Quotes about fashion (1076 quotes, page 6)

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality…this is not true…. i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until…i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories…by workers who were mostly exploited…. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to…and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment… [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.”

Carmen Hermosillo Community manager, essayist, poet, research analyst

"Pandora's Vox", as cited in Curtis, Adam, 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC.

Money , People , Personality

“When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness and he sometimes says to me: "You are I and I am you." I see, then, those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me. In short, what proceeds from those eyes and that face is what I said that I saw in that previous darkness which comes from within, and which delights me so that I can say nothing about it. When I am in the God-man my soul is alive. And I am in the God-man much more than in the other vision of seeing God with darkness. The soul is alive in that vision concerning the God-man. The vision with darkness, however, draws me so much more that there is no comparison. On the other hand, I am in the God-man almost continually. It began in this continual fashion on a certain occasion when I was given the assurance that there was no intermediary between God and myself. Since that time there has not been a day or a night in which I did not continually experience this joy of the humanity of Christ.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, p. 205

God , Soul , Time , Joy

“If one has no courage to denounce, if one bows to madness and stupidity, how can one ever hope to cope with the other wrongs of humanity exploited in the same fashion by Communists?”

Madame Nhu (1924–2011) First lady of South Vietnam

"Letters to the Times: Mrs. Nhu Defends Stand", The New York Times, 14 August 1963. Referring to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks protesting government actions.

Stupidity , Hope , Courage , Madness

“I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey. When they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they're angry, nasty, closed minded, & not mainstream, but fringe.”

Bernard Goldberg (1945) American journalist

The Bernard Goldberg Interview http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/goldberg.php RightWingNews.com John Hawkins, 2001. Today's 'Liberals': Close-Minded, Nasty and Fringe http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/10/15/124248.shtml Newsmax.com. Bernard Goldberg (October 16, 2003)

Way

“A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters.”

P.G. Wodehouse book A Pelican at Blandings

A Pelican at Blandings (1969)

Winter , Summer

“We are not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other company.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Interview with David Griffiths (1959); as quoted in Walt Disney : Conversations (2006) edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson
Paraphrased variant: I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

“There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 16

Truth , Idea , Question , Thinking

“I’m sorry Andrea Dworkin started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating. She never got to see people like me, Carol, and the rest of us little protégées who took her inspiration and flew to a new dimension. She got stuck, and then she got sick, and when you’re famous for one thing, no one wants to see you change unless you reject it all, like a pathetic sinner seeking redemption. She was too stubborn and too old-fashioned for that. Andrea Dworkin never would have admitted that she was a SuperStar. She was the animator of the ultimate porno horror loop, where the Final Girl never gets a chance to slay the monster, she only dies, dies, dies, with the cries of the angry mourners to remember her.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

" Andrea Dworkin Has Died http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html", Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.

People , Girl , Change , Chance

“I decided to go nude because I think that nudity always creates a big reaction. That is what is required to keep people’s attention on such a brutal practice …. These poor animals are electrocuted, skinned alive, drowned, and bludgeoned just for the sake of fashion. … Don’t buy fur. Even a little trim—your gloves or your bag or your jackets …. You must remember that animals don’t have a voice. You must be their voice. Never be afraid to speak up.”

Elisabetta Canalis (1978) Italian model and actress

"Elisabetta Canalis: I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" https://www.peta.org/features/elisabetta-canalis-rather-go-naked-wear-fur/, interview with PETA (8 September 2011).

People , Thinking , Animals

“The human features and countenance, although composed of but some ten parts or little more, are so fashioned that among so many thousands of men there are no two in existence who cannot be distinguished from one another.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 8.
Naturalis Historia

Men , Parting

“Although every part of the human frame has been fashioned by the same Divine hand and exhibits the most marvellous and beneficent adaptions for the use of men, the human eye stands pre-eminent above them all as the light of the body and the organ by which we become acquainted with the minutest and the nearest, the largest and most remote of the Creator’s work”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

As quoted in Good Words (1862), Volume 3. p. 170.
Also quoted in Martyr of science, Royal Scottish Museum (1984), p. 80.

Men , Light , Parting

“The person of faith, (Henri Nouwen) says, is able to see in that moment the faithful presence of God, the one who has never left us, who keeps his word. He comes and picks up those bricks from the crumbling wall and begins to fashion something new, not a wall but a concave space, where we are invited to a deeper intimacy with the ones we love and with God. It is in that greater sharing, that greater intimacy that we begin to realize that the real stability in life is not the wall of our accomplishments but the faithfulness of the ones we love and the faithfulness of God, because both reveal how rich life is in keeping a promise, in keeping one's word. There is nothing to compare with having someone keep their word to us.”

Blase J. Cupich (1949) Catholic bishop

"Homily for the Marriage Jubilee Mass", at Holy Name Cathedral, August 30, 2015, reprinted in the online edition of The Catholic New World, the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, in the Archbishop's Column (September 20 - October 3, 2015)

Love , Life , God , Faith

“But if some mind very different from ours were to look upon some property of some curved line as we do on the evenness of a straight line, he would not recognize as such the evenness of a straight line; nor would he arrange the elements of his geometry according to that very different system, and would investigate quite other relationships as I have suggested in my notes.
We fashion our geometry on the properties of a straight line because that seems to us to be the simplest of all. But really all lines that are continuous and of a uniform nature are just as simple as one another. Another kind of mind which might form an equally clear mental perception of some property of any one of these curves, as we do of the congruence of a straight line, might believe these curves to be the simplest of all, and from that property of these curves build up the elements of a very different geometry, referring all other curves to that one, just as we compare them to a straight line. Indeed, these minds, if they noticed and formed an extremely clear perception of some property of, say, the parabola, would not seek, as our geometers do, to rectify the parabola, they would endeavor, if one may coin the expression, to parabolify the straight line.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

"Boscovich's mathematics", an article by J. F. Scott, in the book Roger Joseph Boscovich (1961) edited by Lancelot Law Whyte.
"Transient pressure analysis in composite reservoirs" (1982) by Raymond W. K. Tang and William E. Brigham.
"Non-Newtonian Calculus" (1972) by Michael Grossman and Robert Katz.

Nature

“For just as soon as a visible form has been fashioned for God, his power is also bound to it. Men are so stupid that they fasten God wherever they fashion him; and hence they cannot but adore. And there is no difference whether they simply worship an idol, or God in the idol. It is always idolatry when divine honors are bestowed on an idol, under whatever pretext this is done. And because it does not please God to be worshiped superstitiously, whatever is conferred upon the idol is snatched from him.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Institutes 1.11.9 as quoted in War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin by Carlos, M. N. Eire p.217

Men , God , Stupidity

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God , People , Health , Faith

“It is the fashion to talk of our changing climate and bewail the hot summers and hard winters of tradition, but how seldom we pause to marvel at the remarkable constancy of the weather from year to year.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

November Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Winter , Change , Summer , Weather

“Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days of his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting, woe betide any child who failed in reverence to his elders; for they dealt out discipline with a heavy hand in those days. Whereas in these degenerate times the leading men of Rome gave any ignorant oafish lout (this was for Postumus) or any feeble-minded decrepit-limbed little whippersnapper (this was for me) full permission—
Postumus interrupted with a warning smile: "So I was right. The degenerate Augustus insults the great Censor by employing you in his degenerate family. I suppose you have told the Lady Livia just how you feel about things?"”

Robert Graves book I, Claudius

Source: I, Claudius (1934), Ch. 5.

Men , Family , Smile , Feeling

“Each fur jacket and piece of fur trim is taken from a terrified living being who was trapped in the wild … or who had a miserable life locked inside a barren wire cage before being drowned, electrocuted, poisoned, or skinned alive. … I, along with many … would love to see … take a step into the compassionate future of fashion by pledging not to feature fur.”

Elisabetta Canalis (1978) Italian model and actress

Letter to Vogue Italia; quoted in "Lose the Fur: Elisabetta Canalis’ Message to New Editor of ‘Vogue Italia’" https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/lose-the-fur-elisabetta-canalis-vogue-italia/, PETA UK (22 February 2017).

Love , Life , Future

“Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors appears to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own, without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people, is, similarly, even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einer, der nur Zeitungen liest und, wenn's hochkommt, Bücher zeitgenössischer Autoren, kommt mir vor wie ein hochgradig Kurzsichtiger, der es verschmäht, Augengläser zu tragen. Er ist völlig abhängig von den vorurteilen und Moden seiner Zeit, denn er bekommt nichts anderes zu sehen und zu hören. Und was einer selbständig denkt ohne Anlehnung an das Denken und Erleben anderer, ist auch im besten Falle Ziemlich ärmlich und monoton.
Article in Der Jungkaufmann, April 1952 http://www.archive.org/stream/alberteinstein_03_reel03#page/n302/mode/1up, Einstein Archives 28-972
1950s

People , Books , Thinking , Appearance

“[T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"Room of One's Own", p. 355
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Life , War , Truth , World

“Nudity is available online and on certain TV programs like live fashion shows. It should be in sync with the rules followed in films. There should be one policy for nudity.”

Pahlaj Nihalani

On nudity on the internet and television, as quoted in " Censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani: Time to snip nudity on TV, web http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tv/news/hindi/Censor-board-chief-Pahlaj-Nihalani-Time-to-snip-nudity-on-TV-web/articleshow/45997678.cms" The Times of India (24 January 2015)

“You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

People

“People who hadn't noticed me, or who had written me off as a game show host, started to reassess me. There were people who hadn't seen me as a stand-up artist and liked it. Suddenly I was in fashion again.”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Independent on Sunday obituary http://web.archive.org/web/20100522031727/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bob-monkhouse-jokewriter-to-the-stars-and-the-longreigning-king-of-primetime-comedy-dies-at-75-578058.html

People , Game

“Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended…The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive.”

Maria Edgeworth book Patronage

Patronage (1814), ch. 20; Tales and Novels, vol. 14, p. 245.

Children , Health , Success , Dead

“In England the theatre has never been anything but a fashion for the upper classes or a debauch for the common people.”

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

Le théâtre n'a jamais été en Angleterre qu'une mode des hautes classes ou une débauche du bas peuple.
Page 348.
Journal d'un poète (1867)

People

“…today’s…newspapers…full of…diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State…. He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

Change , Past

“I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God.”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

God , World , Reality , Parent

“The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools. He learns what she does with light the big tool & then colour then form and appropriates them to his own use. Then he's got a canoe of his own smaller than Nature's but big enough for every purpose except to paint the midday sun which is not beautiful at all. It is plenty strong enough though to make midday sunlight or the setting sun if you know how to handle it. With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature's sailing. He will soon be sailing only where he wants to selecting nice little coves & shady shores or storms to his own liking, but if ever he thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better shaped boat he'll capsize or stick in the mud & nobody will buy his pictures or sail with him in his old tub.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Benjamin Eakins (1868-03-03).

Beauty , Nature , Thinking , Light

“You know they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it's called a nationalist,
And I say 'really, we're not supposed to use that word?' Do you know what I am? I'm a nationalist.”

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

22 October 2018, as reported 23 October 2018 by Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.in/trump-declares-himself-a-nationalist-while-stumping-for-ted-cruz/articleshow/66327534.cms
2010s, 2018, October

“.. an entirely original painter [ Francois Millet ], high-minded and genuinely rustic in nature, who has expressed things about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their melancholy, and the nobleness of their labour. He has represented them in a somewhat barbaric fashion, in a manner to which his ideas gave a more expressive force than his hand possessed. The world has been grateful for his intentions; it has recognised in his methods something of the sensibility of a Burns who was a little awkward in expression.... He stands out as a deep thinker.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

Quote from Maitres d'Autrefois; Belgique – Hollande, Eugène Fromentin; Librairie Plon-Nourrit et Cie, Paris, 1877; as quoted by Arthur Hoebert, in The Barbizon Painters – being the story of the Men of thirty – associate of the National Academy of Design; publishers, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York 1915, p. 73-74

World , Idea , Nature , Country

“Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Appearance , Science

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) American biologist

Reported by Gregg Easterbrook in a January 1997 interview for The Atlantic Monthly.

Hunger , World , Home , Cry

“The seventeenth-century academic separation between fine and useful arts first fell out of fashion nearly a century ago.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler (1961), cited in: Guido Guerzoni (2011). Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400-1700. p. 27

Art

“If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven—were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street; and that to the daisied field—the heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of all—these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Wisdom , Men , Pain , Truth

“This work had its origins in the question of the relations of the individual to social solidarity. Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society? How can he be at once more individual and more solidary? Certainly, these two movements, contradictory as they appear, develop in parallel fashion. This is the problem we are raising. It appeared to us that what resolves this apparent antinomy is a transformation of social solidarity due to the steadily growing development of the division of labor.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Preface
The Division of Labor in Society (1893)

Question , Problem , Appearance , Dependency

“Well I think that my main concern is that there is a market lack of desire for quote-unquote art that people are creating and appreciating. I think because there’s a lack of desire for that, which translates to the creation and elevation of art that then thereby lack substance because there’s no desire for it, there’s no appreciation for it. It self-perpetuates a world in which the hollow, the vapid and the greedy are elevated and revered. That bothers me because art is so important whether it’s design, fine art, film, fashion, things that are important to the world. It’s what makes me want to wake up in the morning, it drives me.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Asked what concerns him the most about the society today. The Aquarian, November 2009 http://www.theaquarian.com/2009/11/06/interview-davey-havok-afi-conspicuous-composition/

People , World , Art , Quotes

“But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath — tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Fashion"
Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)

“In my essay I refuted the Hayek-Robbins argument by showing how a market mechanism could be established in a socialist economy which would lead to the solution of the simultaneous equations by means of an empirical procedure of trial and error. […] Were I to rewrite my essay today my task would be much simpler. My answer to Hayek and Robbins would be: so what’s the trouble?
Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process with its cumbersome tatonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the preelectronic age.”

Oskar R. Lange (1904–1965) Polish economist

"The computer and the market" (1967)

Age , Error , Appearance

“"I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials." --December 2003”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/12/26/elec04.prez.dean.bin.laden/

People

“If there is no choice, we will declare war on the millionaires in Israel. The ground is burning to such an extent, that the rich people of the land should not be surprised if certain groups would arrive and just climb on their houses and expel them from their homes, or if their daughters could no longer walk outside. Each one would have to establish a private police force. When the struggles begin, illustrating the fact that we cannot continue in this condition where there are groups that accumulate wealth and get rich in a legendary fashion, while others are left so far behind, no one should fool himself into thinking that his house and yard are out of the game.”

Amir Peretz (1952) Israeli politician

Source: Interview by Orna Kadosh in Maariv, May 12, 2000 http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/ART47/692.html http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/ART48/171.html

War , People , Fools , Home

“I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (26 April 1903)

Life , Literature

“The Church has as an organized body no sympathy for the masses. It is a sort of fashionable club where the rich are entertained and amused, and where most of the ministers are muzzled by their masters and dare not preach the gospel of the Carpenter of Nazareth.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

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

“It was not a fashionable place, but even among the pleasant people there, the girls made few friends, preferring to live for one another.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women (1868), Ch. 36 : Beth's Secret

People , Girl

“He is only fantastical that is not in fashion.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 2, subsection 3.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III

“The vitality of the individual… depends on his success in fashioning a character resistant to the narrowing of experience, to the rigidity of response, and to the consequent constriction of possibility that surrender to a hardened version of what the self implies. "He was so extremely natural," said Santayana of William James, "that there was no way of telling what his nature was, or what came next." It is an observation that states an ideal, suitable to the ambitions of personality under democracy. The point is not to make war against habit or to make war against one self. It is to fashion a style of existence, a mode of the self, in which we lower our defenses enough to strengthen our readiness for the new, our attachment to life, and our love of the world.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 130

Love , Life , War , World

“The discontinuation of bodily exercises afforded a proportionable quantity of leisure time for the cultivation of the mind; so that the manners of mankind were softened by degrees, and learning, which had been so long neglected, became fashionable, and was esteemed an indispensable mark of a polite education.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. xxxii
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Education

Education , Exercises , Learning , Time

“Lately some picked graduates from Canada are beginning to play their part in looking after those parts of the Empire where the white man goes out, often alone, to teach, to educate and to bring along the more backward races of Empire. There is no more self-sacrificing work, there is no finer work, and you see Canadians to-day in the Sudan, Malaya, Mauritius, and in the colonial service generally—medical men, highly educated men in the Civil Service, helping to bear the white man's burden. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that it is not enough for a country to concentrate solely on making a lot of money for itself; that a real spiritual force comes into it when its sons are ready, as for generations Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen have been ready, to give up the comforts and ease of home life and go out on that pioneer work to bring forward those backward parts of the world and try to help them to benefit from the things that have profited us to much in the years past.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 75-76.
1927

Life , Men , Money , World

“The predecessors of Newton and Leibnitz knew perfectly well how to determine tangents and areas, but they had to approach each problem from first principles. The great contribution of Newton and Leibnitz was precisely to make the procedures for finding tangents, areas, etc. into a calculus, that is, a systematic way of calculating—a collection of algorithms, to use the currently fashionable word.”

Ralph P. Boas Jr. (1912–1992) American mathematician

[Calculus as an Experimental Science, 78, 6, 1971, 664–667, The American Mathematical Monthly, 10.2307/2316582]

Way , Problem

“I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Letter to his son, George Mason, V (27 May 1787)

“My old landscapes of Pennsylvania are worth so much now that I have to hide them, so I don't get put in an even higher tax bracket. For years nobody would pay a dime for them. They're still the same paintings. They didn't get any better. I treasure them as much as my recent black and white abstracts... My dealer was furious when I showed him my latest works. I'm returning to color. He tells me to ride it out and change when the fashion change. I told him no! I told him I paint each painting from the heart. I have followed my heart all my life.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1959
Quote from a speech of Kline in the jazz club The Five Spot, as quoted in Introduction by David Anram, The Stamp of Impulse, Abstract expressionist prints, David Anram, David Acton, p. 21
1960's

Life , Color , Change , Heart

“I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience.”

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 18 (p. 215)

“And parents, some old fashioned kitchen wisdom for dealing with those lice: take your child and cover his hair with mayonnaise and shove him outside because he disgraced your house by bringing lice into it.”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

September 13, 2006
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Wisdom , Parent , Housing

“Call us old-fashioned, but we think that we ought to avoid doing precisely what our enemies want us to do. They want us to elevate them, to give in to fear, to indulge in hatred, to eye one another with suspicion and to take leave of our faculties”

Justin Trudeau (1971) 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; eldest son of Pierre Trudeau

February 8, 2016 BBC Article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35526255 (later misquoted)

Fear , Thinking

“I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 4

Pleasure , Hope , Freedom , Future

“Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Hobson's Choice," pp. 335-336.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Marriage , Feeling , Business , Parting

“Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

God , World , Behavior , Feeling

“There is room enough for a natural 'painture'. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. In endeavouring to do something better than well, they do what in reality is good for nothing. Fashion always had, & will have, its day — but truth (in all things) only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

Truth , Nature , Reality

“The European Union is happy to suck money from member states like a giant leech, with absolutely no respect for how it is spent. Whenever more transparency is called for, they simply hide behind smoke and mirrors and fancy words, and completely ignore common sense. They show a total lack of respect to the citizens of the European Union. The problem with the EU is that it spends money like it is going out of fashion, when actually it’s the Euro which is going out of fashion right now, with so many countries now questioning its membership.”

Jill Seymour (1958) British politician

Where is the transparency? More EU smoke and mirrors… http://jillseymourukip.org/where-is-the-transparency-more-eu-smoke-and-mirrors/ (February 28, 2017)

Money , Question , Problem , Sense

“Whether it be in the toleration of sharia courts, or the turning of a blind eye to cultural practices which go against our laws, too often it has been women who have been the victims of those problems. I have always believed that a multi-ethnic society such as ours can be successful if it can be united by a common set of values and sense of identity, instead of a constant emphasis on division. It’s amazing to think that this was once considered outlandish. It can be difficult to explain this crucial difference in a city like London. More than one TV interviewer has asked me how, as UKIP’s Mayoral candidate, I can appeal to such a multicultural place as our capital. But this is to miss the point entirely. Like anybody else, I enjoy the huge profusion of completely diverse cuisine, fashion and music. Indeed the different cultural influences on our city are so big and ingrained it’s easy to take them for granted. But this is not the same thing as ensuring and, indeed, standing up for the common values and laws which should and must underpin any cohesive society. Here, as across Europe, one of those values – enshrined in our legal system – is that everybody is equal before the law regardless of their gender, sexuality or ethnicity.”

Peter Whittle (politician) (1961) British author, politician, and journalist

‘Cultural Cringe’: Women Are The First Victims Of State-Sponsored Multiculturalism http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/13/2764329/ (January 13, 2016)

Women , Law , Music , Problem

“The sciences of today are business enterprises run on business principles. Research in large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion, and the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is - which means military matters.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Farewell to Reason

pg 102.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

Money , Truth , Business , Science

“I’ve read Rudin before, but that was fifteen years ago in university. Rereading it now, lying all bandaged up, sipping my whiskey in bed in the afternoon, I felt new sympathy for the protagonist Rudin. I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev’s old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others flaws. Not that Dostoyevsky’s characters don’t generate pathos, but they’re flawed in a way that don’t come across as faults.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter Fifteen: Whiskey, Torture, Turgenoev

Way , Lying , Universe , Reading

“Jerome was dyslexic until he was twelve, before it became fashionable. And he broke every pair of glasses I bought him. He hated wearing glasses. He was good at breaking things. Especially relationships. Just like his father.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Jerome's mother
The Pillow Book

Hate

“After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you."”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

… I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not.
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love , Men , Sex , Support

“Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Preface
His Master's Voice (1968)

God , Truth , Lie , Angels

“Each one fashions and bears his world with him, and that unless he himself become wise, strong and loving, no change in his circumstances can make him rich or free or happy.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 5

Love , World , Strong , Change

“During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.”

Karen Blixen book Seven Gothic Tales

"The Deluge at Norderney"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

People , Sea , Country

“Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense about globalisation, western leaders believe liberal democracy is spreading unstoppably. The reality is continuing political diversity. Republics, empires, liberal and illiberal democracies, and a wide variety of authoritarian regimes will be with us for the foreseeable future. Globalisation is nothing more than the industrialisation of the planet, and increasing resource nationalism is an integral part of the process. (So is accelerating climate change, but that's another story.) As industrialisation spreads, countries that control natural resources use these resources to advance their strategic objectives.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Folly of the progressive fairytale," http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/russia The Observer (2008-09-08)

Democracy , Nature , Reality , Change

“It's not very fashionable nowadays to have a philosophy that demands a lot of life. I tend to be drawn to people who are emotional - now they'd be called 'crazy'. Pollock, Jasper Johns, Toulouse-Lautrec. People said, 'They're off their nut!' Was Faulkner off his nut because he stayed in his house for eight months at a time writing books, and then you'd find him drunk up in a tree, making out with some old black woman? I think that's fuckin' great!”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Blender (August/September 2001)

Life , People , Books , Thinking

“I'm gonna take a wild guess—I think that was Buddy DeFranco, and possibly the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The band strikes me as an enigma, in that, first of all, some interesting harmonic things are happening as far as the individual voicings are concerned, but yet it's played in an older, tighter fashion. For instance, the bass player, if there are chord changes happening every two beats, plays the root for two beats, then the next root for two beats—that type of sound. The harmony, especially in the opening part where the theme is established, is a lot more modern than that kind of band would normally sound. I think that they're playing that way to keep that Miller identity, with that rhythmic tightness”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing DeFranco's arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge", from the album Glenn Miller Orchestra Under the Direction of Buddy DeFranco; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu by Leonard Feather, in Downbeat (October 19, 1967), p. 38

Way , Thinking , Change , Parting

“Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 6-7

“Some of you may doubt the truth of what I now say, and argue that the Lord could teach him. This is a mistake. The Lord could not have taught him in any other way than in the way in which He did teach him. You believe Adam was made of the dust of this earth. This I do not believe, though it is supposed that it is so written in the Bible; but it is not, to my understanding. You can write that information to the States, if you please-that I have publicly declared that I do not believe that portion of the Bible as the Christian world do. I never did, and I never want to. What is the reason I do not? Because I have come to understanding, and banished from my mind all the baby stories my mother taught me when I was a child. But suppose Adam was made and fashioned the same as we make adobies; if he had never drunk of the bitter cup; the Lord might have talked to him to this day, and he would have continued as he was to all eternity, never advancing one particle in the school of intelligence. This idea opens up a field of light to the intelligent mind. How can you know truth but by its opposite, or light but by its opposite? The absence of light is darkness. How can sweetness be known but by its opposite, bitter? It is by this means that we obtain all intelligence.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourse 2:6-7 (October 23, 1853)
1850s

Truth , World , School , Way

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

People , World , Art , Imagination

“Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.”

James Northcote (1746–1831) English painter

Quoted by William Hazlitt in Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A. http://books.google.com/books?id=PzQ1AQAAIAAJ&q="Fashion+is+gentility+running+away+from+vulgarity+and+afraid+of+being+overtaken+by+it"&pg=PA264#v=onepage (1830)

“He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences – perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting prudence.
In this point of trusting in some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 73-74)

Men , God , Religion , Law

“She's got style and she's got her own money
So she's not another honey you can quickly disarm
She's got the eyes that make you realize
She won't be hypnotized by your usual charm.
You've got your plan of attack
That won't attract the modern woman
When you're an old fashioned man
She understands the things you're doin'
She's a modern woman.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Modern Woman.
Song lyrics, The Bridge (1986)

Money , Understanding

“I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood.”

Kōki Hirota (1878–1948) Japanese politician executed

Quoted in "Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing" - Page 56 - by Robert Sabella, Fei Fei Li, David Liu - History - 2002.

Question

“All prophecies stripped of acculturation and geographic ornamentation seem only to be saying, “Journey within; look behind your feelings, beyond your pain; fashion your world from what you find there.””

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Pain , World , Feeling

“Fashion shows have never been my thing. I don't look thin enough for the runway. The other girls were always much taller and skinnier. But I've never starved myself or done crazy things just to be thin like a rail.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Quoted in Parade Magazine 10 July 2008 http://www.parade.com/celebrity/celebrity-parade/archive/pc_0194.html.

Girl

“The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Les hivers sont pour les femmes à la mode ce que fut jadis une campagne pour les militaires de l’empire.
La Fausse Maîtresse http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Fausse_Ma%C3%AEtresse (1842), translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, ch. II.

Women , Winter

“The author of Amelia, the most singular genius which their island ever produced, whose works it has long been the fashion to abuse in public and to read in secret.”

George Borrow book The Bible in Spain

The Bible in Spain (1843), ch. 1.

Secret , Reading

“When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: First Things, Last Things (1971), Ch. 8 "Thoughts on the Present"

“I hope that you will have learned from the pain and suffering which you have endured in the past few decades, and have realized how to cherish the blessings of liberty. You will therefore know that freedom does not mean that the people should be licentious and behave in an arbitrary fashion, but that it also involves certain limits, since if there are no constraints no one will be free, and the strong will enslave the weak.”

Mohammad Ali Foroughi (1877–1942) Iranian politician

Radio broadcast (October 1941)

Pain , People , Hope , Freedom

“The structures of society and culture are fighting turned to stone; they are what comes into existence so long and insofar as we interrupt our practical and ideological struggles over the organization of life in society. When the fighting escalates again, the structures dissolve into the collective action and imagination from which they arose. When we fashion structures design to invite their own reconstruction, we make them into both superior instruments of our power and more faithful reflections of our humanity.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 63

Life , Faith , Imagination , Fight

“You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 12, delivered on December 10, 1784; vol. 2, p. 103.
Discourses on Art

Nature

“Muhammad built at Nirun a mosque on the site of the temple of Budh, and ordered prayers to be proclaimed in the Muhammadan fashion and appointed an Imam.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Nirun (Sindh) . The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 158.
Quotes from The Chach Nama

“Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor, because in a most Zenlike fashion, the content is controlled by all and none at the sme time.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.206

Time

“Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. […] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 1: Pioneering Days
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

Freedom , Universe , Parting

“In order to try to remove what we are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many signs, to Marx's work today, which is to say also to his injunction. What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that "changes the world. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered-by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We'll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia! We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: "Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long.29 He doesn't belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties-, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great philosopher."”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

We have heard this and we will hear it again.
Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

People , World , Fear , Sense

“There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Girl

“It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Italy under the Oligarchy
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life , God , War , World

“I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Neal Stephenson coins the term "text literacy" during interview for the article "Pushing the Edge With 'Diamond Age' Nano-Machines," Associated Press, May 10, 1995

Way , Mathematics , Thinking