Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 31

“The great multitudes continue to develop; the new ideas continue to attain their proper force within society; the material possibilities for the full development of all members of society make the task much more fruitful. The present is a time for struggle; the future is ours.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Time, Future

“Does anyone not have any problems with taking ideas seriously? I think I'm in this category because ideas like cryonics, the Singularity, [unfriendly artificial intelligence], and Tegmark's mathematical universe were all immediately obvious to me as ideas to take seriously, and I did so without much conscious effort or deliberation.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In a discussion thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ideas-seriously#Ym77AptKtD2h9bXXd on LessWrong, August 2010

Intelligence, Mathematics, Problem, Thinking

“There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

" Cargo Cult Science http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 341

Problem, Thinking, Science, Help

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

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

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

Books, Art

“In Islam, democracy is included and people are free in Islam, both in expressing their opinions and their actions, until there is no conspiracy and they don't bring up ideas which would deviate Iranian generation.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Imam's Sahife, vol. 5, p. 468. (15 January 1979)
Foreign policy

People, Democracy

“If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by “failure is the mother of success” and “a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 人们要想得到工作的胜利即得到预想的结果，一定要使自己的思想合于客观外界的规律性，如果不合，就会在实践中失败。人们经过失败之后，也就从失败取得教训，改正自己的思想使之适合于外界的规律性，人们就能变失败为胜利，所谓“失败者成功之母”，“吃一堑长一智”，就是这个道理。

World, Law, Failure, Success

“Well, despite what many gay “marriage” activists say, having two mummies or two daddies does not replace God’s design of one mum and one dad. God designed marriage—for one man and one woman—from the very beginning and blessed this union and said, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). This is God’s design for the family! And since God is the all-wise, all-knowing Creator, what He designed is obviously the only true way for us, not what sinful, fallible human beings try to make. Of course, no family is perfect—we live in a fallen world that is groaning from sin—but we are not at liberty to change the design for marriage and family that was given to us by our Creator. When we do, disaster is around the corner. I encourage you to be bold in standing on God’s Word and refusing to compromise with man’s ideas about what a marriage or a family should look like. We need to unashamedly uphold the design given to us by our Creator.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Gay “Marriage”—Tragic for America’s Children https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/07/13/gay-marriage-tragic-americas-children/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 13, 2015) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

God, Marriage, World, Family

“"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked.
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

page 4-5
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Life, Flowers, Mathematics, Light

“Trump owes less to Willkie’s tradition than to Benito Mussolini’s, and not only because of the superficial: Trump’s chin-out toughness, sweeping right-hand gestures and talk of his “huge” successes and his “stupid” opponents all evoke the Italian dictator’s style. Monday’s breathtaking announcement that he would block all Muslims from entering the United States has many pointing out the obvious fascist overtones… Trump uses many of the fascist’s tools: a contempt for facts, spreading a pervasive sense of fear and overwhelming crisis, portraying his backers as victims, assigning blame to foreign or alien actors and suggesting only his powerful personality can transcend the crisis. He endorsed the violence done to a dissenter at one of his rallies, and he now floats the idea of making entry to the United States contingent on religion.”

Dana Milbank (1968) American journalist

Donald Trump, America’s modern Mussolini https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-isnt-todays-wendell-willkie-hes-todays-benito-mussolini/2015/12/08/77c81b0c-9ddc-11e5-a3c5-c77f2cc5a43c_story.html, The Washington Post. (8 December 2015)

Stupidity, Fear, Religion, Sense

“The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God, Hostility, World, Religion

“Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort to make our moral experience resemble more closely what so much of moral thought already supposes it to be like calls for a practice of role defiance and role jumbling that has little place in traditional moral doctrines.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), pp. 563-564

Effort

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

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

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

Death, War, Books, World

“One obvious way to specify what it is that is “due” to someone is to appeal to existing legal codes, but what they will prescribe will vary enormously from one time and place to another. A second account of justice might appeal to some notion of merit or desert. The third approach is Aristotle’s “general” conception, which simply identified “justice” with the sum of all the virtues and excellences. A fourth conception of justice is the idea that justice is in some way to be connected to equality of shares, resources, or outcomes. Finally there is the idea of fairness or impartiality of procedure. One might think that Rawls’s view derives some of its apparent plausibility because of a gradual slide between the various senses of “justice.” People start from a vague intuition that justice as a “general” concept (in the third sense above) is extremely important for the proper functioning of a society; they then find it easy to shift from this to a particular conception that connects “justice” with fairness of procedure and (a certain kind of limited) equality.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 81-82.

People, Justice, Way, Thinking

“V has come to be my last Metal Gear.
It has been an honor and a joy to have been given the opportunity to work on Metal Gear for nearly twenty amazing years.
Tоday's computer graphics, technology, and hardware—compared to those of twenty years ago—have evolved so significantly. As a result, the art that can be created has dramatically changed.
However, the process of conceptualizing and creating a character by understanding their personality, their habits, their backstory, and the role they play—this has fundamentally remained the same. Refining ideas and doing countless sketches over and over are tasks that at times feel formidable and complex. At the same time, they are very fun and gratifying.”

Yoji Shinkawa (1971) Japanese illustrator

Foreword to The Art of Metal Gear Solid V, Dark Horse Comics, 2016, p. 7 https://books.google.it/books?id=BerxDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA7.

Art, Feeling, Understanding, Change

“Whether we know it or not, we always approach the past with some preconceived ideas, with a rudimentary theory we wish to test. In this as in many other respects the cultural historian does not differ all that much from his predecessor, the traveller to foreign lands. Not the professional traveller who is only interested in one particular errand, be it the exploration of a country’s kinship system or its hydroelectric schemes, but the broad-minded traveller who wants to understand the culture of the country in which he finds himself.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

Travel, Understanding, Past, Country

“Government is the most successful idea in the world, but for all its success and importance it is something imperfect. There is no ideal state. After thousands of years it is still a mixture of good and evil.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 116

World, Evil, Success

“The word “vegan,” newer and more challenging than “vegetarian” because it includes every sentient being in its circle of concern and addresses all forms of unnecessary cruelty from an essentially ethical perspective, with a motivation of compassion rather than health or purity, points to an ancient idea that has been articulated for many centuries, especially in the world's spiritual traditions.”

Will Tuttle book The World Peace Diet

Source: The World Peace Diet (2005), Ch. 2

Health, World, Motivation

“Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

People, World, Faith, Religion

“My ideas developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans Jager [leader of the 'Kristiania Bohemia' since 1883]. Many people have mistakenly claimed that my ideas were formed under the influence of Strindberg and the Germans.... but that is wrong. They had already been formed by then.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

Quote in a draft letter to Broby-Johansen, Berlin, 11 December 1926, Munch Museum
1896 - 1930

People

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
Jobs: The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s

Money, People, World

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

Joyce Cary (1888–1957) Irish writer

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

Books, World, Feeling, Reality

“Erika Jayne is six words: fantasy, love, escape, glitz, glamour, and fun. I think women should live out loud. I think that we should be fearless. I think we should express ourselves. I think we should have fun. And I don’t think anyone should dictate to you when your best days are, or that you are too old to express yourself. You are of worth and value in your 40s, 50s, and 60s. You don’t have to stop doing what you love simply because you’re not 25. I just think that those are old ideas that need to be broken and discarded quite honestly.”

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

Erika Jayne interview to Refinery29 https://www.refinery29.com/erika-jayne-girardi-real-housewives-of-beverly-hills-interview (2017)

Love, Women, Thinking

“You get energy from [being hated]. The idea that one side of the political spectrum is more right than the other is ridiculous. Pretty much every issue in this country could be settled with a reasonable compromise. Then we could move on to the next thing. We could move on to the real question which is world domination. … We do have to take over or at least adopt a few more states or something.”

John Reed (novelist) (1969) American writer

Interview with Suicidegirls.com http://suicidegirls.com.mx/interviews/John+Reed/

Hate, World, Question, Country

“The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 188

Universe, Perfection

“You're going to have a deportation force, and you're going to do it humanely and you're going to bring the country -- and, frankly, the people, because you have some excellent, wonderful people, some fantastic people hat have been here for a long period of time. Don't forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting in line to come into this country and they're waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we're going to build the wall. It's going to be a real deal. It's going to be a real wall. There was a picture in one of the magazines where they had a wall this tall and they were taking drugs over the wall. They built a ramp over the wall and the truck was going up and down. They were using it like a highway; the wall is like a highway. It's not going to happen. It's going to be a Trump wall. It's going to be a real wall. And it's going to stop people and it's going to be good. But your friend Thomas Friedman called me and said, hah, there should be a big door. I said going to be a big door. I love the expression. There's going to be a big beautiful nice door. People are going to come in and they're going to come in legally. But we have no choice. Otherwise, we don't have a country. We don't even know how many people. We don't know if it's 8 million or if it's 20 million. We have no idea how many people are in our country. And then you see what happened with Kate in San Francisco. You see what happens with all of the things going on, all of the tremendous crime going on. It costs us $200 billion a year for illegal immigration right now. $200 billion a year, maybe $250, maybe $300. They don't even know. We're going to stop it. We're going to run it properly and we're going to stop it.”

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

On his immigration plan (2015 November 11)
2010s, 2015

Love, People, Beauty, Time

“I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so frequently asked me—"How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"”

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

Girl, Question, Thinking

“When you put the corset on it gives you a glimpse into what those women's lives must have been like, a little bit. Just the fact that they did that to themselves to look a certain way gives you an idea of how important it was to be a proper young lady in those times, to kind of fit the mold of what they were trying to accomplish socially. The director, Jay Russell told me to use the corset as a device to remind myself that not only physically, but emotionally, she was trapped in her surroundings and wanted desperately to get out. It was definitely a reminder because the thing is so tight!”

Alexis Bledel (1981) American actress

About the film Tuck Everlasting
[Lynn B, http://www.agirlsworld.com/rachel/hangin-with/alexisbledel.html, We're Hangin' With.....Alexis Bledel, A Girl's World, October 7, 2002, 2007-02-26]

Women, Way, Time

“To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

"Reunion in Brooklyn" http://books.google.com/books?id=uzz94pR0VQsC&q=%22To+live+without+killing+is+a+thought+which+could+electrify+the+world+if+men+were+only+capable+of+staying+awake+long+enough+to+let+the+idea+soak+in%22&pg=PA131#v=onepage, Sunday After the War (1944)

Men, World

“We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language, by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.”

Frank Herbert book The Santaroga Barrier

Source: The Santaroga Barrier (1968), Chapter Ten

Law, Way, Reality

“The idea of an art world forms the backbone of my analysis. "Art world" is commonly used by writers on the arts in a loose and metaphoric way, mostly to refer to the most fashionable people associated with those newsworthy objects and events that command astronomical prices. I have used the term in a more technical way, to denote the the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p.x.

People, World, Art, Way

“The question now is how to fill the void Jensen's death leaves, particularly for scholars open to scientific inquiry who challenge some of his conclusions. There is no substitute for someone of great intellectual caliber who disagrees with you. With Jensen no longer alive, we will have to invent him. But we cannot really do that, because no one is so constructed as to put the same energy and imagination into a fictitious opponent as we put into polishing our own ideas. No one can pretend to believe what they do not believe, but I hope there is a young scholar out there with the convictions and mind of Arthur Jensen. I am sometimes asked why I spoke so well of him. The answer is that it was easy.”

James Robert Flynn (1934–2020) New Zealand scholar

Flynn, J. R. (2012). Arthur Robert Jensen (1923–2012). Intelligence.

Death, Hope, Imagination, Question

“Software patents may be used as a form of outright coercion, providing protection against theft of ideas as a potentially high cost to future inventors.”

Nathaniel Borenstein (1957) American computer scientist

[Borenstein, Nathaniel S., Programming as if people mattered : friendly programs, software engineering, and other noble delusions, 1991, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 9780691087528, 53, 4. print.]
Attributed

Future

“The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about 'the invisible hand' reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 2

Law

“I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded.”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

As quoted in A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (1996) by Hao Wang

Religion

“Then there is this idea that the world owes you a living. Here is a little thought about that. It isn't particularly logical but it makes my point. You were paid when you were born, with the privilege of living. Death is all that is coming to you. Life came to you when you were born.”

John Sloan (1871–1951) American painter

Ibid., p. 27.
The Gist of Art (1939)

Life, Death, World

“We are entirely for the idea that Europe shall be free from nuclear weapons, from medium-range weapons as well as tactical weapons. That would be a real zero option.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Nuclear War: The Search for Solutions (1985) by Leonard V. Johnson, Helen Caldicott, Thomas L. Perry and Dianne DeMille

“"Dangerous" does not mean exciting or bold; it means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.”

Daniel T. Gilbert (1957) American psychologist

Daniel T. Gilbert (2007) in: John Brockman. What is your dangerous idea?: today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable. Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 42

“Protocols:
Number 15, para. 6
You cannot imagine to what extent the wisest of the goyim can be brought to a state of unconscious naivete in the presence of this condition of high conceit of themselves, and at the same time how easy it is to take the heart out of them…. These tigers in appearance have the souls of sheep and the wind blows freely through their heads. We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorbtion of individuality by the symbolic unit of Collectivism….”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Soul, Imagination, Appearance, Time

“Observing and performing the process is the best way to develop insight into it. However, the team must be vigilant about avoiding the temptation to overstudy. The goal must be to move quickly to redesign. Before concluding we should comment on another tool that is available to reengineering teams, namely benchmarking. Essentially, benchmarking means looking for the companies that are doing something best and learning how they do it in order to emulate them… Used this way, benchmarking is just a tool for catching up, not for jumping way ahead. Benchmarking can, however, spark ideas in the team—especially if teams use as their benchmarks companies from outside their own industries.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 132

Way, Learning

“There is an over-informing force which ultimately brings all the ideas together, and does not allow one idea alone to run away with India. And, that has been demonstrated again and again in terms of conflicting ideologies, conflicting social systems, political systems, all these somehow have been contained in an overall framework.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

“A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's.”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Pages 11-12
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

Reading, Christ

“The more recent concern with complex adaptive organization has led to the notion of contingency as the important key. Thus Wiener, while working in the field of communications and probability theory, became convinced 'that a significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 82 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61. Buckley is here referring to Norbert Wiener (1953) I am a Mathematician; The Later Life of a Prodigyan, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 322.

World, Communication

“The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—
they painted speeding automobiles—
they painted lamps bursting with light—
they painted steaming locomotives and swift bicyclists—
the Futurists stylized their compositions, adopting a violently colored look; with synoptic and geometric shapes they multiplied and decomposed the rhythms of objects and landscapes in order to increase their dynamic qualities and to give an effective rendering of their swift ideas, the states of mind, their conceptions.”

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Italian painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer

Depero (1931) "Futurism and Adverticing Art"; Republished in: Futurism : an anthology http://modernistarchitecture.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ebooksclub-org__futurism__an_anthology__henry_mcbride_series_in_modernism_.pdf. edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, (2011), p. 290

Art, Color, Light, Painting

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

Star, Light, Fight

“On the other hand, the constructive and often scholarly criticism is almost always helpful in thinking about or rethinking decisions. It is my view that constructive criticism goes with the turf, especially when the stakes are so high and the cases arouse passions and emotions. And, in a free society, the precious freedom of speech and the strength of ideas, we at the court could not possibly claim exemption from such criticism. Moreover, we are not infallible, just final.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Thinking, Decision, Freedom, Passion

“I was talking earlier — about anarchy and fascism being the two poles of politics. On one hand you’ve got fascism, with the bound bundle of twigs, the idea that in unity and uniformity there is strength; on the other you have anarchy, which is completely determined by the individual, and where the individual determines his or her own life. Now if you move that into the spiritual domain, then in religion, I find very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. The word “religion” comes from the root word ligare, which is the same root word as ligature, and ligament, and basically means “bound together in one belief.” It’s basically the same as the idea behind fascism; there’s not even necessarily a spiritual component it. Everything from the Republican Party to the Girl Guides could be seen as a religion, in that they are bound together in one belief. So to me, like I said, religion becomes very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. And by the same token, magic becomes the spiritual equivalent of anarchy, in that it is purely about self-determination, with the magician simply a human being writ large, and in more dramatic terms, standing at the center of his or her own universe. Which I think is a kind of a spiritual statement of the basic anarchist position. I find an awful lot in common between anarchist politics and the pursuit of magic, that there’s a great sympathy there.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Alan Moore on Anarchism (2009)

Life, Religion, Girl, Thinking

“Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted—for the constraint of a definite “thing” cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw “evolution” or “social organization,” not to mention the more mundane “digestion” or “self-interest,” without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 428
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Imagination, History, Reality, Drawing

“One way to clarify the origin and character, if not the justification, of the ideal inspiring our programmatic institutional ideas is to say that our program arises from the generalization of aims broadly shared by the great secular doctrines of emancipation of the recent past—both liberal and socialist—and by the social theories that supported them. At the heart of each of these doctrines lay the belief that the weakening of social divisions and hierarchies would reveal deeper commonalities and liberate productive and creative powers. The theoretical and practical consequences of this belief were drastically constricted by dogmatic assumptions about the possible forms of social change and their possible institutional expressions. We have attacked the second set of constraints and therefore, by implication, the first. The result is a more generalized or radicalized version of the social ideal. Our attack on these constraints has led us to rethink the content of the progressive cause.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: The Critical Legal Studies Movementː Another Time, A Greater Task (2015), p. 104-5

Way, Support, Change, Past

“A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 120

“Sri Aurobindo, for one, insisted on the radically different spirit in Sikhism as compared with Islam: 'Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. (…) The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akla, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Sri Aurobindo: Foundations of Indian Culture, p.135
2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

God, Truth, Way, Drawing

“But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality. Supporters of bilingual education thus want it both ways. They propose bilingual schooling as a way of helping students acquire the skills of the classroom crucial for public success. But they likewise insist that bilingual instruction will give students a sense of their identity apart from the public. Behind this screen there gleams an astonishing promise: One can become a public person while still remaining a private person. At the very same time one can be both! There need be no tension between the self in the crowd and the self apart from the crowd! Who would not want to believe such an idea?”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

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

Education, School, Way, Support

“Because of smart policies, Finland is able to spend less per student than do Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States on all levels, with much better outcomes. The good news for America, though, is that for precisely this reason, Finland is an encouraging example for any country that is facing diminished budgets. […] One area in which Finns excel is cutting administrative costs. It turns out that Finns did not invent most of the education policies they are currently using. Americans did. Child-centered education, problem solving-based learning, educating people for democratic life—these are all ideas introduced by American thinkers. […] It doesn’t seem, then, like much of a stretch to suggest that the United States could borrow smart ideas about education from Finland.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 4

Life, People, Education, Problem

“Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Coddling Killers," http://spectator.org/archives/2004/12/29/coddling-killers The American Spectator, December 29, 2004. 2000s

Training

“I think the circle is very abstract. I could make up stories of what the circle means to men, but I don't know if it is that conscious. I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don't think I had a sexual anthropomorphic, or geometric meaning. It wasn't a breast and it wasn't a circle representing life and eternity…. I remember always working with contradiction and contradictory forms which is my idea also in life. The whole absurdity of life, everything for me has always been opposite. Nothing has ever been in the middle. When I gave you my autobiography, my life never had anything normal or in the center. It was always extremes.”

Eva Hesse (1936–1970) German-born American sculptor

[Johnson, Ellen Halda, American Artists on Art: From 1940 to 1980, August 1, 1982, Westview Press, ISBN 0064301125, p. 192]

Life, Men, Thinking

“Instead of copying Nature, we [ Cubists ] create a 'milieu', of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy of literature and music. Your [ Gelett Burgess is American] Edgar Poe did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in 'The Fall of the House of Ushur.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it. Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 413

Life, Art, Music, Color

“It may take years to put your idea into action. But if it has real worth, time will prove it, and you will have something that will endure.”

William A. Patterson (1899–1980) President of United Airlines from 1934 until 1966

Unsourced

Time

“‘… the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Clearing a Space (2008)

History, Time

“Shed the idea that you were programming in an OO style. There is no such thing. You were only programming a particular object system. Now you get to program a different object system.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: How much use of CLOS? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/60f4c36a707db3fe (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“Nuclear weapons began to exert an important influence on military policy immediately following World War II, although their capabilities, limitations, and political implications were only vaguely understood. But it seemed clear they they represented destructiveness at a cheap price. This point was important because of the need to replace the armed forces demobilized so thoroughly and wastefully at the end of World War II in the furor to "bring the boys home." To have rebuilt similar forces in the succeeding years would have been costly both in dollars and in political "face." Neither the Truman administration nor the American people were prepared to foot such a bill, particularly that part of the program which would have been a tacit admission of lack of foresight. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the idea of relying on nuclear weapons and strategic bombing for national defense had great appeal. Such a military program appeared to offer us a way out of fighting dirty, costly wars with Communist masses on the ground. It was a way to meet manpower with mechanical power. Its apparent cheapness gave rise to the slogan, "More bang for a buck."”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

But this reliance on Massive Retaliation overlooked the fact that atomic bangs could eventually be bought for rubles as well as dollars.
Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 12-13

War, People, World, Way

“War is destructive. The idea that you can do something constructive with war is becoming this facile, dangerous, intellectually lax political interpretation of military counter-insurgency theory. I want to hear [President Barack Obama] say that doesn't work. That war is never constructive.”

Rachel Maddow (1973) American journalist

San Francisco Chronicle (27 March 2009) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=37501

War

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

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

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

People, Communication, Birthday, Appearance

“I got the idea [for Earthlings] because I was filming some public service announcements. It was mostly domestic animals, dogs and cats, and when they were killed on the street or euthanized in the shelters, they were put into this room that resembles a large refrigerator. But when I saw them piled up in there, it suddenly made me think of meat in a refrigerator. Even though they looked nothing like meat, there was this parallel – dead animals kept in a fridge – and that made me think of cows and chickens and pigs and eggs and milk, and so on. That was the beginning of Earthlings really, the first spark of inspiration.”

Shaun Monson American filmmaker

“Exclusive: Earthlings' Shaun Monson On New Iberia Research Center And More”, interview with Ecorazzi (25 March 2009) http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/03/25/exclusive-earthlings-shaun-monson-on-new-iberia-research-center-and-more/.

Dogs, Cats, Thinking, Animals

“After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer work in studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at a loss when confronting a new idea or image.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Loss

“It is a special kind of secret how these Asiatic elements [of American Indians] came over the Bering Strait long ago. It's the same with the coyote. When I worked with the coyote [this quote refers to the performance by Beuys when he was locked up together with a coyote in a cage for a few days in René Block Gallery, New York City in 1974], I had the idea that it was not an indigenous animal. It came as a wolf with the Indians over the Bering Strait. And this Asiatic wolf, or step wolf, changed his whole biological configuration and behavior. Then it was my idea to import the coyote once more back to Europe, and you could see it [the coyote] change back to the European wolf or Siberian wolf. It is a transformed European wolf, the coyote, how it came to the character of a brush wolf.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Beuys in an interview with Alan Moore and Edit deAk, 1974; as cited in: Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man., Carin Kuoni; New York, 1993, p. 213
1970's

Secret, Behavior, Quotes, Wolf

“Lots of us SF-types like the idea of traveling to the Future (although, having now done so once myself -- the hard way -- I’m less sure), but why do we imagine the Future would want us? Oh, a few 21st-century Icemen, perhaps, as historical curiosities, but in our hundreds of millions? It would be like the greatest wave of immigration ever, but from the past into other people’s Now. It might seem to them like sacrificing resources needed for their children to their great-great-great-grandparents. Counter-evolutionary, among other things.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Children, People, Way, Travel

“We've got so many ideas for songs and good riffs, and the more we work, the more we tour, we're getting more ideas, just more. It's just gonna get better and better. I can't see an end to it. It's like infinity rock and roll.”

Bon Scott (1946–1980) Rock musician

Australian Music to the World interview at Symphony Hall, Atlanta, August 1978.

“The idea of a ‘system approach’ is both quite popular and quite unpopular. It’s popular because it sounds good to say that the whole system is being considered, but it’s quite unpopular because it sounds either like a lot of nonsense or else downright dangerous – so much evil can be created under the guise of serving the whole.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 11

Evil

“The idea that all problems either have a solution or can be shown to be pseudo-problems is not one I share.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

Source: Outside Ethics (2005), p. 9.

Problem

“What's all this talk about me being teamed with Ginger Rogers? I will not have it Leland--I did not go into pictures to be teamed with her or anyone else, and if that is the program in mind for me I will not stand for it. I don't mind making another picture with her but as for this teams idea, it's out.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Fred Astaire in a letter to his agent Leland Hayward dated February 9, 1934. He went on to make a further nine musical films with Rogers. (M).

“Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody (Guthrie)… Not to be cynical… That cynicism… It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity… which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion… You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while.”

Billy Bragg (1957) English singer-songwriter and left-wing political activist

From Curtis, Hillman, MTIV, Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002), page 221.

Optimism, Sense, Learning

“It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy that dealt with “beauty” and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this “habit” grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically conflicted with artistic considerations before recent times, not only because the morphological characteristics of art perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, because the apparent other “functions” of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture, etc.) used art to cover up art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

World, Beauty, Art, Error

“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

God, Indifference

“Adventurous minds, which wait for and receieve their ideas only from chance.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Chance, Waiting

“We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast.”

Jonathan Sacks (1948) British rabbi

Speech to Kenan Ethics department, 2009.
Universal, 2009

World

“We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Mathematics

“By what name shall we call this animating principle of the universe, this source of all phenomana? Some call it Force or Energy or Mind, others call it God. Some call this idea a working hypothesis, others call it Faith.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 15

God, Faith, Universe, Animals

“Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced. Since the basic idea of the movie is a good one and there are talented people in the cast, what we have here is a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raising-arizona-1987 of Raising Arizona (20 March 1987) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

People

“The most important political task facing the out-of-power party— the Democrats for now— is creating a villain to run against. It's certainly easier than developing some grand new ideas or policies on which to campaign.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

" Searching for the Next GOP Villain http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0405/sajak041805.php3," in Jewish World Review, April 18, 2005. 2000s

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

Life, Religion, Game, Time

“Regarding the spate of High School shootings of 1999: "in the Colorado shootings, the media seemed to change their tack a bit. Though they attached ghoulishly to it, covered it 24 hours a day and even gave it a logo like 'Horror in the Rockies', they did address issues of alienation and pain rather than just saying, 'oh, these aberrant teen-agers have to be stamped out.' After denigrating self-help ideas for the last 20 years, the media are beginning to look at the psychology and not just the police work."”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

USA Today, 1999
Miscellaneous

Pain, School, Change, Help

“Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio... But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

Art, Thinking, Painting

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God, Way, Nature, Light

“[Y]ou have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. … Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", page 316 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=334&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter to William Graham (3 July 1881) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

World, Nature, Universe, Distant

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Life, Hostility, World, Family

“Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 15
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Law, Penalty

“Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified.”

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

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. V.

Time

“You -- (applause continues) -- you know, the idea that you have to wait on line for eight hours to cast your ballot in Florida -- there's something the matter with that. You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever, and get home and then have a -- still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that, because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives. (Light applause.) But for ordinary working people, who have to work eight hours a day, they have kids, they got to get home to those kids, the idea of making them stand for eight hours to cast their ballot for democracy is wrong. We ought to make voting easier to do. Mail -- Oregon has got it right. (Applause.)”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

Source: Take Back America 2005 conference, in Washington D.C. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/7/11437/00894, June 2, 2005

People, Democracy, Home, Thinking

“I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 193-194

Way, Feeling, Mathematics, Thinking

“More government isn't going to help you get ahead. It's going to hold you back. More government isn't going to create more opportunities. It's going to limit them. And more government isn't going to inspire new ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs. It's going to create uncertainty.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

Response to State of the Union speech http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57569091/full-text-rubios-republican-response/, 2010s, 2013

Business, Help

“The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 101

Fate, Art, Imagination, Intelligence

“Josh Smith: But specifically where you stand when it comes to rape, and should it be legal for a woman to get an abortion if she's —
Paul Ryan: Yeah, well, so I'm very proud of my pro-life record, and I've always adopted the idea — the position that the method of conception doesn't change the definition of life.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

WJHL interview http://video.wjhl.com/v/61772220/exclusive-interview-josh-smith-sits-down-with-vp-candidate-paul-ryan.htm,

Life, Change

“The opinion appears to be gaining ground that this very general conception of functionality, born on mathematical ground, is destined to supersede the narrower notion of causation, traditional in connection with the natural sciences. As an abstract formulation of the idea of determination in its most general sense, the notion of functionality includes and transcends the more special notion of causation as a one-sided determination of future phenomena by means of present conditions; it can be used to express the fact of the subsumption under a general law of past, present, and future alike, in a sequence of phenomena. From this point of view the remark of Huxley that Mathematics "knows nothing of causation" could only be taken to express the whole truth, if by the term "causation" is understood "efficient causation." The latter notion has, however, in recent times been to an increasing extent regarded as just as irrelevant in the natural sciences as it is in Mathematics; the idea of thorough-going determinancy, in accordance with formal law, being thought to be alone significant in either domain.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290 ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 29): The Nature of Mathematics.

Truth, Law, Mathematics, Nature

“My early work was philosophic, what would be called epistemology, I was convinced I'd dicredited cognition. When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating. I had to find a way to frame this insight which was not self-defeating and that's in "Blueprint", the essay entitled "The Flaws Underlying Beliefs." One has to do what Wittgenstein claimed to do in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," which is to use the ladder and then throw it away. The way I devolved, moved out from, this position of strict cognitive nihilism, was with the idea of building a new culture which would depart profoundly from the scientific culture in which we live.”

Henry Flynt (1940) American musician

Henry Flynt talks to Stewart Home, New York 8 March 1989

Way, Problem, Falseness

“Fortunately, there is a strategy that does double duty: it both helps you keep control of your own insights, and makes those insights accessible to others. The strategy is: always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say). And this minimalist model will then be easy to explain to other economists as well.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

How I Work (1993)

Help

“The vision and the core values inspire the creation of the image, but the core ideas are the "stuff" of which the image is made. The core ideas that designers generated in the course of using the framework will have to be arranged in sets that enhance the creation of the image and the design of the system.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 126

“Rousseau’s ideas were in the air; he only expressed what many of his contemporaries knew, namely that they were faced with a choice and had to decide either for Voltairianism, with its reasonableness and respectability, or for the surrender of historical traditions and a completely new beginning. There is no personal relationship in the whole history of European culture with more profound symbolic significance than that between Voltaire and Rousseau.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 2. The New Reading Public

History, Personality

“!-- What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born babies don’t see any difference between them, their playpen and their Dad. It’s all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it’s not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept ‘I’ we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn’t it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story. -->If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe. We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line: in the beginning, there was the word. By giving sky one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God, World, Intelligence, Universe

“Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. Paul says that which is earthly is in the likeness of that which is heavenly, Hence if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also? I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement

1840s, King Follett discourse (1844)

Death, Way, Spring, Tree

“Boredom is a powerful incentive to come up with bad ideas, especially for intellectuals. "Capitalism," says Irving Kristol, "is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived." The reason it's so unromantic is that it doesn't tell people what to do and that can be very frustrating for intellectuals who want to tell people what to do. Indeed, court intellectuals have always been more influential where the people are less free, because when an intellectual persuades a dictator or a socialist prime minister (a small distinction to be sure), their advice gets translated into reality. When an intellectual says, "It would be a better society if all beer was free" a free-market politician would, or at least should, say "Maybe, but what can I do about it?"”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2000s, 2001, Free-Market Boring…Losing Consciousness (2001)

People, Beer, Reality

“There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Sometimes attributed to Ackerman this actually originates with Nicolas Chamfort, as quoted in The Cynic's Breviary : Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort (1902) as translated by William G. Hutchison, p. 37
Misattributed

Fools

Quotes about ideas and thoughts page 31

Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 31