one’s fellow proletarians; common suffering; great adventures with new ideas; great prospects for future machine age which is to be a sort of Russian-communist Americanism.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "The New Russia" 1928, pp. 27-28

Love, Age, Sex, Idea

“math> (\left|x\right\rang \left|y\right\rang- \left|y\right\rang \left|x\right\rang) … was my first lesson in quantum mechanics, and in a very real sense my last, since the rest is mere technique, which can be learnt from books.”

John Clive Ward (1924–2000) British-Australian nuclear physicist

J. C. Ward, Memoirs of a Theoretical Physicist (Optics Journal, Rochester, 2004).

Sense

“[The final chapter of the book] sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior will then seem less gratuitous than it may have seemed up to this poin. t”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 95 as cited in: Michael R. W. Dawson (2008) Minds and Machines: Connectionism and Psychological Modeling. p. 88

Behavior, Animals

“The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the maxim, boni judicis est ampliare juris-dictionem. We shall see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers have lately taken. If they do, then, with the editor of our book, in his address to the public, I will say, that "against this every man should raise his voice," and more, should uplift his arm. Who wrote this admirable address? Sound, luminous, strong, not a word too much, nor one which can be changed but for the worse. That pen should go on, lay bare these wounds of our constitution, expose the decisions seriatim, and arouse, as it is able, the attention of the nation to these bold speculators on its patience. Having found, from experience, that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scare-crow, they consider themselves secure for life; they sculk from responsibility to public opinion, the only remaining hold on them, under a practice first introduced into England by Lord Mansfield. An opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps by a majority of one, delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his own reasoning”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter http://books.google.com/books?vid=0Fz_zz_wSWAiVg9LI1&id=vvVVhCadyK4C&pg=PA192&vq=%22impeachment+is+an+impracticable+thing%22&dq=%22jeffersons+works%22 to Thomas Ritchie (25 December 1820) 1820s

Life, Law, Decision, Strong

“All anyone’s got is theories, usually distorted by what they’ve been through or what they want. This book, for example, was written by someone from a suburban, broken home, raised in Thatcher’s Britain, where inclusive ideas and family values were dismantled. A culture in which fame and celebrity became deified and drug use among the young extremely prevalent. Where modern manifestations of tribal identity like trade unions or guilds became redundant, manufacturing industries disappeared, neoliberalism emerged, and the welfare state was all but abolished. You could probably predict the contents of this book by looking at my weekly shopping receipt from Tesco’s. Alright, Waitrose. I’m dying to paint myself as a lowborn, Wat Tyler, Essex messiah; fortunately, I’m not quite that mad. I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Family, Home, Idea, Parting

“[The Koran is] not a religious book, but a manual for conquering other people's countries.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin: 'I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm anti-Islam', BBC (19 April 2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8629615.stm

People, Country

“This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the third book, "The Book of the Idiot"
The Pillow Book

Madness

“The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. … I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

“The Arithmetica… is deficient, sometimes pardonably, sometimes without excuse, in generalization. The book of Porismata, to which Diophantus sometimes refers, seems on the other hand to have been entirely devoted to the discussion of general properties of numbers. It is three times expressly quoted in the Arithmetica… Of all these propositions he says… 'we find it in the Porisms'; but he cites also a great many similar propositions without expressly referring to the Porisms. These latter citations fall into two classes, the first of which contains mere identities, such as the algebraical equivalents of the theorems in Euclid II…. The other class contains general propositions concerning the resolution of numbers into the sum of two, three or four squares…. It will be seen that all these propositions are of the general form which ought to have been but is not adopted in the Arithmetica. We are therefore led to the conclusion that the Porismata, like the pamphlet on Polygonal Numbers, was a synthetic and not an analytic treatise. It is open, however, to anyone to maintain the contrary, since no proof of any porism is now extant.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Quotes, Time

“There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Vol. I, bk. 2, ch. 8.
Recollections (1917)

“Tantarrara! the joyous Book of Spring
Lies open, writ in blossoms.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Daffodil; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Spring

“It's mad isn’t it. I guess I just wanted to make something that people would cherish and hope to hold on to for a while. The goal is to make each book a unique work of art, with an intrinsic quality all their own.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Regarding choosing to bookbind each of his books by hand rather than choosing to have them mass produced; as quoted in "The Caffiene Induced World of Brian A Kenny" https://thecaffieneinducedworldofbrianakenny.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/the-raven-speaks-insight-with-lorin-morgan-richards/ The Raven Speaks: Insight with Lorin Morgan-Richards by Brian A. Kenny (6 December 2012).

People, Hope, Art, Madness

““Kristin, nothing ever does change.” I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. “You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll always have people like Kawahara and the Bancrofts to push their buttons and cash in on the program. People like you to make sure the game runs smoothly and the rules don’t get broken too often. And when the Meths want to break the rules themselves, they’ll send people like Trepp and me to do it. That’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago, and from what I read in the history books, it’s never been any different. Better get used to it.””

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Epilogue (p. 524)
Altered Carbon (2002)

People, Truth, Jerk, History

“I can't help reflecting that it's taken a Government headed by a housewife with experience of running a family to balance the books for the first time in twenty years—with a little left over for a rainy day.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Women's Conference (25 May 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107248 Third term as Prime Minister

Family, Time, Help

“Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.”

Augustine Birrell (1850–1933) British politician

"Bookworms"
In the Name of the Bodleian, and Other Essays

Personality, Dead

“I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice… Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Preface to the Second Edition.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Universe, Time

“The great books … afford us the best examples of man's efforts to seek the truth, both about the nature of things and about human conduct, by methods other than those of experimental science; and because these examples are presented in the context of equally striking examples of man's efforts to learn by experiment … the great books provide us with the best materials for judging whether the experimental method is or is not the only acceptable method of inquiry into all things.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Truth, Nature, Effort, Learning

“The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile?
Of every new disaster
I prove myself the master
By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file!
A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor?
For every major crisis
One remedy suffices:
More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer!A crowded cafeteria?
A substitute's hysteria?
A visitor from Syria?
A missing Book Receipt?I merely send out circulars
To add to other circulars
To add to other circulars
Numerical and neat!”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part III, ch. 16 (Paul Barringer)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Smile, Kiss

“If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Other material for Lily Tomlin

Reading

“One of the first things they teach stockbrokers is to stay out of the stock market. Brokers make their pile from selling advice, and from commissions on stock transactions. They can't predict the market, and few risk their own money. They, at least, only affect their clients' fortunes. Economists, though, can ruin the lot of us with their advice — yet if no science can predict a relatively closed system like the stock market, how the devil are you going to 'fine tune' something a large as the American economy? I'd think it arrogant to try; as arrogant as the man with three illiterate drug-addicted spoiled brats writing a book on parenting.”

Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017) American science fiction writer and journalist

"The Voodoo Sciences" http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html, 1988 Assorted

Money, Thinking, Parent, Science

“I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and skylights to them. Minds with skylights…
One-story intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects, with skylights. All fact-collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class. Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,—facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture in the attics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

Men, People, Imagination, Star

“books—there is a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are all ill acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea that people have that if they are reading any book—that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

People, Idea, Reading

“The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Symbolic Reader, p. 214.
A History of Reading (1996)

“I could never imagine a movie being made from the way I had structured the book, it still feels miraculous that we made it this way without compromising the story, but everything has felt miraculous since I got that first phone call saying Martin Scorsese wants to make a movie out of 'Hugo.”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

I recognize how lucky I am. Brian Selznick: The author who inspired Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes to make family films http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesneaks/la-ca-mn-0903-sneaks-brian-selznick-wonderstruck-20170903-story.html (September 1, 2017)

Way, Feeling, Imagination

“I read it for the first time in about 20 years this year–-recently. It wasn't so bad. I get it. I get fan mail now from people who weren't really born yet when the book came out. I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. I know that sounds so ambiguous. It's sort of out of my hands and it has its reputation so what can you do about it? There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19. I was pretty surprised by the level of writing.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

On Less Than Zero http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=571852

People, Thinking, Time, Reading

“I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

ibid. : About Antrax by Terry Brooks:
2000s

“This book does not show of what architecture is composed, but treats of the origin of the building art, how it was fostered, and how it made progress, step by step, until it reached its present perfection.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 8

Art, Perfection

“Man has sufficient cause for tears without adding to them by books.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Man has sufficient cause for tears without adding to the Ultramarine of Life by Bookes. — [Unnamed] editor's introduction, Love Ballads of the Sixteenth Century (Shop Roycroft, 1897; reprinted 2006), p. 7.
Misattributed

Tear

“I find it necessary on the first page of this book, quite ready for publication, to give the following advice:
:Read each of my written expositions thrice:
:Firstly: at least as you have already become mechanized to read all your contemporary books and newspapers.
:Secondly: as if you were reading aloud to another person.
:And only thirdly: try and fathom the gist of my writings. Only then will you be able to count upon forming your own impartial judgment, proper to yourself alone, on my writings. And only then can my hope be actualized that according to your understanding you will obtain the specific benefit for yourself which I anticipate, and which I wish for you with all my being.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

"Friendly Advice [Written impromptu by the author on delivering this book, already prepared for publication, to the printer" (1949)
All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950)

Hope, Understanding, Reading, Personality

“I can read books and news articles about people who have excelled, people who have done extremely well in their chosen field, or made a lot of money, or married well, or what have you. When some people read this stuff, they get inspired, but when I read it, it makes me feel worse. Sometimes I wish I had never learned to read.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

September 18
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Money, People, Feeling, Learning

“Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 19
Do Books Matter?

Women, World, Literature

“Karl Marx wrote something like that in thick books that the Ch[h]ettris have not read because reading is not what the Ch[h]ettris do. Ch[h]ettris do statecraft.”

Manjushree Thapa (1968) Nepali writer

About Chhetri Bharadars in Nepali Times http://nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3344#.WZ2zbhnA7qA

Reading

“One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Source: "At Swim-Two-Birds" (1939), P. 9.

Time

“My first book “The Naked Manager”, a big success in 1971, had been followed by many others, and I wanted to write still more. Writing books is very interesting as each new project takes you in a different direction. You learn a lot – especially about what you yourself really think.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

Thinking, Learning, Success

“We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of “sense” of what is going on. This “sense” is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having “completed” them.”

Donald Barthelme book Snow White

Source: Snow White (1967), p. 106.

Feeling, Sense, Reading

“We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech (March 1861), as quoted in Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America https://books.google.com/books?id=KSd0SkDXtJQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (2002), by William C. Davis, New York: The Free Press, p. 137 1860s

God, Law, Nature

“I do not believe in infallible men, nor in an infallible church, nor in an infallible book”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Defence at his Heresy Trial

Men

“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925)

Men, Age, School, Religion

“I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs… on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

"Reply to Critics" in The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner

Alcohol, Music, Way, Thinking

“Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 65
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Music, Reading

“Euclid's work will live long after all the text books of the present day are superseded and forgotten. It is one of the noblest monuments of antiquity; no mathematician worthy of the name can afford not to know Euclid, the real Euclid as distinct from any revised or rewritten versions which will serve for schoolboys or engineers. And, to know Euclid, it is necessary to know his language, and, so far as it can be traced, the history of the "elements" which he collected in his immortal work.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908)

History

“If people need a book to tell them that in marriage kindness and forbearance are necessary, and that the sexual act is happier when it is undertaken to give pleasure as well as to receive it, these books are what they want. Possibly people so lacking in understanding of themselves and others do not mind being addressed in the coarse, grainy prose of the marriage counselor.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Marriage, People, Pleasure, Understanding

“When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature. We no longer cure disease by casting out devils.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)

Disease, Religion, Law, Soul

“Countless generations of students and general readers have been intrigued by this deeply human book, which half reveals and half conceals the fascinating yet enigmatic personality of its author.”

Robert Gordis (1908–1992) American rabbi and theologian

"Koheleth - the Man and his World" (1955), preface, p. vii

Personality

“I can tell you that I may be a lot of things but I am not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004, I laid it all out there. And you’re right, on a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I‘m embarrassed by it. I‘m very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn‘t jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth. So I know that it is something that some people have said, “Wait a minute. What happened here?””

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

But I have talked about this and written about it and then, unfortunately, in a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past. April 16, 2008, Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Debate, Philadelphia, when asked about her dishonesty concerning her recent comments about Bosnia. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iySWjciIrjB8hbu450lIABfnYcjwD903ANA80 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cm_Cj6LNWmw http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/us/politics/16text-debate.html?pagewanted=9&_r=1 Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

People, Truth, Waiting, Past

“Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Page 96.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

People, Lie, Law, Thinking

“…letters of a burning book
dance in flame not every time
and not every time literally.”

Anatoly Kudryavitsky (1954) a Russian/Irish novelist, poet, literary translator and magazine editor

Poems, Shadow of Time (2005)

Time, Dance

“This book undertakes the study of management by utilizing analysis of the basic managerial functions as a framework for organizing knowledge and techniques in the field. Managing is defined here as the creation and maintenance of an internal environment in an enterprise where individuals, working together in groups, can perform efficiently and effectively towards the attainment of group goals. Managing could, then, be called ""performance environment design."" Essentially, managing is the art of doing, and management is the body of organized knowledge which underlies the art.
Each of the managerial functions is analyzed and described in a systematic way. As this is done, both the distilled experience of practicing managers and the findings of scholars are presented., This is approached in such a way that the reader may grasp the relationships between each of the functions, obtain a clear view of the major principles underlying them, and be given the means of organizing existing knowledge in the field.
Part 1 is an introduction to the basis of management through a study of the nature and operation of management principles (Chapter 1), a description of the various schools and approaches of management theory (Chapter 2), the functions of the manager (Chapter 3), an analytical inquiry into the total environment in which a manager must work (Chapter 4), and an introduction to comparative management in which approaches are presented for separating external environmental forces and nonmanagerial enterprise functions from purely managerial knowledge (Chapter 5)…”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: Principles of management, 1968, p. 1 (1972 edition)

School, Art, Way, Nature

“Whether the 6-day creation story is a fable or the truth alluding to time dilation in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Bible and the Quran – sharing the same root as an Abrahamic religion – are undoubtedly amongst the most profound and influential books ever written.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Truth, Religion, Time

“I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 31.

History

“There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

Soul, Daughters

“By the same proportion that a penny saved is a penny gained, the preserver of books is a Mate for the Compiler of them.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

The History of the Worthies of England (1662) ; Worthies of Huntingtonshire – John Yong.

“The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years.”

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

Subtitle of the book.
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973)

Art, Idea

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

Robin Sloan (1979) American writer

Source: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), Chapter 31 “Epilogue” (p. 288; closing words)

Hope, Way, Light, Time

“With books and money plac'd for show
Like nest-eggs to make clients lay,
And for his false opinion pay.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 624
Source: Hudibras, Part III (1678)

Money, Falseness

“Get your children out of the public schools, if possible. The problem with the lies in the books is not fixable in the short term and there is a great chance your student will be negatively impacted if you leave them in a public school setting.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), p. 27

Children, School, Problem, Chance

“If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that. Instead of only one religion leading to one ultimate truth, we have many different religions with no common origin, all constantly sharding into ever more deeply-divided denominations, seeking conflicting truths, and each somehow claiming divine guidance despite their ongoing divergence in every direction.”

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

"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Wisdom, God, Truth, World

“We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U. S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo "will know … how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk at the Englert Theatre in Iowa, April 10, 2006 http://www.greenteaphd.com/greenteablog/?p=252 Quotes 2000s, 2006

Life, War, Way, Communication

“Consider the Koran… this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

E. Payne, trans., Vol. II, Ch. XVII: On Man's Need for Metaphysics
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Death, War, World, Religion

“However often we turn to it [the Qur'an] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence… Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible — ever and anon truly sublime — Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Dictionary of Islam (1895), by T.P. Hughes, p. 526

Age, Exercises, Time

“In the book of which I have spoken before, are the Ten Commandments. Maybe we should add three additional ones: "You, your children and your children's children shall never become perpetrators"; "You, your children and your children's children shall never never allow yourselves to become victims"; and "You, your children and your children's children shall never, but never, be passive onlookers to mass murder, genocide, or (let us hope it may never be repeated) to a Holocaust-like tragedy."”

Yehuda Bauer (1926) Israeli historian of the Holocaust

Address to the Bundestag (27 January 1998) https://web.archive.org/web/20050307015224/http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1990_1999/1998/1/Address%20to%20the%20Bundestag-%20by%20Professor%20Yehuda%20Baue

Children, Hope

“Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 40.

History, Universe

“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should. I’ve got Greenspan’s book…. I've never been involved in Wall Street, I've never been involved in the financial stuff, the financial workings of the country, so I'd like to have somebody intimately familiar with it.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Referring to a potential Vice President, 18 December 2007 http://www.newsweek.com/id/103730/page/3 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html?_r=3&hp&oref=slogin&oref=login&oref=slogin 2000s, 2007

Country

“Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

Truth, Art, Way, Chance

“My only books
Were woman's looks,
And folly's all they've taught me.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

The Time I've Lost in Wooing, st. 1. Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

“A lot of people misspelt the title of the book and called it Necropolis, but I’m fine with that, because the title is a play on that and it is a city of the dead. Narcopolis is a necropolis. Bombay disappears and a lot of the characters die with it. Throughout the book, opium disappears and heroin arrives and the last few chapters point at the future, to what Bombay will be. You can make an accurate educated guess as to what it will be in the future.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

People, Education, Future, Dead

“Others complain that I don’t make the fundamental idea plain enough. This is every writer’s dilemma. Your form is your meaning, and your meaning dictates the form. But what you try to convey is reality—the fact plus the feeling, a total complex experience of a real world. If you make your scheme too explicit, the framework shows and the book dies. If you hide it too thoroughly, the book has no meaning and therefore no form. It is a mess.”

Joyce Cary (1888–1957) Irish writer

The Paris Review Interview: "Joyce Cary, The Art of Fiction," No. 7. Fall-Winter 1954-1955.

World, Feeling, Idea, Reality

“Anwar Sheikh, for example, was a typical Muslim in 1947. He even killed three (Sikh) Hindus in the back-streets of Lahore during the post-partition riots and felt proud of performing a jihadic act. But once he saw through Muhammad, his creed, his book and his god (Allah), Sheikh not only discarded Islam with contempt but is now a committed scholar producing powerful literature and defiantly fighting the Islamic thought-police.”

Anwar Shaikh (1928–2006) British Pakistani writer

Abhas Chatterjee, in (1997). Time for stock taking, whither Sangh Parivar? Edited by Goel, S. R.
About

God, Literature, Fight

“To think that the internet allowing fans to feel that they are “not alone as readers” plays to the “clubhouse” mentality that is a large part of what’s wrong with comics today. When you have isolated fans, reading the books on their own and not knowing (or much caring) if anybody else is, then the prime reason for reading is enjoyment—it’s all about the books themselves. It’s not about “getting together” with fellow fans to dissect and deconstruct…”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

On the idea of comic fans utilizing the Internet to interact and share their hobby with each other

Feeling, Thinking, Reading, Parting

“He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."”

Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East

Journey to the East (1932)

War, People, Thinking, Suicide

“The book cannot be called, as some say, “a written evidence of the mind and character of Hitler and his henchmen,” for at the time of writing Hitler was seeking power, and once having gained this power it becomes the old story of the oppressed gaining power, becoming the oppressor, a fact that runs through history with a persistency of man’s claims to “natural rights.””

Virgil John Tangborn (1920–1944)

Mein Kampf review by Vigil Tangborn

History, Nature, Time

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men, Money, World, Family

“Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical "problem" hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Henry James: Birth of a Hermaphrodite", p. 131
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Problem

“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)

Love, Life, Death, Pleasure

“The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 280.

Way, Understanding, Reading

“One thing I will say is Joe Rogan’s commentary was a little off during the fight. The ground game was pretty even in my book with Shields doing a little more controlling. Kampmann escaped to his feet several times and Kampmann had more submission attempts than Shields had, but listening to Rogan, you would have thought Shield had submitted him the first ten seconds of being on the ground. I really think the UFC could use a third man doing the broadcast, that has some experience inside the octagon. I don’t disagree with everything Rogan says, but there are a lot of things he says that I just laugh at.”

Matt Hughes (1973) American mixed martial artist

- Giving his opinion about the UFC 121 broadcasting. Quick Quote: Matt Hughes is not impressed with Joe Rogan's commentary for the Shields-Kampmann fight, LowKick.BlitzCorner.com, 2012-09-04 http://lowkick.blitzcorner.com/UFC/Matt-Hughes-talks-about-UFC121-10539,

Game, Thinking, Time, Fight

“Whoever converses much among the old books, will be something hard to please among the new.”

William Temple (1881–1944) Archbishop of Canterbury

Miscellanea (1690), Part II, Essay "Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning".

“Find something you really love and make it your career. Don't let anyone discourage you or tell you it's not practical. I have loved the Middle East since I was a little girl. I read my first book about ancient Egypt when I was 10, and I've been hooked ever since... I have been blessed to have had great, strong women mentors, beginning with my mother. I have also met incredibly impressive women in the Arab world. They are demonstrating enormous courage as they work to expand women's rights and human freedom in their countries. I am inspired to work harder every time I spend time with them.”

Elizabeth Cheney (1966) American lawyer

Barbara Kantrowitz and Holly Peterson, "What I Learned: Whether they're running universities, political campaigns or major corporations, these 11 remarkable women have found their own ways of overcoming obstacles," Newsweek, October 15, 2007.

Love, Women, World, Girl

“The newly emerging dominant group is "knowledge workers." The very term was unknown forty years ago. (I coined it in a 1959 book, Landmarks of Tomorrow.) By the end of this century knowledge workers will make up a third or more of the work force in the United States--as large a proportion as manufacturing workers ever made up, except in wartime. The majority of them will be paid at least as well as, or better than, manufacturing workers ever were. And the new jobs offer much greater opportunities.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

About the rise of the knowledge worker
1990s and later, "The Age of Social Transformation." 1994

Knowledge

“Boys are scolded even for their violent fantasies- for the violent stories they want to hear, the violent books they want to read, the violent games they want to play. Male "demonism" is punished, pathologized, and stigmatized from cradle to campus. Even the good guys are treated like bad guys for ganging up, for being "xenophobic," patriotic, or too exclusive. Video games, fighting sports, and movies are decried for being "too violent." Football is deemed "too dangerous" by many overprotective parents. Everyone is supposed to agree that violence is never the answer- unless that violence comes from the cutting edge of the State's ax.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 105
The Way of Men (2012)

Guy, Game, Boy, Parent

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Education, School, Family

“Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

As quoted in Quoted Often, Followed Rarely, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/12/8363107/index.htm;About the 1975 The Mythical Man-Month.

People, Quotes, Reading