Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 27

“A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash -- the obviously worthless ideas -- and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his existence. But such truly priceless ideas… perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his existence to himself and to his God.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" (1977)

Women, God, Hope, Tear

“Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.'
'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!'
'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert

Truth

“Since you are advising high school students and undergrads, I suggest that you mention to them that they can start being independent researchers before they graduate from college. For example I came up with my b-money idea (a precursor to Bitcoin) as an undergrad, and was also already thinking about some of the questions that would eventually lead to [updateless decision theory].”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In a discussion thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x2fkoZMuMNhBashH4/academia-as-a-career-option-its-social-value-and#AZCrzTMa4yvywgahE on LessWrong, March 2014

Money, School, Way, Question

“In recent centuries the only near spiritual relative of Tolstoy is the English poet, who in the fourteenth century, in the form of Piers Plowman, preached religious ideas so strikingly like those of Tolstoy. They are both individualists and they seek individual, not social, regeneration. …Both point to the simple toiling God-fearing peasant as one expressing the ideal of the Christian life and service.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 29-30

Life, God, Fear

“Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won’t need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 2 (p. 13)

Money, World, School, Thinking

“The manner in which mathematical theories are applied does not depend on preconceived ideas; it is a purposeful technique depending on, and changing with, experience.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 2 - 3.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)

Mathematics, Change, Dependency

“It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.”

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

"How Do People Get New Ideas?" (1959)
General sources

“The assignment must fit the kid. That's the beauty of it, Obie." Obie waited a minute or two and couldn't resist asking, "You running out of ideas, Archie?" The great Archie Costello running dry? The possibility was staggering to contemplate. "Just being artistic, Obie. It's an art, you know. Take a kid like this Renault. Special circumstances.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

He fell silent. "Put him down for the chocolates."
Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 15

Beauty, Art, Waiting

“If I could really paint! A month ago I was so sure of what I wanted. Inside me I saw it out there, walked around with it like a queen, and was blissful. Now the veils have fallen again, gray veils, hiding the whole idea of me. I stand like a beggar at the door, shivering in the cold, pleading to be let in. It is hard to move patiently, step by step, when one is young and demanding... I walk along the boulevards [Paris] and crowds of people pass by and something inside me cries out, 'I still have such beautiful things before me. None of you, not one, has such things.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

And then it cries, 'When will it come? Soon?'
excerpt of her Journal, Paris 1897; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 195
1897

People, Beauty, Painting

“Scientism exalts the idea of science on its own, causing people to become fixated on the assumptions that seemed scientific to them during their formative years. This prevents them from seeing contrary facts, however glaring they may be, that have been noticed more lately.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 5.

People, Science

“This Party of ours has been on the defensive for too long. The time has come to counter-attack…The intellectual counter-attack is as important as the counter-attack in Parliament and in the constituencies. If we can win the battle of ideas, then the war will already be half-won.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Federation of Conservative Students Conference (24 March 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102663 Leader of the Opposition

War, Time

“The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 24)
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

“Of all the mind tools we acquire in the course of furnishing our brains from the stockpiles of culture, none are more important, of course, than words — first spoken, then written. Words make us more intelligent by making cognition easier, in the same way (many times multiplied) that beacons and landmarks make navigation in the world easier for simple creatures. Navigation in the abstract multidimensional world of ideas is simply impossible without a huge stock of movable, memorable landmarks that can be shared, criticized, recorded, and looked at from different perspectives.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

World, Way, Intelligence, Time

“I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Quoted in Myriem Bouzaher's introduction to the French version of The Name of the Rose, Postille al Nome della Rosa, Page 18 (1985)

“Why destroy aretê? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made aretê the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Truth, Question

“Come, swift-wing'd Fancy, airy maid,
In varied, dazzling vest array'd,
Inspire thy vot'ry's lay;
Grant me thy flow'ry walks to tread,
To range thy summer-painted mead,
Or near thy fountain play.
Now led by thy resistless hand,
Or guided by thy fairy wand,
O'er yet untrodden space;
Or on thy pinions borne along,
The bright Ideas' flitting throngs
Pursue th' aerial race.”

Elizabeth Bentley (writer) (1767–1839) British writer

Ode to Fancy (1790), from Genuine Poetical Compositions, on Various Subjects (1791)

Summer, Painting

“I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Quoted in Benedict Nightingale, "Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/movies/21scofield.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin, The New York Times (2008-03-21)

Life, Star, Thinking, Time

“Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means — what it bestows on us — the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”

Bill Moyers (1934) American journalist

"The Power of Democracy", speech accepting the Public Intellectual Award of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (7 February 2007), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 92

People, Democracy, Problem, Time

“Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea.”

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

Cassandra (1860)

Men, God, Thinking

“17. Wednesday. A fine morning. Proceeded on my journey towards Braintree. Stopped to see Mr. Haven, of Dedham, who told me, very civilly, he supposed I took my faith on trust from Dr. Mayhew, and added, that he believed the doctrine of satisfaction of Jesus Christ to be essential to Christianity, and that he would not believe this satisfaction unless he believed the Divinity of Christ. Mr. Balch was there too, and observed, he would not be a Christian if he did not believe mysteries of the gospel; that he could bear with an Arminian, but when, Dr. Mayhew they denied the Divinity and satisfaction of Christ, he had no more to do with them; that he knew to make of Dr. Mayhew's two discourses upon the expected of all things. They gave him an idea of a cart whose wanted greasing; it rumbled on in a hoarse, rough manner; there was a good deal of ingenious talk in them, but it was thrown together in a jumbled, confused order. He believed the Doctor wrote them in a great panic. He added further that Arminians, however stiffly they maintain their opinions in health, always, he takes notice, retract when they come to die, and choose to die Calvinists. Set out for Braintree, and arrived about sunset.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Entry for 17 February 1756 in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams vol. 2, 10-1
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Health, Faith, Christ

“Dad, by example and through his teaching, had helped me understand something that has been with me since that time: When something we learn contradicts Scripture, we need to first of all go to the Bible and study the words in context very carefully. If, after doing this, we are sure the Bible still clearly means what we had previously gleaned, then we need to question the ideas that contradict the Bible's words. Then, even if we can't find an explanation that shows where the secular idea is in error, we need to continue to search and wait for the answer. Even if we don't find answers in our lifetime, we cannot reinterpret Scripture. To do so would be to make man's ideas infallible and God's Word fallible. This would put us on a course of compromise and unbelief through the rest of Scripture, and Dad often warned us of this "slippery slope."”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy (2008)

God, Error, Search, Understanding

“I don't want you get an idea I experiment with drugs, cause I don't. I am into full-scale research.”

Gallagher (1946–2022) American comedian

“Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instincts and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side? Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom — spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure — to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed and the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Men, World, Mountain

“The object of mathematics is to discover "true" theorems. We shall use the term "valid" to describe statements formed according to certain rules and then shall discuss how this notion compares with the intuitive idea of "true."”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, p. 8. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA8 Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

Mathematics

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant — you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Introduction to Passion Play (1962)

Stupidity, Way, Personality, Madness

“Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Robert Chambers, Chambers's Information for the People (1875) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=vNpTAAAAYAAJ

Law, Art, Mathematics, Nature

“You wanted God’s ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 37
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses (1843-1844)

God

“Romantically speaking, the idea of lovers experiencing the ultimate orgasmic rapture while floating in zero gravity is a metaphor.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)

Lovers

“I thought, wow, those people are showing off like me, that’s what I do at home. I can do that and get paid. That was my first realisation that maybe I wasn’t going to be a secretary or a postwoman or a lollipop woman. I did have a moment of thinking I liked the lollipop woman idea. But can you imagine? I would be like, ‘F**king move your car!’ I don’t think that would work.”

Michelle Gomez (1966) Scottish actress

An interview with the Sunday Herald talking about when she went to see Kiss Me Kate when she was seven.

People, Cars, Home, Imagination

“There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of the 1745 — the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs — the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons — the total eradication of the Jacobite party […]. […] This race has now almost entirely vanished from the land, and with it, doubtless, much absurd political prejudice — but also many living examples of singular ad disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour. […] for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction, I have embodied in imaginary scenes […].”

Walter Scott book Waverley

Source: Waverley (1814), Chapter LXXII, A postscript, which should have been a preface

Faith, Change, Loyalty

“Another thing Tom and I enjoy doing is visiting our small circle of friends, so spending an afternoon in Malibu with David and Yolanda is always a nice little escape. It’s always good to bounce creative ideas off of someone as incredibly talented as David. Even after all of his success in the business, he’s still willing to listen with a fresh set of ears and gives great feedback.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne's blog for Bravo http://www.bravotv.com/the-real-housewives-of-beverly-hills/season-6/blogs/erika-girardi/erika-girardi-its-quite-obvious (2015)

Business, Success

“The purpose of income calculations in practical affairs is to give people an indication of the amount which they can consume without impoverishing themselves. Following out this idea, it would seem that we ought to define a man's income as the maximum value which he can consume during a week, and still expect to be as well off at the end of the week as he was at the beginning.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Value and capital, (1939), p. 172

People

“The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Fear, Reality, Sense

“I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say — learn as much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause of the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Many of these precepts which he quotes here have been quoted as originating with Lord Acton.
The Study of History (1895)

Men, Books, School, Problem

“And for me, it's pretty clear-cut that until we learn some better explanation for how life began, there is a God who always existed and created the heavens and the earth. And until somebody gives me a better explanation, I'll go for it. And it doesn't scare me at all when scientists say, "Oh, but that can't be proved," because neither can any of the Darwinian hypotheses about how life began be proved. Anyway, I couldn't give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. It doesn't earn any extra respect from me, because it's not as if science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Interviews: Ben Stein is Expelled! Christianity Today Movies, Christianity Today Movies: Interview with Ben Stein, 15 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/benstein.html,

Life, God, People, Learning

“Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion--which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea--you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset and find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

Way, Thinking, Parent, Animals

“I'd like to protect children, too, but… is everything worth sacrificing to that? I mean, drugs have done a lot of good. […] They've midwived a lot of good ideas… lot of great songs, you know? I think "Penny Lane" is worth 10 dead kids. […] I think Dark Side of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids. There, I said it.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

I'm Swiss (2005)

Children, Thinking, Dead

“Now - how can we possibly examine something we use all the time and presuppose in every statement? How can we criticize the terms in which we habitually express our observations? Let us see! The first step in our criticism of commonly-used concepts is to create a measure of criticism, something with which these concepts can be compared. Of course, we shall later want to know a little more about the measuring stick itself; for example, we shall want to know whether it is better than, or perhaps not as good as, the material examined. But in order for this examination to start there must be a measuring-stick in the first place. Therefore, the first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds with the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen. This step is, again, counter-inductive, Counter-induction is thus both a fact”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

science could not exist without it - and a legitimate and much needed move in the game of science.
Pg 68.
Against Method (1975)

Religion, Game, Science, Time

“Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize.... It is essentially practical and passionate.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Studio International 171 – June 1966, p. 280
1961 - 1975

People, Passion, Drawing

“I was planning on writing a detailed review of several books on web security tonight, but the Obama collapse has superseded my best-laid plans. Here’s another open thread for this important topic, as America wrestles with the issue of whether it would be a good idea to elect a President with a 20-year history of associating with people who hate America.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

March 14, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=29285_Should_America_Have_a_President_Who_Associates_with_America-Haters&only

Hate, People, Books, History

“Universities are bastions of free speech and incubators of new and challenging ideas. But sometimes they fail to see the creeping extremism on their campuses. When David Irving goes to a university to deny the Holocaust – university leaders rightly come out and condemn him. They don’t deny his right to speak but they do challenge what he says. But when an Islamist extremist goes there to promote their poisonous ideology, too often university leaders look the other way through a mixture of misguided liberalism and cultural sensitivity.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)

Way, Universe

“Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 38 : A Little Glass of Rum, p. 393

Past

“Here we are, up to our ears in transcendence: Any organization or function is controlled by it. The building blocks for making living creatures are utilized by it. Thus, the entire world of living beings is transcended by phenomena that create finality. Natural selection working for the continuance and welfare of animals, plants, and man himself, is seen to be the grand law which organizes the living universe. So the Darwinians, who fancied they had exorcized finalism and transcendency but forgot to analyze critically the idea of natural selection, failed to see its implications or metaphysical consequences. They thought they were absolved from giving any finalization or deistic interpretation by decreeing that on earth all is but deceptive appearances; finality is a sham, guided evolution illusory. How is it possible to understand such an attitude?”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 2-3
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

World, Law, Understanding, Nature

“Is there any more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, or a doe, or a dog?”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

World, Dogs, Nature, Animals

“I will quickly admit that what I have is a faith. I cannot prove creation and you cannot prove evolution. If we approach it on the common ground that both ideas are religious, it will make a lot more sense. It is not science versus religion. Don’t let them use that phrase when they talk about the controversy of creation versus evolution. It is not science versus religion it is religion versus religion. Both of them are simply religious beliefs.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Faith, Religion, Sense, Science

“His having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an additional interest with him. I like the idea — a very proper compliment to an aunt! I rather imagine indeed that nieces are seldom chosen but out of compliment to some aunt or another. I daresay Ben [Anna's husband] was in love with me once, and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of scarlet fever.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to niece Anna (1814-11-30) regarding characters in Anna's novel [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Love, Imagination, Dead

“You don't gather knowledge when you are getting to know yourself; you lose it. Many of your firmest ideas go out the window. You may feel naked, vulnerable, threatened, argumentative, angry.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Feeling, Knowledge

“Cardan's originality in the matter seems to have been shown chiefly in four respects. First, he reduced the general equation to the type x^3 + bx = c; second, in a letter written August 4, 1539, he discussed the question of the irreducible case; third, he had the idea of the number of roots to be expected in the cubic; and, fourth, he made a beginning in the theory of symmetric functions. …With respect to the irreducible case… we have the cube root of a complex number, thus reaching an expression that is irreducible even though all three values of x turn out to be real. With respect to the number of roots to be expected in the cubic… before this time only two roots were ever found, negative roots being rejected. As to the question of symmetric functions, he stated that the sum of the roots is minus the coefficient of x2</sup”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, pp.461-464

Question, Time

“Back in those days, when I heard a mod that was better than mine I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out how this sound was made and how the idea was thought up. I still think this way.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

Amiga Music Preservation interview, 2006

Way, Thinking, Drawing

“In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of master over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Introduction
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980)

School, Art, Mathematics, Sense

“"You stupid mutt! How could you? My baby!
[Jacob] backed out the front door now as I stalked him, half-running backward down the stairs. "It wasn't my idea, Bella!"
"I've held her all of one time, and already you think you have some moronic wolfy claim to her? She's mine. […] How dare you imprint on my baby? Have you lost your mind?"”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Cullen and Jacob Black, p. 449
Twilight series, Breaking Dawn (2008)

Stupidity, Thinking, Time, Baby

“The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

Life, Nature, Dependency

“A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part I, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

People, Art

“As every enquiry, which regards religion, is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular, which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature. Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. But the other question, concerning the origin of religion in human nature, is exposed to some more difficulty. The belief of invisible, intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race, in all places and in all ages; but it has neither perhaps been so universal as to admit of no exception, nor has it been, in any degree, uniform in the ideas, which it has suggested. Some nations have been discovered, who entertained no sentiments of Religion, if travellers and historians may be credited; and no two nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely in the same sentiments.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Introduction
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Men, Age, Religion, Travel

“A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent”

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) American mathematician

Source: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 322; Cited in: Walter F. Buckley (1967) Sociology and modern systems theory. p. 82

World

“The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

1989
October
The Real Ethics Debate
D. B.
Mother Jones
0362-8841
31
http://books.google.com/books?id=EecDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA30
1980s

Money

“There is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

Downey, Maureen (interviewer), "Teaching introverts: Do schools prefer big talkers to big thinkers?", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 5, 2016.

Motivational, Back To Work

“I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground. Similarly, the idea [that] you can arrange for distributions of incomes which correspond to some conception of merit or need. If you need prices, including the prices of labor, to direct people to go where they are needed, you cannot have another distribution except the one from the market principle. I think that intellectually there is just nothing left of socialism.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Interview with Thomas W. Hazlett in May of 1977, as published in " The Road to Serfdom, Forseeing the Fall", in Reason magazine (July 1992) http://reason.com/archives/1992/07/01/the-road-from-serfdom 1960s–1970s

People, Communication, Understanding, Thinking

“I get that a lot because I've hung around with a lot of artists and I'm very close to a lot of them. I'm very involved in their work; I think a lot of my ideas have grown out of it, and that there's been some give and take.”

Frank Gehry (1929) Canadian-American (b.1929)

Source: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Frank Gehry, The City and Music (2002)

Thinking

“All we know at present of locomotion is the locomotion of one piece of matter with reference to other pieces. That can be freely granted, and the whole edifice of physics is consistent with the idea that locomotion through the ether is impossible to measure. But the impossibility has never been proved, and some day an exceptional phenomenon may be found.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

My Philosophy, p. 125 https://books.google.com/books?id=pC28TnExGEEC&pg=PA115 My Philosophy (1933)

“I cannot refrain… from expressing my surprise that, according to the report in The Times there should be so much complaint about the difficulty of understanding the new theory. It is evident that Einstein's little book "About the Special and the General Theory of Relativity in Plain Terms," did not find its way into England during wartime. Any one reading it will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; it is only to be regretted that it was impossible to avoid clothing them in pretty involved mathematical terms, but we must not worry about that. …
The Newtonian theory remains in its full value as the first great step, without which one cannot imagine the development of astronomy and without which the second step, that has now been made, would hardly have been possible. It remains, moreover, as the first, and in most cases, sufficient, approximation. It is true that, according to Einstein's theory, because it leaves us entirely free as to the way in which we wish to represent the phenomena, we can imagine an idea of the solar system in which the planets follow paths of peculiar form and the rays of light shine along sharply bent lines—think of a twisted and distorted planetarium—but in every case where we apply it to concrete questions we shall so arrange it that the planets describe almost exact ellipses and the rays of light almost straight lines.
It is not necessary to give up entirely even the ether. …according to the Einstein theory, gravitation itself does not spread instantaneously, but with a velocity that at the first estimate may be compared with that of light. …In my opinion it is not impossible that in the future this road, indeed abandoned at present, will once more be followed with good results, if only because it can lead to the thinking out of new experimental tests. Einstein's theory need not keep us from so doing; only the ideas about the ether must accord with it.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Books, Way, Imagination, Mathematics

“[T]here is a tremendous egotism and conceit in those popular articles and lectures entitled,"My Idea of Religion," or "My Idea of God." An individual religion can be as misleading and uninformed as an individual astronomy or an individual mathematics.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 4, p. 59

God, Religion, Mathematics

“Don’t you think it’s ironic that you have no idea what you’re supposed to do,” said Verily, “and yet so many people have gone to so much trouble to prevent you from doing it?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 3.

People, Thinking

“The players are not interested in the score, but merely in how many runs are necessary to tie and to win. They take nothing for granted in baseball. The idea is to win. The game's the thing.”

Moe Berg (1902–1972) baseball player, spy

September 1941, Atlantic Monthly Pitchers and Catchers

Game

“Observations interpreted by reason. Few, if any, ideas have had such impact on the lives of men.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 9 (p. 139)

Men

“In Denver, Nugget Coach Dan Issel said, "As I grew up, Wilt the Stilt was the player. Just the things he was able to do. I guess one year they told him he couldn't make as much money as he wanted because he couldn't pass the ball, so he went out and led the league in assists. "Watching Wilt, you always kind of got the idea he was just playing with people. That he was on cruise control and still 10 times better than anybody else that was playing at that time."”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

[Stewart, Larry, Giant Towered Over the Rest, The Los Angeles Times, 1999-10-13]
Scoring

Money, People, Time

“Since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the distribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. The conception, originally introduced by Hering and independently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon and has been received with some approval, especially by F. Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and structural change, a process frankly inconceivable.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 190

Life, Food, Way, Imagination

“In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Opening sentence, p. 1
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

God, Hope, Sex, Understanding

“Great changes are not caused by ideas alone; but they are not effected without ideas.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter III, The Movement Of Theory, p. 30.

Change

“Since World War Two, Britain's elite has suffered from a collective collapse of cultural nerve. Many things contributed: postwar exhaustion, the collapse of the British Empire (and therefore of national purpose), and post-colonial flagellatory guilt of the kind that white western liberals have made their specialty. This left the British establishment vulnerable to the revolutionary ideology of the New Left, at the core of which lay a hatred of western society. As a consequence, the British elite decided not only that the British nation was an embarrassment but also that the very idea of the nation was an anachronism.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

"The Country That Hates Itself" http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-country-that-hates-itself (June 16, 2006)

War, World, Suffering

“If you only knew…. how much I want to work… I have some new ideas that I would like to try out. [a few days before Monrandi's death in 1964]”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

a remark to Roberto Longhi, in 1964; as quoted in 'Morandi 1894 – 1964', published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 338
1945 - 1964

Death

“Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.”

H. G. Wells book The Soul of a Bishop

The Soul of a Bishop (1917)

Life, People

“Most theories of learning have been based on ideas of "reinforcement" of success. But all these theories postulate a single, centralized reward mechanism. I doubt this could suffice for human learning because the recognition of which events should be considered memorable cannot be a single, uniform process. It requires too much "intelligence." Instead I think such recognitions must be made, for each division of the mind, by some other agency that has engaged the present one for a purpose.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Intelligence, Thinking, Learning, Success

“So I come up with some ideas for the programmer to work with, and they decide what's good and what's impossible to implement, based on schedule or programming difficulty.”

Hirokazu Yasuhara (1965) Japanese video game designer

Gamasutra interview (2008)

“Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not — well, it's progress”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck (2002)

“As systematic inquiry into the natural facts was begun it was at once found that the accepted ideas of variation were unfounded. Variation was seen very frequently to be a definite and specific phenomenon, affecting different forms of life in different ways, but in all its diversity showing manifold and often obvious indications of regularity. This observation was not in its essence novel. Several examples of definite variation had been well known to Darwin and others, but many, especially Darwin himself in his later years, had nevertheless been disposed to depreciate the significance of such facts. They consequently then lapsed into general disparagement. Upon more careful inquiry the abundance of such phenomena proved to be far greater than was currently supposed, and a discussion of their nature brought into prominence a consideration of greater weight, namely that the differences by which these definite or discontinuous variations are constituted again and again approximate to and are comparable with the class of differences by which species are distinguished from each other.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Preface
Problems In Genetics (1913)

Life, Way, Nature

“As soon as you establish concrete intention, you begin to notice all kinds of things in your world that relate to that intention. Ideas and opportunities seem to appear from nowhere, almost as though by magic.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

World, Appearance

“Zeev Sternhell has conclusively demonstrated that nearly all the ideas found in fascism first appeared in France. The fusion of racial nationalism with revolutionary and semicollectivist socioeconomic aspirations first occurred there, and in parallel fashion France was the first major country in which the revolutionary left rejected parliamentarianism while supporting a kind of nationalism.”

Stanley G. Payne (1934) American historian

Source: Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980), A History of Fascism, 1914—1945 (1995), p. 291

Fashion, Support, Appearance, Country

“Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Wave Mechanics,” p. 75
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Intelligence, Drink, Science, Change

“The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany resembled the ‘state socialism’ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon coming to power, under which private enterprise would work for the government—an idea Lenin was force to abandon under the pressure of the ‘Left Communists’.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

“The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. The new cycle which begins with the ninth year of the Fascist regime places the alternative in even greater relief — either we or they, either their ideas or ours, either our State or theirs!”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

"Fundamentals of critical argumentation" (2005) by Douglas Walton, p. 243
Undated

World, Democracy

“The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

How to Make Guys Like You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFiApf_m4H0 YouTube

Way, Boy

“Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 2 (p. 58)

“Apropos of the "The Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: —
"Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers save the growing heritage
That makes complete manhood."
But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.”

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

Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the "Cabinet Edition" of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4

Money, Pain, Question, Thinking

“This idea of oh poor little black person, oh poor little poor person, oh poor little woman, oh poor little indigenous person, everybody's a poor little something!”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Vice. Meet Brazil's Donald Trump: He's Deliberately Outrageous and He Wants to Be President https://news.vice.com/article/meet-brazils-donald-trump-hes-deliberately-outrageous-and-he-wants-to-be-president. Vice (27 April 2016).

Personality

“Regarding public Christmas displays: At some point, someone who worked at Rockefeller Center must have said, "Boys, I have a great idea for Christmas. Let's kill a beautiful tree that's been alive for seventy-five years and bring it to New York City. We'll stand it up in Rockefeller Plaza and conceal its natural beauty by hanging shiny, repulsive, man-made objects on it, and let it stand there slowly dying for several weeks while simpleminded children stare at it and people from Des Moines take pictures of it. That way, perhaps we can add our own special, obscene imprint to Christmas in Midtown."”

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

Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004)

Children, People, Beauty, Way

“I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

My Autobiography (1964)

Feeling, Time, Personality, Clothes

“I believe that in our period it is definitely necessary that, as far as possible, the paint is applied in pure colours, set next to each other in a pointillist or diffuse manner. This is stated strongly, and yet it relates to the idea which is the basis of meaningful expression in form, as I see it. It seems to me that the clarity of ideas should be accompanied by a clarity of technique.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Israel Querido, Summer of 1909; published in the weekly magazine 'De Controleur' 23 Oct, 1909; as cited in English translation, in Two Mondrian sketchbooks 1912 - 1914, ed. Robert P. Welsh & J. M. Joosten, Amsterdam 1969 p. 10
1900's

Painting

“…nor have I found occasion to depart from the plan… the rejection of the whole doctrine of series in the establishment of the fundamental parts both of the Differential and Integral Calculus. The method of Lagrange… had taken deep root in elementary works; it was the sacrifice of the clear and indubitable principle of limits to a phantom, the idea that an algebra without limits was purer than one in which that notion was introduced. But, independently of the idea of limits being absolutely necessary even to the proper conception of a convergent series, it must have been obvious enough to Lagrange himself, that all application of the science to concrete magnitude, even in his own system, required the theory of limits.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Science, Parting

“Know that the difficulties which lead to confusion in the question what is the purpose of the Universe or of any of its parts, arise from two causes: first, man has an erroneous idea of himself, and believes that the whole world exists only for his sake; secondly, he is ignorant both about the nature of the sublunary world, and about the Creator's intention to give existence to all beings whose existence is possible, because existence is undoubtedly good.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

World, Question, Nature, Universe

“Iraqis have not had a permanent constitution since 1958. This process of engaging society as a whole in its own future, engaging it once again in the idea of a permanent constitution, is a beginning, it seems to me, of creating the kind of civil society that we hope to see flourish in Iraq once again.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"This way to the promised land", Globe and Mail (April 10, 2003)

Hope, Future

“Contact with like-minded painters, a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through... One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

Dependency

“We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.
A remark reported in Psychologie de l'art (1927) by Henri Delacroix, p. 93; as translated in Literary Impressionism (1973), Maria Elisabeth Kronegger, p. 77.
Observations

“My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

Vol. I, Ch. 24 : "The Fixed Period".
The Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

Life, Men, Age

“Our solutions provide something that is 100% right, all the time. That is the idea. The cobbled together gunk never does […] It's unfortunate the application-level people are all caught up in cobble, cobble, cobble and just never learn how to evolve.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Comparing CARP and pfsync, the OpenBSD redundant firewall solution, to a collection of shell scripts
[Re: using OpenBSD instead of F5 Big-IP (was Cisco routers), MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=111163273330909, 2005-3-24, 2017-12-26]

People, Learning, Time

“My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, Imagination, Nature, Knowledge

“Often the raw ideas like ‘Relax’ and ‘Rage Hard’ - are the best. ‘Rage Hard’ just happened. There was little conscious effort.”

Holly Johnson (1960) British artist

Frankie go bang! http://www.zttaat.com/article.php?title=989 by Paul Simper at zttaat.com, Accessed May 2014.

Effort, Rage

“In this reconstruction, the idea of reason comprises three elements: impartiality with regard to persons, temporal impartiality, and rational or well-founded beliefs. No doubt we should add goodwill, in order to exclude impartial malice.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Personality

“The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival…The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself. I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in — [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 157, 0-517-53502-5]

Life, People, Truth, Lie

“I have divided [the different sections of mankind] into three classes. The first, to which you and I have the honour to belong, marches under the banner of the progress of the human mind. It is composed of scientists, artists and all those who hold liberal ideas. On the banner of the second is written 'No innovation!' All proprietors who do not belong in the first category are part of the second. The third class, which rallies round the slogan of 'Equality' is made up of the rest of the people.”

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) French early socialist theorist

[J]e me propose en m'adressant à différentes fractions de l'humanité, que je divise en trois classes: la première, celle à laquelle vous et moi avons l'honneur d'appartenir, marche sous l'étendard des progrès de l'esprit humain; elle marche sous l'étendard des progrès de l'esprit humain; elle est composée des savants, des artistes et de tous les hommes qui ont des idées libérales. Sur la bannière de la seconde il est écrit: point d'innovation; tous les propriétaires qui n'entrent point dans la première sont attachés à la seconde. La troisième, qui se rallie au mot égalité, renferme le surplus de l'humanité.
Oeuvres choisies: précédées d'un essai sur sa doctrine (1839), p. 15

People, Parting

Quotes about ideas and thoughts page 27

Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 27