Quotes about books
page 38

“Williams’s starting point is the immense pessimism of nineteenth-century men of letters…. One can explain this pessimism to some extent in terms of various social and political failures, especially in France…. But Dr Williams would rather look at the physically examinable, and he finds in the author’s disease the roots of what his book cover calls, with an admirable eye on the market, the horror of life….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Life, Men, Disease, Failure

“1993 California
Los Angeles Times November 28, 1993
“In what observers called an historic ruling, a Russian court has pronounced the infamous ‘’Protocols of Zion’’ an anti-semitic forgey…[It is] the first such verdict in the land where the fraud originated 90 years ago. ‘Up to now, every country has disengaged itself from this shameful book except Russia where it was concocted,’ Tancred Golenpolsky, the publisher of the Moscow Jewish newspaper that won the ruling, said Saturday. The court cast arose 10 months after Golenpolsky’s Jewish Gazette accused the radical nationalist Group Pamyat (Memory) of printing anti-Semitic sentiments…Fostering ethnic conflict is punishable under Russian law.”
Graphic novelist: I’m writing a graphic book that will reveal the true origin of the infamous “Protocols of Zion.” I hope it will alert those who are ignorant of its falsehood!!
Research desk: Haw! Good luck! You’re dealing with an old vampire that will not die in spite of all the absolute proof of fraudulence.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.113

Law, Hope, Angels, Fraud

“What other book besides the Bible could be heard in public assemblies from year to year, with an attention that never tires, and an interest that never cloys?”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 35.

“A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On the adaptation of her novel I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, quoted in MoviePilot https://moviepilot.com/posts/3514425 piece <br class="br">1990–2002

Mountain, Fish, Change, Summer

“Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. …I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Life, Truth, Sadness, Color

“When you understand the Good Book to be one that isn't necessarily filled with stories to be believed, but instead messages to be received — you free yourself from the burden of previous ignorance and agendas and you allow the activation of living truth within.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 152

Truth, Understanding

“Touching the secrets of the heart and the successions of time, doth make a just and sound difference between the manner of the exposition of the Scriptures and all other books. For it is an excellent observation which hath been made upon the answers of our Saviour Christ to many of the questions which were propounded to Him, how that they are impertinent to the state of the question demanded: the reason whereof is, because not being like man, which knows man’s thoughts by his words, but knowing man’s thoughts immediately, He never answered their words, but their thoughts. Much in the like manner it is with the Scriptures, which being written to the thoughts of men, and to the succession of all ages, with a foresight of all heresies, contradictions, differing estates of the Church, yea, and particularly of the elect, are not to be interpreted only according to the latitude of the proper sense of the place, and respectively towards that present occasion whereupon the words were uttered, or in precise congruity or contexture with the words before or after, or in contemplation of the principal scope of the place; but have in themselves, not only totally or collectively, but distributively in clauses and words, infinite springs and streams of doctrine to water the Church in every part. And therefore as the literal sense is, as it were, the main stream or river, so the moral sense chiefly, and sometimes the allegorical or typical, are they whereof the Church hath most use; not that I wish men to be bold in allegories, or indulgent or light in allusions: but that I do much condemn that interpretation of the Scripture which is only after the manner as men use to interpret a profane book.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

XXV. (17)
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Men, Secret, Age, Spring

“It seems that those, who have hitherto treated of this Subject, have been more conversant in the Practice of Designing, than in the Principles of Geometry… that might have enabled them to render the Principles of it more universal, and more convenient for Practice. In this Book I have endeavour'd to do this; and have done my utmost to render the Principles of the Art as general, and as universal as may be, and to devise such Constructions, as might be the most simple and useful in Practice.”

Brook Taylor (1685–1731) English mathematician

New Principles of Linear Perspective (1715, 1749)

Art, Universe

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The New York Times (2009)

Hell

“In one of my early books I suggested that the potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy. My later experience with psychedelics only confirmed this initial impression. These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviours to a depth that cannot be matched by any other method and tool available in modern mainstream psychiatry and psychology. In addition, it offers unique opportunities for healing of emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

Foreword to the MAPS edition of LSD: My Problem Child (October 2005) by Dr. Albert Hofmann

Study, Personality

“The unexpressed aim of every politician is to influence events that history books will record his name - and spell it right.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 8, Centennial summer, p. 174

History

“The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 20

“He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 3

Death, Hope, Reading, Dead

“Earth and Sky, Woods and Fields, Lakes and Rivers, the Mountain and the Sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.”

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834–1913) British banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath

The Use of Life (1894), ch. IV: Recreation

Teachers' Day, Mountain, Learning, Sea

“What I have been trying to do in this book is not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what it would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Twelve, "1971–The Beginning…", p. 383

Age, Thinking, Sense, Time

“Be careful to read books before you recommend them. Recently some church groups have been induced to recommend books which turned out to be filled with obscenity. This is an important part of the Socialist-Communist campaign to discredit religious culture. What technique could better serve their purpose than to have the churches themselves sponsor degenerate literature!”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Literature, Reading, Parting

“Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto’s depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

How—and How Not—to Love Mankind.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Love, Women, Men, People

“In this book Neil Fligstein takes issue with prevailing theories of the corporation and proposes a radically new view that has important implications for American competitiveness.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Abstract
The transformation of corporate control, 1993

“If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book … that's no fun at all.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in Guitar Player (November 1989).

Exercises

“You can't be a rascal for 40 years and then cop a plea the last minute. God keeps better books than that.”

Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) American writer

On his deathbed.
Quoted by Stuart B. McIver, Dreamers, Schemers and Scalawags, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Florida, 1994. ISBN 1-56164-034-4.
On Death and Dying

God

“The more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations; nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself. The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.”

Herman Melville book Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

Bk. XXV, ch. 3
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)

Truth, Universe, Success, Parting

“Copernicus stuck very closely to the facts, but in Kepler I invented freely, and it's a much better book because of that.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

“This suiting my humor so well; I did thenceforth prosecute it, (at School and in the University) not as a formal Study, but as a pleasing Diversion, at spare hours; as books of Arithmetick or others Mathematical fel occasionally in my way. For I had none to direct me, what books to read, or what to seek, or in what Method to proceed. For Mathematicks, (at that time, with us) were scarce looked upon as Academical Studies, but rather Mechanical; as the business of Traders, Merchants, Seamen, Carpenters, Surveyors of Lands, or the like; and perhaps some Almanack-makers in London.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

School, Way, Mathematics, Business

“Books are the tools of both teacher and pupil. A library is perhaps the most important adjunct of instruction. It is open to all and is used by all. In every department of science throughout the world the keenest intellects are at work, seeking for solutions to the unending series of problems that present themselves in the physical and natural world. 'Light, more light,' said the dying philosopher, and the longing of the world is but the echo of his last faint cry. To do our duty and to give reply to the many demands made upon us requires all the light and all the experience of other minds, wheresoever they may be found.”

Henry H. Goodell (1839–1905)

Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, (1900), p. 17.

World, Nature, Problem, Light

“I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

People, Beauty, Dreams, Thinking

“In Hitler's Germany, when to be a Communist or Socialist or militant trade unionist or liberal och democrat meant arrest, the concentration camp, and often death and torture, when there was institued one of the most thoroughgoing "purges" of litterature and burning of books that the world has ever known, when Schiller's "Don Carlos", the poems of Heine and the novels of Thomas Mann were banned or burned as "subversive", the writings of Trotsky were widely translated and distributed.”

James Klugmann (1912–1977) British writer

From Trotsky to Tito (1951)

Death, World

“I had a lot of growing pains adjusting to the comic book writing format. The whole writing process just didn’t make sense to me. I had to somehow construct each panel just by describing it? But how many panels to a page? How much dialogue should be in each panel? How much time should pass between each panel? All these sorts of things were mind-boggling to me. By the end of writing the script, I sort of figured out some of my mistakes.”

Patrick McHale (artist) (1983) writer, storyboard artist, animator, filmmaker

EXCLUSIVE: Patrick McHale Talks Bringing Over The Garden Wall to Cartoon Network and BOOM! Studious http://nerdist.com/exclusive-patrick-mchale-talks-bringing-over-the-garden-wall-to-cartoon-network-and-boom-studios/ (October 13, 2014)

Pain, Sense, Time

“This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies. What is a visionary company? Visionary companies are premier institutions -- the crown jewels -- in their industries, widely admired by their peers and having a long track record of making a significant impact on the world around them. The key point is that a visionary company is an organization -- an institution. All individual leaders, no matter how charismatic or visionary, eventually die; and all visionary products and services -- all "great ideas" -- eventually become obsolete. Indeed, entire markets can become obsolete and disappear. Yet visionary companies prosper over long periods of time, through multiple product life cycles and multiple generations of active leaders.”

James C. Collins book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Book abstract, as cited in: Joe Kelly, ‎Louise Kelly (1998), An Existential-systems Approach to Managing Organizations. p. 256
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 1994

Life, World, Idea, Time

“The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. “We are not satisfied,” he read, “with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people’s idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours.” The Quaestor put down the book, … and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Variations on a Philosopher” in Themes and Variations (1943), p. 2

Life, God, People, Idea

“We call the wise age that in which men had a wonderful knowledge of science which we recognize without fail by certain signs, although without knowing who they were, or in what place, or when. …It has become a matter of common usage to call the barbarous age that time which extends from about 900 or a thousand years up to about 150 years past, since men were for 700 or 800 years in the condition of imbeciles without the practice of letters or sciences—which condition had its origin in the burning of books through troubles, wars, and destructions; afterwards affairs could, with a great deal of labor, be restored, or almost restored, to their former state; but although the afore-mentioned preceding times could call themselves a wise age in respect to the barbarous age just mentioned, nevertheless we have not consented to this definition of such a wise age, since both taken together are nothing but a true barbarous age in comparison to that unknown time at which we state that it [i. e., the wise age] was, without any doubt, in existence.”

Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer

Géographie, in Les Oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges (1634) ed. Girard, p. 106-108, as quoted by Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968)

Men, War, Age, Knowledge

“The first thing you’ve got to do is study and understand what we’re up against. You must realize that this is not a religion that you’re fighting against. You’re fighting against a theo-political belief system and construct. You’re fighting against something that’s been doing this thing since 622 AD - 7th century - 1,388 years. You want to dig up Charles Martel and ask him why he was fighting the Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732? You want to ask the Venetian fleet at LePonto why they were fighting a Muslim fleet in 1571? You want to ask the Christian – I mean the Germanic and Austrian – knights why they were fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683? You want to ask people what happened at Constantinople and why today it’s called Istanbul? Because they lost that fight in 1453. You need to get into the Qur'an, you need to understand their precepts, you need to read the Sunnah, you need to read the Hadith and then you can really understand this is not a perversion: They are doing exactly what this book says. I want to close by saying this, and I think we’ve said this all through this morning so far: Until we get principled leadership in the United States that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail, because we will never clearly define who this enemy is and then understand their goals and objectives - which is on any jihadist website - and then come up with the right and proper goals and objectives to not only secure our republic, but to secure western civilization.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

Response to question: Why would [Islamist terrorists] warp a religion to justify attacking the United States. [Hudson Institute, Reclaim American Liberty Conference, January 13, 2010, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=hudson_upcoming_events&id=741, March 22, 2011]
2010s

People, Religion, Understanding, Thinking

“Some people in our country seem more concerned about respecting the dignity and privacy of criminals and terrorists than they are about having an airport full of people obliterated, or a completely booked hotel blown to bits. Perhaps they think, Let's not get so upset about attacks on our embassies or military bases. Maybe, they surmise, the terrorists have good reason for attacking us. We have no right to be harassing innocent people in our country. For some people, not even the grotesque images that filled our television screens after al Qaeda's blatant attacks on 9/11 seem enough to wake them out of their utopia feel-good world.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 259

People, World, Feeling, Thinking

“Had it merely called to our attention the existence and exact nature of certain fundamental gaps in economic theory, the Theory of Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern would have been a book of outstanding importance. But it does more than that. It is essentially constructive: where existing theory is considered to be inadequate, the authors put in its place a highly novel analytical apparatus designed to cope with the problem.
It would be doing the authors an injustice to say that theirs is a contribution to economics only. The scope of the book is much broader. The techniques applied by the authors in tackling economic problems are of sufficient generality to be valid in political science, sociology, or even military strategy. The applicability to games proper (chess and poker) is obvious from the title. Moreover, the book is of considerable interest from a purely mathematical point of view.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz. "The Theory of Economic Behavior," The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 5 (Dec., 1945), pp. 909: Lead paragraphs of the article

Behavior, Game, Mathematics, Nature

“Man is the animal who weeps and laughs — and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

The Pleasures of Literature (1938), p. 17

Animals

“If you read Peter Farb's book, Man's Rise of Civilization, he goes through all these different cultures at first contact, and they very often figure out in very different ways, but typically the things that were in common among them, were that the idea of the accumulation of private property beyond your needs was considered a mental illness.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Thom Hartmann, in the documentary film "I Am" written, directed, and narrated by Tom Shadyac
Disputed

Way, Idea, Reading

“As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud’s book, it evinces “the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.””

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 41

Reality

“As Moses sought to lead his people on, he discovered that there were those among them who would occasionally become emotionally and sentimentally attached to a particular spot so that they wanted to stay there and remain stationary at that point. One day when Moses confronted this problem, he wrote in the book of Deuteronomy, the first chapter and the fifth verse: “You have been in this mountain long enough, turn ye and go on your journey, move on to the mountof the Amorite.”~ This was a message of God through Moses. And whenever God speaks he says go forward, saying in substance that you must never become bogged down in mountains and situations that will impede your progress. You must never become complacently adjusted to unobtained goals; you have been in this mountain long enough, “turn ye and take your journey."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"Keep Moving from this Mountain" http://www5.spelman.edu/about_us/news/pdf/70622_messenger.pdf – Founders Day Address at the Sisters Chapel, Spelman College (11 April 1960) <br class="br">1960s

God, People, Mountain, Problem

“There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell... When the king decreed that the people of Iceland were to relinquish all of their brass and copper so that Copenhagen could be rebuilt following the war, men were sent to fetch the ancient bell at Þingvellir by Öxará.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

Men, War, People, Time

“Progressives have convinced people that they are fighting theft. If a greedy capitalist has looted your possessions, you would want the government to do something about it. An essential function of government is to bring thieves to justice and to restore stolen possessions to their rightful owners. If the progressive critique is valid, then it doesn't matter if government does it inefficiently, since there is no one else to do the job: inefficient justice is better than no justice. Moreover, when we ask the police to go after bad guys and repossess their stolen goods, we aren't concerned with whether we foster virtue among the "giver" and gratitude in the "receiver." That's because the giver isn't really giving; he's merely giving back, and the receiver has no cause for gratitude since he (or she) is merely being made whole. In this scenario, Americans who are sitting in the bandwagon have earned that right, and the people pulling are the thieves who deserve to be penalized and castigated. This is why I've devoted the bulk of this book to refuting the theft critique. If I've succeeded, then the whole progressive argument collapses and our federal government, far from being an instrument of justice, now becomes an instrument of plunder.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 14

People, Justice, Guy, Fight

“If the first Christians – as described in the first chapters of the Book of Acts – were to rule the country, the United States of America would embrace socialism or perhaps even communism.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Communication, Country

“The press is a ready example of their efforts, and of the skills they have acquired in this field. They have taken care to steer their members and sympathizers into journalism. And within journalism, they have paid attention to even marginal niches. Consider books. A book by one of them has but to reach a paper, and suggestions of names of persons who would be specially suitable for reviewing it follow. As I mentioned, the editor who demurs, and is inclined to send the book to a person of a different hue is made to feel guilty, to feel that he is deliberately ensuring a biased, negative review. That selecting a person from their list may be ensuring a biased acclamation is talked out. The pressures of prevailing opinion are such, and editors so eager to evade avoidable trouble, that they swiftly select one of the recommended names…
You have only to scan the books pages of newspapers and magazines over the past fifty years to see what a decisive effect even this simple stratagem has had. Their persons were in vital positions in the publishing houses: and so their kind of books were the ones that got published. They then reviewed, and prescribed each other’s books. On the basis of these publications and reviews they were able to get each other positions in universities and the like…. Even positions in institutions which most of us would not even suspect exist were put to intense use. How many among us would know of an agency of government which determines bulk purchases of books for government and other libraries. But they do! So that if you scan the kinds of books this organization has been ordering over the years, you will find them to be almost exclusively the shades of red and pink….
So, their books are selected for publication. They review each other’s books. Reputations are thereby built. Posts are thereby garnered. A new generation of students is weaned wearing the same pair of spectacles – and that means yet another generation of persons in the media, yet another generation of civil servants, of teachers in universities….”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Feeling, Decision, Effort, Teachers

“In the 14th Century an anonymous English mystic wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, the main theme of which is that God cannot be apprehended by man's intellect and that only love can pierce the "cloud of unknowing" which lies between Him and us. I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities. When people praise passages I have written, more often than not I can genuinely say, 'Did I write that?' I don't think this is due to my having a bad memory, because I have almost total recall of trivialities. I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays in lives which would otherwise remain earthbound.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

Australians in a Nuclear War (1983)

Love, Life, God, People

“Often have I sighed to measure
By myself a lonely pleasure,—
Sighed to think I read a book,
Only read, perhaps, by me.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To the Small Celandine.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pleasure, Thinking, Reading

“A book is a bottle thrown into the sea on which this label should be attached: Catch as catch can.”

Alfred De Vigny (1797–1863) French poet, playwright, and novelist

Un livre est une bouteille jetée en pleine mer sur laquelle il faut coller cette étiquette: attrape qui peut.
Page 93.
Journal d'un poète (1867)

Sea

“One writer, for instance, excels at a plan or a title page, another works away at the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

No. 1 (Oct. 6, 1759).
The Bee (1759)

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life, Men, Family, Law

“Yes you see boys and girls, you see we came from a dot and that dot came from nothing. Now they call that Science and put it in a Science book? I’d call that a fairy tale and put it in the garbage.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Girl, Boy, Science

“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”

Ryū Murakami book Almost Transparent Blue

Almost Transparent Blue (1976)

Thinking, Change

“I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Said to Sir Louis Mallet by Cobden on his death bed within two days before his death, quoted in Richard Gowing, Richard Cobden (London: Cassell, 1890), p. 130.
1860s

World, Communication

“We have worked together for the last 20 years, first in America and now at INSEAD in France, with time also spent in Asia along the way. From the get-go, we shared an intellectual curiosity to understand what it takes to stand apart and create strong profitable growth. In search of an answer to this question, we looked back more than 100 years and across more than 30 industries. Contrary to common thought, we did not find any permanently excellent companies, nor permanently excellent industries in our research. What we did find, however, were smart strategic moves. And the strategic move that we found matters centrally is to create blue oceans. Blue oceans allow companies to stand apart and create strong profitable growth. This led to our book, Blue Ocean Strategy. Even before Blue Ocean Strategy was released, it broke Harvard Business School Press's historical record for most foreign licenses ever obtained.”

Renée Mauborgne American economist

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne in: Alistair Craven " Guru Interview: W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne http://first.emeraldinsight.com/interviews/pdf/kim_mauborgne.pdf?PHPSESSID=1423baeb156c88436a5b11," Emerald Management First, p. 2. Accessed 08.2016.

School, Way, Search, Understanding

“It was very emotional, actually. In the front of the book I wrote something Anton Chekhov wrote to the woman he ended up spending the rest of his life with: "Hello, the last page of my life."”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

Which I thought was very appropriate. <br class="br">On reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series, as quoted in "Daniel Radcliffe" by Chris Norris in Details (October 2008) http://men.style.com/details/blogs/thegadabout/2008/09/daniel-radcliff.html

Life

“My plea is not for an impossible subjectivism. But the so-called infallible church or book has no power unless I feel that what it says is true. And who can decide that but myself?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.57)

Feeling

“I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Crime Times, Nov./Dec. 1988

People, World, Fear, Thinking

“I was in Miami, reading at the book fair. My partner on the platform had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous day. At the book signing afterwards, Pulitzer Man had waiting for him a queue of admiring readers that stretched up the spine of Florida, while I had three people — an academic who was writing something on my work, the usual maniac in a raincoat, and a kindly chap who leaned down and said to me in a confidential whisper, “I'm not going to buy your book, but you looked so lonely I felt I had to come and talk to you.””

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

People, Waiting, Reading

“Said on his deathbed, 1827, as cited from the book Last Words.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

“It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Thinking, Success

“Books give not wisdom where was none before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.”

John Harington (writer) (1560–1612) English courtier and author

Epigram in Muses Library (1737), p. 310.

Wisdom, Reading

“The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. […] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 237

War

“I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro… and, of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i. e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Learning, Reading, Childhood

“We find that actual, concrete knowledge, that is, the great work of toilsome discovery, has one deadly enemy, omniscience. The Jews are a case in point; if a man possesses a sacred book, which contains all wisdom, then all further investigation is as superfluous as it is sinful: the Christian Church took over the Jewish tradition. This fastening on to Judaism, which was so fatal for our history, is being accomplished before our very eyes; it can be demonstrated step by step. The old Church Fathers, taking their stand expressly upon the Jewish Torah, are unanimous in preaching contempt of art and of science.”

Houston Stewart Chamberlain book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)

Wisdom, Art, History, Knowledge

“Harriet lived in Connecticut and influenced antislavery in her book "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Harriet was a optimist who expressed her feelings by writing. Harriet was listed as one of the people who started the civil war. She started it from one of her books (It was the most influencial book in all of American History) However, Harriet was a very successful person and never stood down.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Little Foxes (1865)

War, People, Feeling, History

“Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i. e., one not created for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem nihilistic and dark. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Those are real purposes, not illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Douthat on the rampage against secularism, gets it all wrong http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/douthat-on-the-rampage-against-secularism-gets-it-all-wrong/" December 23, 2013

Life, Faith, Sense, Learning

“Who is Gloria Estefan today? I'm very fulfilled as a woman. I've been able to have a wonderful family life, a fantastic career. I have a lot of good friends around me. My family has been my grounding point, and rooted me deeply to the earth... I'm very happy. I've done everything I ever wanted to do. The key to me was -- I told my husband when we were in our 20s -- I'm going to work really hard, so one day I won't have to work so hard. And to me what that was, was having choices. And I do have choices now -- and I have take full advantage of that. It's important for me now to be here for my little girl [Emily, age 12]. My son is full grown -- and I know have quickly that goes. So, I'm balancing being a mother -- which to me is the most important role I have on this earth -- and still being creative, writing -- which is what I love to do. So, I've been able to branch out into not just writing songs like you have heard through the years -- but writing children's books, writing a screenplay. But at my core that's what I am: a writer. And that's what I enjoy doing behind the scenes: writing the songs for albums, recording it. And that's why you have seen me take more of a back seat to being the center of attention, and being out on tour and doing that kind of thing. I've stepped up a lot of my charity work. This year, the five concerts I did were all for charity: different ones and my own foundation. So, that's becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life -- as I wanted it to be. And [I keep] just growing and evolving.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

iTunes interview (released June 2, 2007)
2007

Love, Life, Children, Age

“That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” It’s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn’t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven’t seen, feel what we haven’t felt, understand what we haven’t understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Intellectual in America”, p. 15; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

People, World, Feeling, Understanding

“Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Heart of a Goof (1926)

Time, Daughters

“The concept of a Favorite Book is childish, if you’re a lifelong reader. Lots of books of political theory, philosophy and economics have indelibly influenced my thinking.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

2010s, 2016

Thinking

“A wise man changes his mind sometimes, but a fool never. To change your mind is the best evidence you have one. The last redoubt holding out for me was the year-day principle (on which I had written a defense in 1972 for the Southern Publishing Association Daniel volume which was published in 1978). This collapsed when I handled hundreds of books of commentary on Revelation in the Library of Congress stacks and found that the respective authors had in many cases suggested dates that seemed appropriate for their own time but ridiculous later. It became clear that we, as Adventists, had done the same as our predecessors.”

Desmond Ford (1929–2019) Australian theologian

Desmond Ford on His Previous Defense of the Year Day Principle http://www.atoday.com/content/desmond-ford-his-previous-defense-year-day-principle", Adventist Today, 2006

Fools, Change, Time

“In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 322

Problem, Thinking, Solitude

“I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the Book of Genesis. It is right up there on the desk.In Genesis 13:14–17, the Bible says, "The Lord said to Abraham, 'Lift up now your eyes, and look from the place where you are northward, and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever.... Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it to thee.'" That is God talking.The Bible says that Abraham removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar before the Lord. Hebron is in the West Bank. It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said, "I am giving you this land — the West Bank."”

James Inhofe (1934) American politician

This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true. <br class="br">" Peace in the Middle East http://inhofe.senate.gov/pressreleases/peace.htm", Senate Floor speech regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict ()

God, Support, Appearance

“I generally keep upto date with recent academic writings in law and literature; and to keep myself upto date I also subscribe to and browse through the New York Review of Books – a bi-weekly feature which gives all the current publications around the world – as well as the London Review of Books.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

Conversation with the living legend of law - Fali Sam Nariman

World, Law, Literature

“Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzlingly bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin. I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - Donald Duck.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Memories of Duckburg, http://www.helnwein.com/texte/helnweintexts/artikel_398.html, Zeit Magazin, Hamburg, 1989

Life, Money, People, World

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Love Minus Zero/No Limit

People, Reading, Drawing

“The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled or guided systems. It certainly includes such topics usually treated in books on servomechanisms. But a wider range of topics is only one difference between engineering cybernetics and servomechanisms engineering. A deeper - and thus more important - difference lies in the fact that engineering cybernetics is an engineering science, while servomechanisms engineering is an engineering practice.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii

Study, Science, Parting

“I used to walk by the river
An old book under my arm
The river is the same as pain
It elapses mindlessly
And when will the week be over”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

Je passais au bord de la Seine
Un livre ancien sous le bras
Le fleuve est pareil à ma peine
Il s'écoule et ne tarit pas
Quand donc finira la semaine
"Marie", line 21; translation from Donald Revell (trans.) Alcools (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995) p. 75.
Alcools (1912)

Pain

“The world is changing and we are awakening. These statistics give us a numerical glimpse at the visceral dissatisfaction that most of us feel. Now is the time to express it. These corrupt structures cannot be maintained without our compliance. You could vote against them, if there was anything to vote for, but there isn’t, or you could stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes, stop buying stuff you don’t need. When we, the majority, unite and demonstrate our new intention, we will be invincible. If we, who are complicit by our silence, become active and disobedient. This is a pivotal time in the history of our species. We are transitioning from an ideology that places power and responsibility in the hands of the few to one where we all collectively have power. It is important that we clarify, in a manner accessible to all, which institutions and systems are beneficial and which ones have to go. It is important that we propose ideas and systems that will be advantageous, like the handful in this book, and ensure that they are presented properly. When they are inevitably disparaged by the fearful enemies of change, we must remain unified and insistent. At this climactic time, we have no choice but change. This book, written by a twerp, with minimal interaction with brilliant thinkers and uncorrupted minds, demonstrates that. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World, Fear, Feeling, History

“It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 14 (p. 150)

Idea

“It's the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can't fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh. I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

God, Universe, Change, Future

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

H. G. Wells book Love and Mr Lewisham

Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23

Lie, World, Communication, Lying

“My late friend hated book-jackets, and ripped them all off immediately. I think he felt, somehow, that the book was still trying to sell him its contents after he had paid for it (or turn him in, if he had stolen it). Dejacketed, the book is anonymous and valueless. To translate something immediately into this state is an unequivocal act of proprietorship. You remove a book-jacket just as you make a lover naked: before their complete possession, they must be removed from the currency.”

Don Paterson (1963) Poet

Aphorisms in Poetry, vol. 187, n. 1, October 2005

Hate, Lovers, Thinking

“Have we not arrived at that terrible age, announced in the Sacred Books of India, "when the castes shall be mingled, when even the family shall no longer exist?"”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

La crise du monde moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World) (1927)

Age, Family

“Of what value is the study of management?
The study of management has been omitted from the student's training until comparatively recently, for a very different reason than was psychology. It was never doubted that a knowledge of management would be of great value to anyone and everyone, and many were the queer schemes for obtaining that knowledge after graduation. It was doubted that management could be studied otherwise than by observation and practice. Few teachers, if any, believed in the existence, or possibility, of a teaching science of management. Management was assumed by many to be an art, by even more it was thought to be a divinely bestowed gift or talent, rather than an acquired accomplishment. It was common belief that one could learn to manage only by going out on the work and watching other managers, or by trying to manage, and not by studying about management in a class room or in a text book; that watching a good manager might help one, but no one could hope really to succeed who had not " the knack born in him."”

Lillian Gilbreth (1878–1972) American psychologist and industrial engineer

Source: Psychology of management, 1914, p. 2-3

Hope, Art, Knowledge, Study

“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.”

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

As quoted in Novelists in Interview (1985) edited by John Haffenden

Forgetting

“Bramah's books fall into two very unequal categories. Some, fortunately the smaller part, record the adventures of the blind detective, Max Carrados. These are competent, mediocre books. The rest are parodic in nature: they pass themselves off as translations from the Chinese, and their boundless perfection achieved the unconditional praise of Hilaire Belloc in 1922. Their names: The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900), Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922), Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928), The Mirror of Kong Ho (1931), The Moon of Much Gladness”

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) English author

1936
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Total Library"
Criticism

Nature, Parting, Perfection

“I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

“I tried the door. It opened, darkness inside, and I switched on the light. She lay there in the Murphy bed. Her face was the face of an old rose pressed and dried in a book, yellowish, with only the eyes to prove there was life in it. The room stank. The blinds were down, the door opened with difficulty until I kicked away the rug against the crack.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Life, Light

“From early on, my father talked to me like an adult. One of the earliest things he did was teach me the Latin names of the parts of the body. He was very analytic. We had no money, but intellectual curiosity was encouraged, and my parents constantly talked with each other. This develops the brain. I remember listening and thinking, listening to voices talking, talking, talking. … My father died of cancer but lived long enough to see me famous, though not long enough to read my book fully. If he were alive I wouldn't be quite so outrageous, speaking about my sex life, for instance. I don't believe in embarrassing my family.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Life, Money, Family, Sex

“"The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 134

Life, Art

“The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 204

Communication

“Central to this book is the further assumption that man is a rational utility maximizer in all areas of life, not just in his “economic” affairs, that is, not only when engaged in buying and selling in explicit markets. This idea goes back to jeremy Bentahm in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but received little attention from economists until the work of Gary Becker in th 1950s and 1960s.
The concept of man as a rational maximizer implies that people respond to incentives.(…) From this proposition derive the three fundamental principles of economics.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

Source: Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), Ch. 1: The Nature of Economic Reasoning

Life, People, Idea

“I began to get up at two or three in the morning and work for twelve to fifteen hours a day. I’d get so emotionally drained by the writing, that I’d feel sick at the end of the day. My family became worried about me and they invited a friend, who was a writer in Los Angeles, to see me. He told me that he’d heard how serious I was about my writing, so he was willing to take a little time off of his busy schedule to glance at my work. I gave him the latest version of my manuscript. He took it home and came back to see me the following week. His face was long. He told me that he was sorry to say this but, as a family friend, he had the obligation to be truthful, so he’d tell me straight out that I had no talent. The book was terrible. And also, I was trying to write way beyond my mental capabilities.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Truth, Family, Angels, Way

“Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns…Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions…Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement… Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness… that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, review of The Price of Greatness.

Question, Thinking, Wealth

“If there's four Vietcong in a village with knives and punji sticks, we'll bring in a B-52. And I think, sometimes we need to learn to fight smarter instead of to fight richer. And this is what I mean, you know, education, "oh, education's expensive;" no it's not, books are cheap, (the) internet's cheap, we can fight smarter, we can learn. So, that's where resource-to-kill-ratio comes from.”

Max Brooks (1972) American author

Lecture of Opportunity | Max Brooks: World War Z https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nGG5E04cog

Education, Thinking, Learning, Fight

“"He" should be read as "he or she" throughout the book.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum book Modern Operating Systems

Modern Operating Systems, 3rd ed., p. 2.

Reading

“I was glad to get away from those students when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in London. I found myself in the British Museum, at first content, reading English Renaissance literature. But then came the crisis: the domed silence; the dusty pages of books all around me; the days accumulating in lists of obsequious footnotes; the wandering doubts about the value of scholarship. My year in Britain came to an end and I rushed to ‘come home.’ Then quickly discovered that I could not. Could not cast off the culture I had assumed. Living with my parents for the summer, I remained an academic—a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen, searching for evidence of our ‘cultural ties’ as we ate dinner together.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

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

Family, Home, Search, Literature

“Fechner laid down the general outlines of his program [psychophysics] in ZendAvesta, the book about heaven and the future life. Imagine sending a graduate student of psychology nowadays to the Divinity School for a course in immortality as preparation for advanced experimental work in psychophysics! How narrow we have become!”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 128: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;254)

Life, School, Imagination, Future

“Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 260

Science

“The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

Published in Education Leadership, September 2005 http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/uncondtchg.htm

Children, Behavior, Time

“Grove quotes me – and the quotes are things I actually said! That is stunningly rare. … What liberals normally do in response to a principled conservative argument is lie, manufacture quotes, and call conservatives names – as some dissolute drunk did in the New York Post a few days later. The left's logic deficit is a topic I explore thoroughly in my book. Buy it and prepare to have your blood run hot.
Oh, and for the record, Howard Kurtz is wrong about the reason I call him the Liberal Ombudsman for Liberal Media Bias in my book – it was not the "girly-boy" quote. Paradoxically, that is the ONLY time Kurtz has quoted me accurately.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Mentioning comments by journalist Howard Kurtz about his reporting of Coulter calling editors at National Review Online "girly-boys".
2002, Ann Coulter : Left Is 'out to Destroy the Country' (2002)

Lie, Quotes, Boy, Time

“It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to S.P. Kuvshinnikova (December 25, 1888)
Letters

Painting, Wealth

“Oh, it was a real shock when we saw the Creature. And you can see from the pictures in the book that I look a little awestruck, kind of taken aback when I saw it at first. I thought it was quite wonderful, extraordinary, and a little scary which of course is exactly what is was supposed to be.”

Julie Adams (1926–2019) American actress

WAMG Interview: Julie Adams – Star of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON https://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2012/03/wamg-interview-julie-adams-star-of-creature-from-the-black-lagoon/ (March 19, 2012)

Quotes about books page 38

Quotes about books
page 38