Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 36

“Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 1; Partly cited in Jens-Erik Mai (2010) Classiﬁcation in a social world: bias and trust http://jenserikmai.info/Papers/2010_Classificationinasocialworld.pdf Journal of Documentation Vol. 66 No. 5, 2010. p. 640; Also cited in ( Bawden, 1991 http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~dbawden/reactionspaper.pdf).

“The traditional picture of the blind old singer of Chios is largely made up of memories that go back to the time when a poet was a vates— a priestly and God-inspired seer. His blindness is merely the outward sign of the inward light that fills his being and enables him to see things others cannot see. This bodily infirmity expresses— as does the lameness of the divine smith Hephaestus—a second idea that was current in primitive times, that a maker of poems, ornaments and other products of handicraft can only come from the ranks of those who are unfit for war and foray. But apart from this feature, the legendary ‘Homer’ is an almost perfect example of the mythical poet who was still half-divine, a wonder-worker and a prophet. We find the clearest embodiment of this idea in Orpheus, the primeval singer who had his harp from Apollo and instruction in the art of song from the Muse herself; with his music he could move not merely men and beasts but even rocks and could reclaim Eurydice from the bonds of death.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter III. Greece and Rome

Death, Men, God, War

“We don’t need to be in dire straits to need to feel hope. On a perfectly beautiful, sunny, clear day when everything is going just right, you can still use hope. That we are able to be content within is the most hopeful message there is. That we can find that one thing the heart has searched for, for so long, is a very hopeful message. That’s the message I bring. And that brings people hope. That is what is important for all of us: that hope, that idea of self-fulfillment, that idea of being able to have contentment in one’s life.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Undated
Source: Conversation with Prem Rawat The Prem Rawat Foundation

Life, People, Beauty, Hope

“The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd – one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like – one writes novels about it.”

Anthony Powell (1905–2000) English novelist

The Times, May 15, 1986.

Life, Question

“It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side.”

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

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

Men, Truth, World, Religion

“By themselves, brontosaur gizzards don't indicate how much or what these dinosaurs ate each day; other lines of evidence must be employed to explore these questions. But brontosaur gizzards and teeth together indicate what brontosaurs did not eat. They didn't eat soft, mushy vegetation. Birds that subsist entirely on soft fruits don't possess muscular gizzards and don't use hard pebbles for their gizzard linings. Soft, watery food requires only a short, simply constructed gut - with just enough contractile force to squeeze out all the juices.
Brontosaur teeth, moreover, confirm the heretical idea that they ate a tough vegetable diet. If the brontosaurs dined only on soft water plants, then very little wear would be found on their teeth. But in fact the teeth of Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and their kin manifest very severe wear, which could only have been produced by tough or gritty food.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 136-137
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Food, Question, Bird, Water

“When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Video interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lytxafTXg6c dated 1963

Stupidity, Feeling, Understanding, Business

“There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.”

Lionel Trilling book The Liberal Imagination

The Function of the Little Magazine
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Education, Imagination

“The Qur'an is not a book of abstract theories and cold ideas, which one can grasp while seated in a cozy armchair. Nor is it merely a religious book like other religious books, whose meanings can be grasped in seminaries and oratories. On the contrary, it is a Book which contains a message, an invitation, which generates a movement. The moment it began to be sent down, it impelled a quiet and pious man to abandon his life of solitude and confront the world that was living in rebellion against Allah. It inspired him to raise his voice against falsehood, and pitted him in a grim struggle against the lords of disbelief, evil and iniquity. One after the other, from every home, it drew every pure and noble soul, and gathered them under the banner of truth. In every part of the country, it made all the mischievous and the corrupt to rise and wage war against the bearers of the truth.”

Abul A'la Maududi (1903–1979) Indian theologian, politician and philosopher

1979, Tafhimul Qur'an, Vol. I, Lahore, pp. 334.
1970s

Life, War, Truth, Books

“As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 10, Punch Drunk

“The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"We Need a Radical Left", The Nation (29 June 1998) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political/Radical_Left.html

People, Hope

“Outside the academic establishment, the “far-reaching change in all our habits of thought” is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 13-14

Life, God, Way, Behavior

“So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (p. 403)

“Often the willingness to think differently about a problem and then risk sharing the idea with others certainly pay off.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 97

Problem, Thinking

“The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 105

“I am very underleveraged. I have a great company. I have a tremendous income. And the reason I say that is not in a braggadocios way. It's because it's about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money.”

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

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Money, Way, Time, Country

“Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge

Knowledge

“LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding.”

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist

Trip of a Lifetime (1999)

Sex, Understanding

“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.”

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) Swedish chemist, innovator, and armaments manufacturer

As quoted in The 12 best Questions To Ask Customers (2001), by Jim Meisenheimer, p. 26.

“Systems science is generally said to have emerged during and after World War II, although there were precursors to the basic ideas. The people who created each school of thought were working largely independently, although many of them knew each other. They came from different disciplines, they were working on different problems, they formulated different variations of the principles of systems and cybernetics, and they often chose to affiliate with different academic societies.”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

Source: "The origins and purposes of several traditions in systems theory and cybernetics," 1999, p. 79: Introduction

War, People, World, School

“[In reference to Playstation Football] Here's an idea! Why don't they make a button that says frickin' "pass!"”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Git-R-Done (album)

Football

“Art is simultaneously particular and general. This is a real dichotomy. The great thing about proportion, one aspect of art, is that it is both extremes at once. The level of quality of a work can usually be established by the extent of the polarity between its generality and particularity. Or, to state the idea a little too simply, the better the work, the more diverse its aspects. The nature of the general aspects and the particular ones changes from artist to artist and especially from time to time, since the changes are due to broad changes in philosophy. This change is the essential change in art, determining its purpose and appearance”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Source: 1980, "Art and Architecture," 1987, p. 177

Art, Nature, Appearance, Change

“In recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)

Truth, Science, Anger

“There are one or two things, which you can directly do in very critical times. But otherwise, this indirect influence that you can exercise on the affairs of the State is the most important role he can play. And, he can play it successfully only if he is, his ideas and his nature of functioning are seen by the public in tune with their standards. The President has to be a citizen and there must be some equation between the people and the President, and if some advice or something is to be given to the executive, it would be received with grace, it would be sometimes accepted, if it is known that the public opinion is on the side of the kind of advice the President is giving. Otherwise, he cannot exercise much influence.”

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

People, Exercises, Nature, Time

“To draw and paint is an elementary thing, it has to be done. But it can be a mental process, intellectual process, thought process. *It is a question of temperament of each artist, there are abstract painters, figurative painters, painters who work in silence or who don’t want to work at all, but they continue with ideas in their mind and in their soul. It’s very fascinating; it’s a vast area without rules or regulations.”

S. H. Raza (1922–2016) Indian artist

Culture:S.H. Raza Comes in Full Circle

Soul, Question, Silence, Drawing

“From a very early age, we form concepts. Each concept is a particular idea or understanding we have about our world. These concepts allow us to make sense of and reason about the things in our world. These things to which our concepts apply are called objects.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

James Martin (1993, p. 17) as cited in: " CIS330 Object Oriented Approach Ch2 http://webcadnet.blogspot.nl/2011/04/cis330-object-oriented-approach-text_3598.html" webcadnet.blogspot.nl. 2011/04/16

Age, World, Understanding, Sense

“The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

World

“[T]he Confederacy was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today, can evoke racial polarization…”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions).

One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

Love, Life, Men, People

“I am taking the high road, an ascetic path, but one which to my way of thinking is the only valid path which in the long run has got what it takes. It's a slow and sometimes discouraging undertaking. At times it can seem a little bewildering. Europe is yet far from being re-Paganized, but little by little, thinkers catch the idea and feel reconquered. Generally, it doesn't take much: an image, an attitude, an experience, rather than a speech, and everything that has been repressed has come back ever so strongly. Our role is that of waker-uppers.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“At the heart of Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental.”

George Packer (1960) American journalist and writer

God, Marriage, Faith, Optimism

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

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

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

World, Fashion, Nature, Country

“Philosophy and cognitive science have contributed to the advancement of the object model. The idea that the world could be viewed either in terms of objects or processes was a Greek innovation, and in the seventeenth century, we find Descartes observing that humans naturally apply an object-oriented view of the world. In the twentieth century, Rand expanded upon these themes in her philosophy of objectivist epistemology. More recently, Minsky has proposed a model of human intelligence in which he considers the mind to be organized as a society of otherwise mindless agents. Minsky argues that only through the cooperative behavior of these agents do we find what we call intelligence.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 34-35

World, Behavior, Intelligence, Nature

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

World, Law, Imagination, Nature

“As a Jew who does not believe in God, but very strongly believes in Jewish peoplehood, the idea of a prayer or blessing does not resonate in a traditional sense. For me, a blessing is a statement of intention of purpose and an expression of gratitude.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

http://blogs.forward.com/avraham-burg/tags/edgar-m-bronfman/

God, Sense, Gratitude

“Hayek ripped G. W. F. Hegel in The Counter-Revolution of Science’s third part for his “historicism”—the idea, in Hayek’s terminology, that history moves in set and predictable stages. He considered this idea fatally flawed and societies that were based on it to be unsuccessful, unproductive, and unfree. Historicism denies free will. The future is what we make of it.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

History, Science, Future, Parting

“Not my idea of God, but God.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

God

“And then suddenly I would realize that I couldn’t remember, hadn’t actually consciously experienced, any of the last forty-seven properties I had visited, and didn’t know if I had left a paper or just walked up to the door, stood for a moment like an underfunctioning automaton, and turned around and walked away again. It is not easy to describe the sense of self-disappointment that comes with reaching the end of your route and finding that there are sixteen undelivered papers in your bag and you don’t have the least idea—not the least idea—to whom they should have gone. I spent much of my prepubescent years first walking an enormous newspaper route, then revisiting large parts of it. Sometimes twice.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 122

Disappointment, Sense, Parting

“The story of Islam is no different. Prophetic Islam is inimical to mystic ideas. In the beginning, some Sufis courted martyrdom, but eventually they bought peace and safety by surrendering to Prophetic Islam. There have been some outstanding Sufis, but by arid large the Sufi movement has been part of a larger aggressive apparatus, just like Christian Missions of Imperialism. Though Islam persecuted "infidels", destroyed their temples, enslaved and looted them, we find no Sufis protesting. In fact. they were often beneficiaries of this vandalism. "In many cases there is no doubt that the shrine of a ·Muslim saint marks the site of some local cult which was practised on the spot long before the introduction of Islam," says Thomas Arnold making it look quite normal and harmless. Mu'in aI-Din Chishtl's dargah at Ajmer is one such shrine built on the ruins of an old Hindu temple. The saint had also got the present of a Hindu princess, part of thebooty captured by a Muslim General, Malik Khitab, when he attacked the neighbouring pagan land. Sufi saints often took full part in Islamic jihad.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Peace, Parting, Princess

“What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

PENN Address (2004)

“A new way of seeing and a new politics is arising already in bits and pieces, here and there, across the continent. … The new politics is arising out of the work and ideas of many of the people in many of the social movements of the 1970's: the spiritual, environmental, feminist, and "men's liberation" movements; the human potential, simple living, appropriate-technology, and business-for-learning-and-pleasure movements; the humanistic-transformational education movement and the new nonviolent-action movement. … Each of these movements … has something to add to the new politics. Their contributions come together like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 5.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Men, People, Pleasure, Education

“… it's one thing to believe in something that might be true (like God in general or Christianity specifically) even though neither can be substantiated or tested in any objective way. But it is a whole other matter to willfully deceive others into believing things which are definitely not true -like creationism, especially when we can also prove that those doing this know their assorted arguments are bogus, and know they’re lying to our children, and that they hope to continue doing so under the guise of “education”. Creationism extorts support through peer-pressure, prejudice, and paranoid propaganda, and sells itself with short, simplistic slogans which appeal to those who don’t want to think too much, or are afraid to question their own beliefs. Worst of all, it actually forbids critical inquiry, and promotes anti-intellectualism, and it is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods. First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Children, Education, Hope

“I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.”

Nigel Slater (1958) English food writer, journalist and broadcaster

The Real Cook - Writers and critics - Celebrities and articles - Food - Waitrose.com http://www.waitrose.com/food_drink/wfi/foodpeople/writersandcritics/9810064.asp

Life, People, Hell, Cooking

“Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair — there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an impecunious parent. There is nothing fair about Muhammad Ali having been born with a skill that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There is nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich having great legs that we all want to watch. There is nothing fair about any of that. But on the other hand, don't you think a lot of people who like to look at Marlene Dietrich's legs benefited from nature's unfairness in producing a Marlene Dietrich. What kind of a world would it be if everybody was an absolute identical duplicate of anybody else. You might as well destroy the whole world and just keep one specimen left for a museum. In the same way, it's unfair that Muhammad Ali should be a great fighter and should be able to earn millions. But would it not be even more unfair to the people who like to watch him if you said that in the pursuit of some abstract idea of equality we're not going to let Muhammad Ali get more for one nights fight than the lowest man on the totem pole can get for a days unskilled work on the docks. You can do that but the result of that would be to deny people the opportunity to watch Muhammad Ali. I doubt very much he would be willing to subject himself to the kind of fights he's gone through if he were to get the pay of an unskilled docker.”

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

From Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 5 transcript) http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/broadcasts/freetochoose/detail_ftc1980_transcript.php?page=5.

Life, People, World, Way

“The U. S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.”

Michael Lewis book Flash Boys

Source: Flash Boys (2014), p. 69

World, Art, Speed, Perfection

“I knew I had to be sure-footed about the issues I was talking about. When you're twenty-nine years old, who the hell is going to think you're credible? It wasn't enough to have ideas; I had to know my facts. I had to demonstrate command from the minute I started running. I understood that was the test I had to pass.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 63
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Hell, Thinking

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U. S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

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

Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new-yitna?id=UsaThom&images=images/modeng&data=/lv6/workspace/yitna&tag=public&part=24, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library (October 11, 1991). 1990s

Way, Thinking, Tree

“Some institutionalist lines of thought, arising particularly in economics and political science, retain very strong notions of society as made up of bounded, purposive, sovereign, and rational actors. In economics, these might be individuals or organizations, operating in market-like environments. In political science, they might be sovereign national-states operating in an almost anarchic environment. Institutionalism, in such schemes, involves the idea that some fundamental institutional principle must be in place before systems of such actors can effectively operate. The classic core principle required in economic versions is property rights (North & Thomas, 1973). In international relations theory it is the principle of nation-state sovereignty”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Krasner, 1999
Source: "Reflections on institutional theories of organization,." 2008, p. 790

Strong, Science

“In my vision, space-age objects, in the form of small computers, will cross these cultural barriers to enter the private worlds of children everywhere. They will do so not as mere physical objects. This book is about how computers can be carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change, how they can help people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across the traditional lines separating humanities from sciences and knowledge of the self from both of these. It is about using computers to challenge current beliefs about who can understand what and at what age. It is about using computers to question standard assumptions in developmental psychology and in the psychology of aptitudes and attitudes. It is about whether personal computers and the cultures in which they are used will continue to be the creatures of "engineers" alone or whether we can construct intellectual environments in which people who today think of themselves as "humanists" will feel part of, not alienated from, the process of constructing computational cultures.”

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

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

Children, People, Books, Age

“During those five years (of retirement), I traveled a lot and in some of the cities I visited, there was a kind of immediate recognition, whether it was Egypt or the Middle-East, or Russia or Africa. This kind of surprised me. It wasn't so much a reflection on me. It was a reflection on the Hindi film industry. People didn't know me by name, they knew me by my film name. They sang my songs when they saw me on the street, and came up to me and called me Vijay, for instance. I felt that if there is so much recognition of this medium and this industry in totally non-traditional regions of the world, why is it that something is not being done to market this or to promote it at a much larger scale? This is when I thought of the idea of forming a corporation much like international corporations worldwide to get a kind of professionalism and a kind of corporate attitude to the entertainment industry in this country and to be able to exploit it in all parts of the world. That was the attraction. That really brought me back again. Also, during my 30-year career, one of the accusations that used to come my way was that you've never invested back into the film industry. You've invested in pharmaceuticals, in this and that. But you've never invested your money back into the industry. But here, I felt, was one activity that was very genuine. I really was putting money back to raise the standard of working in the industry”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

On his motivation behind starting ABCL
Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Money, People, World, Way

“Everyone sees for himself, the artist also sees for himself. Others see where ideas coincide, or whether they agree or disagree. There is no binding, no forcing of things. It has to be a free association of ideas.”

S. H. Raza (1922–2016) Indian artist

Culture:S.H. Raza Comes in Full Circle

“Roger: That is true to a degree; I usually have songs ideas demoed out, and I will pass them off to vinnie, and he will focus on the lyrics. Then we all get together, work out the nuts and bolts of the song, kick around some changes and everyone is involved in the finishing touches. Chris will do the same, bring in a song idea, and we'll all throw in ideas and the songs just evolve. Some songs change very little from the initial conception, (like a new song called "In-dependence Day") and others really go through many arrangement changes/lyric changes,”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

like "Still Life"

Life, Change, Dependency

“How old do I think the earth is? You know what? I don't have any idea. I know it's pretty old, so it goes back a long, long way. I'm not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how long, how old the earth is. I hear your mom was asking about evolution. You know, it's a theory that's out there. It's got some gaps in it, but in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figured you're smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

Rick Perry (1950) 14th and current United States Secretary of Energy

2011-08-18T12:52
Quote of the Day: How Old is the Earth?
Mother Jones
Kevin
Drum
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/quote-day-how-old-earth
to a 9-year-old boy
2011

School, Way, Moms, Thinking

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

Source: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

Men, War, People, World

“This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly bound in our suffering Latin American lands. A struggle of masses and of ideas. AN epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and and corned by imperialism; our peoples, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of tat flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

People, Suffering

“War is men killing each other, often at close quarters, and doing their damnedest to stay alive. And until you have done that, against a capable enemy, you don't have any idea of what it's like, honestly. Mr Spielberg may splash the screen with gore, and publicists may declare: "You are there!", but you're not. You're snug in a cinema watching a load of crap performed by actors. Hand-to-hand fighting is different, and it's no place for a woman.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

It's no place for anyone, including me, but for a woman least of all.
The Defeat of the British Army. p. 182.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

Men, War, Fight

“In this very special form, feedback became part of the jargon of Group Dynamics, which has also assumed many of the characteristics of a cult in the efforts made to conserve some of the rigor of procedure with which Kurt Lewin and the experimentalist, Alex Bavelas, had attempted to imbue it. In this case, far from serving as a catalyzing, high-level theoretical tool, the term feedback has become a jargon-catchall for any kind of report back to government, management, the subjects of an experiment, subjects during an experiment, and so on. Stripped of its intellectual potential, the term knocks about the corridors of Unesco and for the most part those who use it have no idea that this bit of enjoined, Group Dynamic-recommended behavior is in any way related to the forbidding cross-disciplinary integration known as cybernetics.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 273

Way, Behavior, Effort, Parting

“When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. …behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.6 Threading a New Tapestry

Behavior

“Oh look, an ATM! Ok, here we go! I lost all my money, now what do I do? Get a gun! Rob a casino! Good idea! Look at all the lights! This is beautiful.”

Bill Burr (1968) American actor, comedian and a celebrity podcaster

Premium Blend, episode [2.03], June 20, 1998

Money, Beauty, Light

“Fellini has sometimes been accused of not being interested in the work of other directors but I never found this accusation to hold true. The Federico I knew was not only a voracious reader but extremely interested in hearing about international directors, most notably, Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Akira Kurosawa, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. Clearly, part of the pleasure of discussing these directors was the stimulus for new ideas that their latest films gave him. Although we never explored Portuguese film in any depth, the films of Manoel de Oliveira and Joao César Monteiro genuinely fascinated Federico. At the urging of Mastroianni, he went to see A Divina Comédia (1991), Oliveira’s superb allegory about Western civilization, and returned enthralled. He had long been obsessed by the theme of insane asylums and Oliveira’s masterful blend of philosophy and religion appealed to him at a time in his life when such questions as death and resurrection had become pressing concerns. I do not know where or in what format Federico saw Monteiro’s Recordaçoes de Casa Amarela (1989) but it was a film he described as “deliriously eccentric, a satirical bizarrie that Bunuel would have adored."”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini’s favorite directors
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Life, Death, Pleasure, Religion

“Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 323)

“If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, 1912; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 15
1910 - 1915

Beauty, Hope, Art, Feeling

“The idea of politics is in need of defence.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Eight, The Need For Politics, p. 167

“This test thought out and proposed by Professor Ebbinghaus of Berlin, varies in significance according to its mode of use. It consists essentially in this: a word of a text is omitted and the subject is asked to replace it. The nature of the intellectual work by which the gap is filled, varies according to the case. This may be a test of memory, a test of style, or a test of judgment. In the sentence: ‘Louis IX was born in ——‘ the gap is filled by memory. ‘The crow —– his feathers with his beak’; in this the idea of the suppressed word is not at all obscure, and the task consists in finding the proper word. We may say in passing, that according to the opinion of several teachers before whom we have tried it, this kind of exercise furnishes excellent scholastic training. Lastly, in sentences of the nature of those we have chosen, the filling of the gaps requires an attentive examination and an appreciation of the facts set forth by the sentence. It is therefore an exercise of judgment.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 64

Exercises, Nature, Teachers, Memory

“I guess I can't, or my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason. You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6 (Orr)

War, World, Dreams, Imagination

“I have made the complete return [from imagination] to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is like nature, an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye and the eye is the painter's first and last vehicle are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

n.p.
1921 - 1930, Art and the Personal Life', Marsden Hartley, 1928

Law, Imagination, Intelligence, Nature

“… the idea of Gaia is anticipated most clearly in a line from the Tao Te Ching, the oldest Taoist scripture. In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside: 'Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.' If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of the Gaia theory say they reject it because it is unscientific. The truth is that they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Straw Dogs (p. 33-4)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

God, Hate, Truth, Fear

“If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 375

Death, God

“I love the idea of waking up to a song. It could be any song.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Ghoshal discussing about her schedule http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/the-livewire/article3845968.ece - Archived http://web.archive.org/web/20170310200829/http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/the-livewire/article3845968.ece

Love

“It does seem quite ironic to me that the very people who have made no attempt to think for themselves, are always the most vocal in demanding respect for their "ideas". But some Muslims go further than this and claim that they're being victimized in British society. But I don't really believe that's true. I do think a lot of people are getting fed up of hearing about Muslims all the time, and wish that Muslims would just shut up and get on with their lives, instead of constantly belly-aching about nothing, but that's not the same as being victimized. But because we live in a liberal democracy and therefore have certain double standards to maintain, any criticism of Islam or of Muslims always draws the immediate accusation of Islamophobia, a dishonest word which seeks to portray legitimate comment as some kind of hate crime.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"The trouble with Islam" (16 March 2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhN6CG1zCRc 2007

Hate, People, Democracy, Thinking

“In academic philosophy, people tend to use the term ‘libertarian’ in a restrictive way, to refer to people who 1) hold that property rights and other rights are absolute or nearly absolute, 2) who ground their theories of rights and justice on the concept of self-ownership, 3) who reject social justice, and 4) who reject the idea that positive liberty really is liberty, and is a valuable form of liberty which society should project and promote. Libertarians hold that justice requires that we respect property rights, period, even if that means a large percentage of people will starve, lead poor and desperate lives, or have no stake in their society. If that’s libertarianism, count me out.”

Jason Brennan (1979) philosopher

Neoclassical Liberalism: How I’m Not a Libertarian (2011)

People, Justice, Way

“A picture that I painted after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain [in 1936, Max Ernst was a resolute opponent of the Spanish dictator General Franco, who was supported by Germany's Nazi regime] is 'The Fireside Angel'. This is, of course, an ironic title for a rampaging beast that destroys and annihilates anything that gets in its way. This was my idea at the time of what would probably happen in the world, and I was right.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Room 10, Max Ernst', the exhibition text of FONDATION BEYELER 2 - MAX ERNST, 2013, texts: Raphaël Bouvier & Ioana Jimborean; ed. Valentina Locatelli; transl. Karen Williams
Max Ernst is referring to his painting 'L'ange du foyer' / 'Le triomphe du surréalisme', 1937 ('The Fireside Angel' / The Triumph of Surrealism'); the alternative title was offered by Ernst himself in 1938, when he spontaneously opted for a different title: 'The Triumph of Surrealism'.
1936 - 1950

World, Angels, Way, Support

“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”
“What is it?”
“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Men, Truth

“Like other German theorists of the state, Carl Schmitt held to the idea that politics is always about violence; if we really and truly disagree with other people, we ought to treat them as enemies. Fish does not follow Schmitt this far. To be sure, he fills his books with examples of people who ought to, and usually do, hate each other: secular liberals dealing with religious fundamentalists; full-stop opponents of affirmative action confronting those who support it; defenders of speech codes and critics of hate-crime laws.”

Alan Wolfe (1942) American political scientist

The Future of Liberalism (2009), Ch. 5 : Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington

Hate, People, Books, Law

“[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

Reality, Sense

“We Americans have a long history of fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again is not something new.
It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of "intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised within this tradition anymore.
If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Exercises, History, Motivation, Thinking

“Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)

Communication

“While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens…"
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?"
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?'”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

how do I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word — it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.
Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?", p. 245-246
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Guy, Problem, Learning, Time

“Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 3

Life, Men, Hate, People

“Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/lkbak10.txt (1888), Ch. 1.

Imagination, History, Nature

“I am not a career politician. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm a working man with commonsense ideas and goals. I describe myself politically as fiscally conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

“The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

"The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)
1940s and later

“The work itself, whether thought of as image of idea, as revelation, or as a manifest of meaning, could not have existed without a profound concern to achieve a purpose beyond vanity, ambition or remembrance, for a man’s term of life. Yet, while one looks at his works, a warning should be given, lest one forget, among the multitude of issues, the relation I bear to those with 'eyes'. Although the reference is in a different context and for another purpose, a metaphor is pertinent as William Blake set it down: THE Vision of Christ that thou dost see – Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy: - Thine is the friend of All Mankind, - Mine speaks in parables to the Blind: 'Therefore, let no man under-value the implications of this work or its power for life; - or for death, if it is misused'.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 196
1950s

Life, Death, Christ, Forgetting

“Ideas, passionately promoted and put to the test—that’s what politics can be. That’s what our country can be…It can be a confident America, where we have a basic faith in politics and leaders. It can be a place where we’ve earned that faith. All of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency. Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing the identity politics of “our base” and “their base,” we unite people around ideas and principles. And instead of being timid, we go bold.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

College Republican National Committee, "Paul Ryan's Unshakeable Optimism in the American Dream" http://www.crnc.org/paul-ryans-unshakeable-optimism-america/ 15 April 2016

People, Faith, Confidence, Passion

“They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 29.

People, Art, Sense

“The most remarkable feature of Bell's work was undoubtedly the possibility it offered to determine experimentally whether or not Einstein's ideas could be kept. The experimental tests of Bell inequalities gave an unambiguous answer: entanglement cannot be understood as usual correlations, whose interpretation relies on the existence of common properties, originating in a common preparation, and remaining attached to each individual object after separation, as components of their physical reality.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

"Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution" (2004)

Reality

“It takes a long time for an idea to strike.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

quoted by Sheena Wagstaff 'Edward Hopper', Tate Publishing (2004)
1941 - 1967

Time

“At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

Money, People, Communication, Effort

“The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Mike Wallace interview (4 November 1958), quoted in The Great Quotations (1966) by George Seldes
Other speeches and writings

Truth, Way

“And it's certain that unexpected new ideas are beginning to emerge. That paintings are once again beginning to be painted in very different tone from a few years ago.
The last thing I made is a rather large study of an avenue of poplars with the yellow autumn leaves, where the sun makes glittering patches here and there on the fallen leaves on the ground, which are interspersed with the long shadows cast by the trunks. At the end of the road a peasant cottage, and the blue sky above it between the autumn leaves.
I think that in a year's time — having spent that year once again painting a great deal and constantly — I'll change my manner of painting and my colour a great deal, and that I'm likely to become slightly more sombre rather than lighter.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from Vincent's letter to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, on or about Saturday, 25 October 1884; from original text of letter 467 - vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let467/letter.html 1880s, 1884

Autumn, Thinking, Study, Change

“Don't crucify me because of what your idea of a movie star is. I didn't start out to be a movie star. I started out to be an actor. You people out in the East have no idea what goes on out here. No awareness or knowledge whatsoever. You lose track of the human being behind the image of the movie star.”

Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) American stage and film actor

Interview, 1969 http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-with-kirk-douglas

People, Star, Knowledge

“I like working on sponge because it's a simple, light material and always ready to use. The colour and texture meet my aesthetic requirements and it has a lolof volume and physically, is very present in the space. The ink or paint is immediately absorbed into the foam surface, making any corrections almost impossible. It is a material which lends itself to quick, fast application and is particularly good for spontaneous sketching with paint squeezed directly from the tube. The fact that these works will not last (sponge is not a very durable material) does not deter me; it suits the character of the work very well and to an extent reflects my ideas about art.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

At the time of writing exhibition catalogue, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, 1998.

Art, Light, Painting

“…he said if enough people—a stadium full, maybe—were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord. I toyed with the idea of asking everyone below to concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free, but”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

People, Tree

“We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i. e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. … But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable inedia, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.”

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

On the irrelevance of the luminiferous aether hypothesis to physical measurements, in an address at the University of Leiden (5 May 1920)
1920s

Time, Parting

“I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it."”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

On the creation of the hydrogen bomb, in "Infamy and honor at the Atomic Café : Edward Teller has no regrets about his contentious career" by Gary Stix in Scientific American (October 1999), p. 42-43.

People, Way, Parting

“I just like the idea of pills. I like to collect them but not actually take them. When I fell off my horse, I got tons of stuff: Demerol and Vicodin and Xanax and Valium and Oxycontin, which is supposed to be like heroin. And I'm quite scared to take them. I'm a control freak.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Interview : Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 2005-12-01 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-library/madonna-interview-rolling-stone-december-01-2005,

Horse