Quotes about exercise
page 13

“The Executive must have the largely unshared duty to determine and preserve the degree of internal security necessary to exercise that power successfully. It is an awesome responsibility requiring judgment and wisdom of a high order. A very first principle of that wisdom would be an insistence upon avoiding secrecy for its own sake. For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.”

Potter Stewart (1915–1985) American judge

Source: Security Classification Reform Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Goverment Operations of the House of Representatives. Ninetythird Congress. Second Session. 1974

Wisdom, Self-confidence

“In order to prevent the further spread of the (COVID-19) coronavirus (in Japan), commuting in shifts and teleworking need to be widely exercised across society. We will call on the corporate world to actively implement”

Hiroshi Kajiyama (1955) Japanese politician

the measures Hiroshi Kajiyama (2020) cited in " Flexible working hours key to fighting Covid-19: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/coronavirus-flexible-working-hours-key-to-fighting-covid-19-japanese-prime-minister-shinzo-abe/story-9U0YMv57n0OlyWrEe0q43K.html" on Hindustan Times, 25 February 2020.

World

“Cruelty is cruelty under whatever colouring it may appear; and whether exercised on a man or on a fly, cruelty is still cruelty. It matters not whether the victim be furnished with two legs or with four, with wings, with fins, or with arms; where there is sensation, there is subject for cruelty, and in proportion to the degree of sensation will its action operate.”

Lewis Gompertz (1783–1861) Early animal rights activist

Source: Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), Chapter 11, pp. 149–150

Appearance, Flying

“People who want to do so can lose weight most safely and permanently if they realize that above all they must be patient. ... It is better to eat a little less at each meal than impulse would suggest and to do that constantly. Add to this a little more exercise or activity than impulse suggests and keep that up constantly too. A few less calories taken in each day and a few more used up will decrease weight, slowly, to be sure, but without undue misery. And with better long-range results too.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

General sources

People

“Every day, COVID-19 seems to reach a new and tragic milestone. More than 210,000 cases have now been reported to WHO, and more than 9,000 people have lost their lives. Every loss of life is a tragedy. It’s also motivation to double down and do everything we can to stop transmission and save lives. We also need to celebrate our successes. Yesterday, Wuhan reported no new cases for the first time since the outbreak started. Wuhan provides hope for the rest of the world, that even the most severe situation can be turned around. Of course, we must exercise caution – the situation can reverse. But the experience of cities and countries that have pushed back this virus give hope and courage to the rest of the world.”

Tedros Adhanom (1965) Director-General of the World Health Organization, former Minister in Ethiopia

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 20 March 2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---20-march-2020, World Health Organization.

Life, People, World, Hope

“Exercise dissipates tension, and tension is the enemy of serenity. I found that I worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition, and so training became one of the inflexible disciplines of my life.”

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

Interview with Gavin Evans, Soweto (15 February 1990) recounted in COVID-19 lockdown: Can you do Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison cell workout? https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-lockdown-can-you-do-nelson-mandelas-prison-cell-workout?video_autoplay=true, 7 April 2020 1990s

Life, Training

“What vexations there are in the external customs which are thought to belong to religion, but which in reality are related to ecclesiastical form! The merits of piety have been set up in such away that the ritual is of no use at all except for the simple submission of the believers to ceremonies and observances, expiations and mortifications (the more the better). But such compulsory services, which are mechanically easy (because no vicious inclination is thus sacrificed), must be found morally very difficult and burdensome to the rational man. When, therefore, the great moral teacher said, 'My commandments are not difficult,' he did not mean that they require only limited exercise of strength in order to be fulfilled. As a matter of fact, as commandments which require pure dispositions of the heart, they are the hardest that can be given. Yet, for a rational man, they are nevertheless infinitely easier to keep than the commandments involving activity which accomplishes nothing... [since] the mechanically easy feels like lifting hundredweights to the rational man when he sees that all the energy spent is wasted.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View https://books.google.com/books?id=TbkVBMKz418C. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 9780809320608. Page 33. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Religion, Feeling, Reality, Teachers

“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Oddest Prophet – Søren Kierkegaard by Malcolm Muggeridge

God, Fate, Hope, Democracy

“Not only boxing, but wrestling, quarter-staff, single-stick, bull-baiting, every exercise of the common people, that supposes the possible risk of life or limb, and, of course, that tends to prepare them for deeds of bravery of a higher order, and, by the means of those deeds and of the character and consequence naturally growing out of them, to preserve the independence and the liberties of their country; every such exercise seems to be doomed to extirpation. ... Every thing calculated to keep alive the admiration, and even the idea, of hardihood, seems to have become offensive and odious in the sight of but too many of those, whose duty it is to endeavour to arrest, and not to accelerate, the fatal progress of effeminacy. ... That cuttings and stabbings are more fatal than boxing, to say nothing of the disgrace, every one must agree; and, it cannot be denied, that the former have increased in proportion as the latter has been driven from amongst the people.”

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

‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 200
1800s

Life, People, Idea, Nature

“Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery: these are the stages of national degradation. We are in the fourth; and, I beg the reader to consider, to look into history, to trace states in their fall, and then say how rapid is the latter part of the progress! Of the symptoms of effeminacy none is so certain as a change from athletic and hardy sports, or exercises, to those requiring less bodily strength, and exposing the persons engaged in them to less bodily suffering; and when this change takes place, be assured that national cowardice is at no great distance, the general admiration of deeds of hardihood having already been considerably lessened.”

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

‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 197
1800s

History, Sport, Suffering, Change

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

Life, God, People, Secret

“I say...upon this point, what JUDGE BLACKSTONE says; and that is, that the right to resist oppression always exists, but that those who compose the nation at any given time must be left to judge for themselves when oppression has arrived at a pitch to justify the exercise of such right.”

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

‘To the Freemen of Coventry’, Political Register (4 April 1818), p. 404
1810s

Time

“The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a Senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise “impartial justice.””

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the President, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.
Senate remarks on the Trump impeachment trial (2020)

God, Justice

“Coming from that small town and watching films made me like travel in my space and appreciate being part of a bigger world and exercise emotions that you don't get to exercise when you are coming from a small town.”

Haifaa al-Mansour (1974) Saudi Arabian film director

Cinema Cafe at 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute - 31 Jan 2020, at 17 Min 50 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwwCbpp_GkI

World, Travel, Parting

“The exercise of freedom consists in stripping oneself of one's own will.”

Léon Bloy (1846–1917) French writer, poet and essayist

Source: Pilgrim of the Absolute (1947), p. 292

Freedom

“In view of this grave and unprecedented outrage, the House may be assured that his Majesty's Government will take without delay appropriate steps to vindicate the authority of the law and to protect officers and servants of the King and his Majesty's subjects in the exercise of their duties and in the enjoyment of their legal rights.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons on the gun-running at Larne, Ireland (27 April 1914), quoted in The Times (28 April 1914), p. 8
Prime Minister

Law, Housing

“The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins (2019)

“Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 147
The Tatler (1711–1714)

Health, Reading

“…The responsibility, the burden, is much heavier for us. If we don’t exercise our collective imagination—and not just documentation —we’ll always be at a certain disadvantage. I think what literature could provide us with is showing other possibilities. What I fear most is homogeneity.”

Rawi Hage (1964) Canadian writer

On the burden of racialized writers to represent their communities in “‘What I Fear Most is Homogeneity’: An Interview with Rawi Hage” https://hazlitt.net/feature/what-i-fear-most-homogeneity-interview-rawi-hage in Hazlitt (2018 Sep 12)

Fear, Imagination, Literature, Thinking

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Notes on Hospitals 3rd Edition (1863), Preface

Death, Disease, Knowledge, Science

“The difficulty of exercising “social responsibility” illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise — it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to “exploit” other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do good—but only at their own expense.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

People, Making love, Selfishness

“Exercise helps build the muscle of a child’s brain even more effectively than studying.”

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

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 94

Study, Help

“The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government, It has been more concerned to render government just and moderate than to make it facile, well-ordered,and effective.”

Woodrow Wilson The Study of Administration

Source: 1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887, p. 206;

Making love, Art, Study, Perfection

“Finally, our greatest asset in this struggle is the American people--their willingness to pay the price for these programs--to understand and accept a long struggle--to share their resources with other less fortunate people-to meet the tax levels and close the tax loopholes I have requested--to exercise self-restraint instead of pushing up wages or prices, or over-producing certain crops, or spreading military secrets, or urging unessential expenditures or improper monopolies or harmful work stoppages--to serve in the Peace Corps or the Armed Services or the Federal Civil Service or the Congress--to strive for excellence in their schools, in their cities and in their physical fitness and that of their children--to take part in Civil Defense-to pay higher postal rates, and higher payroll taxes and higher teachers' salaries, in order to strengthen our society--to show friendship to students and visitors from other lands who visit us and go back in many cases to be the future leaders, with an image of America--and I want that image, and I know you do, to be affirmative and positive-and, finally, to practice democracy at home, in all States, with all races, to respect each other and to protect the Constitutional rights of all citizens.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress

Friendship, Children, People, Secret

“No one, I think, can deny that the depression of the agricultural interest is excessive. Though I can recall periods of suffering, none of them have ever equalled the present in its instances. ... [N]or is it open to doubt that foreign competition has exercised a most injurious influence on the agricultural interests of the country. The country, however, was perfectly warned that if we made a great revolution in our industrial system, that was one of the consequences that would accrue. I may mention that the great result of the returns we possess is this, that the immense importations of foreign agricultural produce have been vastly in excess of what the increased demands of our population actually require, and that is why the low prices are maintained...That is to a great degree the cause of this depression.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the House of Lords on the agricultural depression (28 March 1879), reported in The Times (29 March 1879), p. 8

Thinking, Suffering, Country

“I ask you to pray for me as I exercise my being a father to you all, be assured that I will do my best to serve you all to the exclusion of no one.”

Ricardo Baccay (1961)

Baccay installed as new Tuguegarao archbishop http://usl.edu.ph/baccay-installed-as-new-tuguegarao-archbishop/ (January 28, 2020)

“Men are not zoophilists (being-lovers). Not many of them are philanthropists (man-lovers). They are barbarians. And the wrongs inflicted by them on non-human beings are for the most part inflicted simply because they feel like it. Human nature is so constructed that men get pleasure out of doing the most monstrous deeds. It is worse than this. Human nature is so constructed that it contains elements which demand exercise, demand motor expression, and in whose expression the most lamentable and appalling effects are produced.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 154

Men, Pleasure, Feeling, Lovers

“Take a serious look at yourself. Ask yourself questions about your mood, the way you view the world and people, think about your mistakes and the dangers they unleash. Today the character of a person determines whether he can exercise influence and authority, far more than all the minds on this earth. As you know, this is all the more true in Belgium, and Belgians want to see in their leader the qualities they will never want from themselves.”

Leopold I of Belgium (1790–1865) German prince who became the first King of the Belgians

https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-2-0 Leopold I In a letter to his son Prince Leopold II

People, World, Way, Mood

“Women are unquestionably destined to exercise more and more influence upon practical politics in Australia…In the educating of the electorate in liberal ideas they have for many years been an effective force. Now we have an organisation in which all distinctions have gone, and with men and women working equally for the one body …”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

Albury Conference, 1944
Wilderness Years (1941-1949)
Source: http://www.australianquotes.com/quotes_1950-present.php

Women, Men, Education, Idea

“The subject of love is always of the most absorbing interest to the younger and more active portion of a people; sexual passion, in its ennobling or debasing form, exercises irresistible attraction.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=7VlHAQAAMAAJ&q=irresistible#v=snippet&q=irresistible&f=false Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

Love, People, Making love, Passion

“The Lord exercises immense courtesy. He never imposes himself, never forces himself upon anyone. If I don’t let him in, he’s not going to force his way in. But that is not to say that someone who does good blindly, but who’s open to that imperative of goodness, isn’t vulnerable to a sort of propaedeutic of the spirit – an inward preparation of the heart that, whether in this world or the next, will bear fruit. Good is always good.”

Erik Varden (1974) Norwegian Monk and Prelate

Spirituality without platitudes https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/14404/spirituality-without-platitudes (September 12, 2018)

World, Way, Heart

“All our talents increase in the using, and the every faculty, both good and bad, strengthen by exercise.”

Anne Brontë (1820–1849) British novelist and poet

“If it is right that the State should resume its authority over the land for the purposes of burying the dead, it is surely also right that it should exercise its ownership where it is necessary it should do so to feed the living.”

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

Speech in Killerton Park, near Exeter, opening the Liberal land campaign (17 September 1925), quoted in The Times (18 September 1925), p. 14
Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons

Dead

“The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise.
1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don't cross out.
3. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don't think. Don't get logical.
6. Go for the jugular.
[…] That is the discipline: to continue to sit.”

Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones

Essay, "First thoughts". p.8, 9
Writing Down the Bones (1986)

Thinking, Time

“Do not be quick in giving fatwa (religious verdict) but exercise restraint in managing your differences of opinions. Such differences shouldn’t be vehicle for the spread of hatred and disunity among the people.”

Salah Al Budair (1971) Imaam at Masjid al-Nabawi

Spilling of innocent blood is against Islam – Saudi Imam https://www.pressreader.com/nigeria/daily-trust/20160330/281616714503807 (30th Mar 2016)

People

“3 Habits That Changed My Life
My daily reading habit makes my thinking better. Habit of daily exercise keeps me fit.
Habit of never giving up in life make me confident.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Life, Confidence, Thinking, Change

“Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.”

Jonathan Van Ness (1987) American hairstylist and television personality

page 207
Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love (2019)

Love, Life, Forgiveness, Learning

“All creative thought and creative action is strictly personal. A committee, any collective, cannot think. It cannot act creatively. It can only act destructively. It can exercise brute force.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Leonard Read Journals, November 4, 1951 https://history.fee.org/leonard-read-journal/1951/leonard-e-read-journal-november-1951/

Thinking, Personality

“The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. One knows how numerous this clique is, how they stick together and what power they exercise through their unions. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Oration in Defense of Flaccus. See Apostle Paul: A Polite Bribe https://books.google.com.br/books?id=wefkDwAAQBAJ&pg=108 by Robert Orlando, p. 108.

“It is good to remember that the administration of justice is only just when it is exercised in conformity with the truth and the moral good.”

Juan Alberto Puiggari (1949) Argentine archbishop

Source: Argentinean bishop condemns mid term abortion, stresses that Church 'cannot remain silent' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/20011/argentinean-bishop-condemns-mid-term-abortion-stresses-that-church-cannot-remain-silent (17 June 2010)

Truth, Justice