Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 5

“Long after Plato’s time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to ‘our’ interests.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 46.

Sense, Freedom, Time

“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Memoirs (1796)

Singing

“A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.”

William McFee (1881–1966) American writer

Book I: The Suburb, Ch. IV
Casuals of the Sea (1916)

God, Country

“Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an antonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Habermas (2006) "Conversation about God and the World." Time of transitions. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 150-151.

Love, Life, Justice, Democracy

“The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still obtained, and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent and condition. The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of National welfare and National efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the reëlection or defeat of a Congressman here and there—a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. XI : The Natural Resources of the Nation, p. 386

Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“A work on tidal theory… led me to Lagrange's Mécanique analytique and thereby I returned to those ideas of analysis. All the developments in that work were transformed through the principles of the new analysis in such a simple way that the calculations often came out more than ten times shorter than in Lagrange's work.”

Hermann Grassmann (1809–1877) German polymath, linguist and mathematician

the "ideas of analysis" to which he returned, are those quoted above.
Ausdehnungslehre (1844)

Way, Time

“To know in order to do, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal. (Gustave Courbet, 1855) - note”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

Courbet wrote this 'Realist manifesto' for the introduction to the catalogue of his independent, personal exhibition at the Pavilion of Realism in Paris, outside the 1855 Universal Exhibition. His text is echoing the tone of the period's political manifestos of those days
1840s - 1850s, Realist Manifesto', 1851/1855

Art, Appearance, Time

“good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 487
Non-Fiction, Letters

Art, Intelligence, Nature

“America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

Men, Secret, World, Mood

“There is an ancient Chinese saying "He who labours with his mind rules over he who labours with his hand". This kind of backward idea is very harmful to youngsters from developing countries. Partly because of this type of concept, many students from these countries are inclined towards theoretical studies and avoid experimental work.

In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work.”

Samuel C. C. Ting (1936) physicist

Nobel banquet speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1976/ting-speech.html, December 10, 1976

Nature, Reality, Study, Science

“The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Freedom

“So I’m unequivocal on this. If somebody is a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business, and working in a job, an obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens are supposed to do, and not harming anybody -- the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong. Full stop. And the state does not need to weigh in on religious doctrine. The state just has to say we’re going to treat everybody equally under the law. And then everybody else can have their own opinions.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and President Kenyatta of Kenya in a Press Conference at Kenyan State House in Nairobi, Kenya https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-and-president-kenyatta-kenya-press-conference (July 25, 2015) 2015

Love, Law, Business

“That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 51; often paraphrased as: "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything".
The Antichrist (1888)

Faith, Mountain

“The worship of the rational mind makes you prone to totalitarian ideology. The Catholic Church always warned against this. The warning was that the rational mind always falls in love with its own creations. The intellect is raised to the status of highest god. The highest ideal that a person holds – consciously or unconsciously – that's their god. It functions precisely in that manner. It exists forever, it exists in all people, it takes them over and exists in their behavior. That's a god. We have to think about that idea functionally.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Love, God, People, Behavior

“I am impressed by the great limitations of the human mind. How quick are we to learn, that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand, that is, to see the deeper connections. Slowest of all, however, are we in inventing new connections or even in applying old ideas in a new field.”

Frits Zernike (1888–1966) Dutch physicist

His Nobel lecture, "How I Discovered Phase Contrast" (11December 1953) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1953/zernike-lecture.html

Understanding, Learning

“The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Robert Louis Stevenson Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), ch. 6.
Criticism

Life, World, Soul, Suffering

“Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

True Citizenship at the Children's Theater 1907

Youth, Boy, Time, Country

“I'm asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change - but in yours. I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes, we can. Yes, we did. Yes, we can.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2017, Farewell Address (January 2017)

Faith, Justice, Change

“Not all the geometrical structures are "equal". It would seem that the riemannian and complex structures, with their contacts with other fields of mathematics and with their richness in results, should occupy a central position in differential geometry. A unifying idea is the notion of a G-structure, which is the modern version of an equivalence problem first emphasized and exploited in its various special cases by Elie Cartan.”

Shiing-Shen Chern (1911–2004) mathematician (1911–2004), born in China and later acquiring U.S. citizenship; made fundamental contributio…

Mathematics, Problem

“The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

The scientific work of Georges Lemaître (1968), P.A.M. Dirac, Commentarii (Pontifical Academy of Sciences), vol 2, 11, pp. 1–18.

“Playing Doctor Who came as a great surprise to me. I had no idea that I would enjoy it so much. All that was required of me was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

“To Indians the idea of the transmigration of the soul from animal to man, and man to animal, does not seem strange, and so from our scriptures pity for all sentient creatures has not been banished as a sentimental exaggeration. When I am in close touch with Nature in the country, the Indian in me asserts itself and I cannot remain coldly indifferent to the abounding joy of life throbbing within the soft down-covered breast of a single tiny bird.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

Life, Soul, Nature, Bird

“Very broadly, I think one writes and rewrites the same book. I lead a character from book to book, I continue along with the same ideas. Only the angle of vision, the method, the lighting, change.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Paris Review interview (1956)

Books, Thinking, Light, Change

“The general Muslim outlook was thus one of Muslim nationalism or Muslim internationalism, and not of true nationalism. … On the other hand, the Hindu idea of nationalism was definitely one of Hindu nationalism. It was not easy in this case (as it was in the case of the Muslims) to draw a sharp line between this Hindu nationalism and true nationalism. The two overlapped, as India is the only home of the Hindus and they form a majority there.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Nehru, quoted in Religion, Caste, and Politics in India by C. Jaffrelot

Home, Drawing

“Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

California Legislature Stunned By Invasion Of Armed "Black Panthers" https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2202&dat=19670503&id=ClcmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZP8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1072,5010951&hl=en, Gettysburg Times (3 May 1967) 1960s

“I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language […] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Itconversations.com http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail58.html quoted in www.dasgenie.com http://www.dasgenie.com/scrap/archives/000060.html

Way

“All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” … “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. … The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the “agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic “agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of “being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great “agon” of all things for the deity.
Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. …
There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. …
Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 85-88

Love, Life, Men, God

“Yes, I have expressed that because it is undemocratic. Some smart aleck came up with the idea that we should impose a certain quota system that you can only contest if you get a certain number of nominations. Why do you need a certain quota imposed on them? You have to cross the bar before you can exercise your right. That, for me, is undemocratic.”

Muhyiddin Yassin (1947) Home Affairs Minister of Malaysia

Muhyiddin Yassin, Muhyiddin walks a fine line, thestar.com, 11 May 2008
Quote

Exercises

“The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Life, Family, Justice, Way

“Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. I couldn't square my grandfather's idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he'd found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it. There was more left to explore, but suddenly it seemed like a waste of time; it was impossible that anyone could still be living here, even the most misanthropic recluse. I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth.”

Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 3, Page 81

Truth, Feeling, Sense, Tree

“Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.”

Albert Einstein book The Evolution of Physics

The Evolution of Physics (1938) (co-written with Leopold Infeld)
1930s

Books, Mathematics

“I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he’d take it away. So he'll be like: 'You think this is going pretty well?”

Hugh Laurie (1959) British actor, comedian, writer, musician and director

Then he'll go and send down some big disaster.
Stargazing: Heather's Angry, Jane is Ill, Hugh is Anxious Kansas City Star, Wed, Oct. 31, 2007

God, Thinking

“There's been a trend around the country of trying to get college to disinvite speakers with a different point of view or disrupt a politician's rally. Don't do that, no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths… If the other side has a point, learn from them! If they're wrong, rebut them, teach them, beat them on the battlefield of ideas!”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Commencement speech at Howard University, as quoted in "Obama: Students Need to Stop Shutting Down Speech of People They Disagree With" http://www.mediaite.com/tv/obama-students-need-to-stop-shutting-down-speech-of-people-they-disagree-with/ by Josh Feldman, Mediaite (7 May 2016) 2016

Learning, Country

“(on not going to his high school prom) I wasn't aware of the prom. I had no idea that it was even going on, not that I would have gone. It's not the kind of thing that would ever occur to me. You would think I would have heard about it in school, but I didn't.”

Larry David (1947) American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book

Books, School, Thinking

“…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Quoted in: Paul Jones (2011), The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities. p. 47.
Other explanation by Picasso of the Guernica.
Quotes, 1930's

Horse, Painting

“I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium. …I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried by the help of my senses to apprehend them. And I thought that I had better had recourse to ideas, and seek in them truth in existence. I dare to say that the simile is not perfect—for I am far from admitting that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only "through a glass darkly," any more than he who sees them in their working and effects.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

People, Truth, Soul, Sense

“Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up.”

R.L. Stine (1943) American writer and producer

Reading Rockets interview http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/stine/transcript hi you know it’s me cardi B

Hate, Books, School, Color

“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”

José Saramago book The Double

The Double (2002)

Books, Education, Way, Feeling

“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness

“The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 180-181.

Men, Way, Feeling, Courage

“Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas … the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification … has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Nature

“I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 172

God, People, Feeling, Time

“Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"The Late Benjamin Franklin", The Galaxy, Vol. 10, No. 1, July 1870 http://books.google.com/books?id=2TIZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA139. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)

Country

“Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Disease

“The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 19

Understanding, Help

“The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”

Rick Cook (1944) American writer

The Wizardry Consulted (1995)

World

“If then we would indeed be “filled with wisdom and spiritual understanding;” if we would “walk worthy of the Lord unto all well pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;” here let us fix our eyes! “Laying aside every weight, and the sin that does so easily beset us; let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Here best we may learn the infinite importance of Christianity. How little it can deserve to be treated in that slight and superficial way, in which it is in these days regarded by the bulk of nominal Christians, who are apt to think it may be enough, and almost equally pleasing to God, to be religious in any way, and upon any system. What exquisite folly it must be to risk the soul on such a venture, in direct contradiction to the dictates of reason, and the express declaration of the word of God! “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?”
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we shall best learn the duty and reasonableness of an absolute and unconditional surrender of soul and body to the will and service of God.—“We are not our own; for we are bought with a price,” and must “therefore” make it our grand concern to “glorify God with our bodies and our spirits, which are God’s.” Should we be base enough, even if we could do it with safety, to make any reserves in our returns of service to that gracious Saviour, who “gave up himself for us?” If we have formerly talked of compounding by the performance of some commands for the breach of others; can we now bear the mention of a composition of duties, or of retaining to ourselves the right of practising little sins! The very suggestion of such an idea fills us with indignation and shame, if our hearts be not dead to every sense of gratitude.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we find displayed, in the most lively colours, the guilt of sin, and how hateful it must be to the perfect holiness of that Being, “who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” When we see that, rather than sin should go unpunished, “God spared not his own Son,” but “was pleased[99], to bruise him and put him to grief” for our sakes; how vainly must impenitent sinners flatter themselves with the hope of escaping the vengeance of Heaven, and buoy themselves up with I know not what desperate dreams of the Divine benignity!
Here too we may anticipate the dreadful sufferings of that state, “where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;” when rather than that we should undergo them, “the Son of God” himself, who “thought it no robbery to be equal with God,” consented to take upon him our degraded nature with all its weaknesses and infirmities; to be “a man of sorrows,” “to hide not his face from shame and spitting,” “to be wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities,” and at length to endure the sharpness of death, “even the death of the Cross,” that he might “deliver us from the wrath to come,” and open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here best we may learn to grow in the love of God! The certainty of his pity and love towards repenting sinners, thus irrefragably demonstrated, chases away the sense of tormenting fear, and best lays the ground in us of a reciprocal affection. And while we steadily contemplate this wonderful transaction, and consider in its several relations the amazing truth, that “God spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all;” if our minds be not utterly dead to every impulse of sensibility, the emotions of admiration, of preference, of hope, and trust, and joy, cannot but spring up within us, chastened with reverential fear, and softened and quickened by overflowing gratitude. Here we shall become animated by an abiding disposition to endeavour to please our great Benefactor; and by a humble persuasion, that the weakest endeavours of this nature will not be despised by a Being, who has already proved himself so kindly affected towards us. Here we cannot fail to imbibe an earnest desire of possessing his favour, and a conviction, founded on his own declarations thus unquestionably confirmed, that the desire shall not be disappointed. Whenever we are conscious that we have offended this gracious Being, a single thought of the great work of Redemption will be enough to fill us with compunction. We shall feel a deep concern, grief mingled with indignant shame, for having conducted ourselves so unworthily towards one who to us has been infinite in kindness: we shall not rest till we have reason to hope that he is reconciled to us; and we shall watch over our hearts and conduct in future with a renewed jealousy, [Pg 243] lest we should again offend him. To those who are ever so little acquainted with the nature of the human mind, it were superfluous to remark, that the affections and tempers which have been enumerated, are the infallible marks and the constituent properties of Love. Let him then who would abound and grow in this Christian principle, be much conversant with the great doctrines of the Gospel.
It is obvious, that the attentive and frequent consideration of these great doctrines, must have a still more direct tendency to produce and cherish in our minds the principle of the love of Christ.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 240-243.

Love, Death, Wisdom, God

“And in fact, at every moment of economic change throughout our history, this country has taken bold action to adapt to new circumstances and to make sure everyone gets a fair shot. We set up worker protections, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to protect ourselves from the harshest adversity. We gave our citizens schools and colleges, infrastructure and the Internet -- tools they needed to go as far as their effort and their dreams will take them. That’s what middle-class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules. We don’t just want everyone to share in America’s success, we want everyone to contribute to our success.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)

School, Dreams, History, Effort

“It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class. It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country — the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, or who you love. It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Fifth State of the Union Address (February 2013)

Love, Country

“I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.”

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) American political economist

Hardin (1968) "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science.

World, Way, Nature, Problem

“Human beings are made in God's image – that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system. Our body of laws has that metaphysical presupposition, without which the laws fall apart. And that's starting to happen. It really is. It's the postmodern critique of law. The law schools are overrun by postmodernists who are undermining the structure of Western law as fast as they possibly can. They don't buy any of this. So they're much more likely to think of the law as a casual, pragmatic tool that is to be manipulated for the purposes of bringing forth the Utopia. It's a really, really, really bad idea. It's very strange to me that we go off track when that metaphysical foundation starts to get rattled.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

God, School, Law, Thinking

“From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Apologia Pro Vita Sua [A defense of one's own life] (1864)

Age, Religion, Dreams

“America, this is our moment. This is our time, our time to turn the page on the policies of the past, our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face, our time to offer a new direction for this country that we love. The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Barack Obama’s Remarks in St. Paul http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/us/politics/03text-obama.html (3 June 2008) 2008

Love, War, Children, People

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Age, World, Way

“My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) American mathematician and information theorist

Scientific American (1971), volume 225, page 180.
Explaining why he named his uncertainty function "entropy".

“Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas – they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ "Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority"

Behavior

“"Property" has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social conscience than religion: for offence against the latter there is lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness. Since Property is deemed the base of all stability, the more's the pity that not all are owners, that in fact the greater proportion of Society comes disinherited into the world. Society is manifestly thus reduced by its own principle to such a perilous inquietude, that it is compelled to reckon all its laws for an impossible adjustment of this conflict; and protection of property — for which in its widest international sense the weaponed host is specially maintained — can truly mean no else than a defence of the possessors against the non-possessors. Many as are the earnest and sagacious brains that have applied themselves to this problem, its solution, such as that at last suggested of an equal division of all possessions, has not as yet been found amenable; and it seems as if the State's disposal of the apparently so simple idea of Property had driven a beam into the body of mankind that dooms it to a lingering death of agony.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Know Thyself (1881)

Death, World, Religion, Law

“Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Love, Men, World, Faith

“The basic totalitarian claim: What I know is everything that needs to be known, and if only it were only manifest in the world, the world would become a utopia. I also think that that's the core idea behind the Tower of Babel. It's the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

World, Thinking

“The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden – is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Nature

“In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Essai sur le théorie des proportions chimiques (1819). Translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry 1400-1900 (1952), 260.

Nature

“We create organizations to serve us, but somehow they also force us to serve them. Sometimes it feels as if our institutions have run out of control, like the machinery of Charlie Chaplin's film Modem Times. Why we should become slaves to our servants… A society of organizations is one in which organizations enter our lives as influential forces in a great many ways — in how we work, what we eat, how we get educated and cured of our illnesses, how we get entertained, and how our ideas are shaped. The ways in which we try to control our organization and our organization in return try to control us become major issues in the lives of all of us.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Henry Mintzberg (1989) Mintzberg on management: inside our strange world of organizations. p. 301. As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 36

Education, Way, Feeling, Time

“Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities.. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p.59

Men, Support, Sport, Housing

“Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

"Abuse of Words" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35621/35621-h/35621-h.htm (1764) C.f. Locke: "The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before." An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book III http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book3.html, chapter 4 Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Books, Reading

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Some evidence for Henry Buckle (1821-1862) as the source: see p.33 quotation https://books.google.com/books?id=2moaAAAAYAAJ&q=buckle#v=snippet&q=buckle&f=false There are many published incidents of this as an anonymous proverb since at least 1948, and as a statement of Eleanor Roosevelt since at least 1992, but without any citation of an original source. It is also often attributed to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover but, though Rickover quoted this, he did not claim to be the author of it; in "The World of the Uneducated" in The Saturday Evening Post (28 November 1959), he prefaces it with "As the unknown sage puts it..." Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and little minds discuss people. In this form it was quoted as an anonymous epigram in A Guide to Effective Public Speaking (1953) by Lawrence Henry Mouat New York times Saturday review of books and art, 1931: ...Wanted, the correct quotation and origin of this expression: Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people... Several other variants or derivatives of the expression exist, but none provide a definite author: Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities. Great minds discuss ideas Average minds discuss events Small minds discuss people Small minds discuss things Average minds discuss people Great minds discuss ideas ...Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas. (Marie Curie, undated (died 1934), as quoted in Living Adventures in Science by Henry and Dana Lee Thomas, 1972) ...Some professor of psychology who has been eavesdropping for years makes the statement that "The best minds discuss ideas; the second in ranking talk about things; while the third group, or the least in mentality, gossip about people"… (Hardware age, Volume 123, 1929) ...He now reports that, "the best minds discuss ideas; the second ranking talks about things; while the third and lowest mentality – starved for ideas – gossips about people." (Printers' Ink, Volume 139, Issue 2, 1927, p. 87) ...It has been said long ago that there were three classes of people in the world, and while they are subject to variation, for elemental consideration they are useful. The first is that large class of people who talk about people; the next class are those who talk about things; and the third class are those who discuss ideas... (H. J. Derbyshire, "Origin of mental species", 1919) ...Mrs. Conklin points out certain bad conversational habits and suggests good ones, quoting Buckle's classic classification of talkers into three orders of intelligence — those who talk about nothing but persons, those who talk about things and those who discuss ideas... (review of Mary Greer Conklin's book Conversation: What to say and how to say it in The Continent, Jan. 23, 1913, p. 118) ...[ Henry Thomas Buckle's ] thoughts and conversations were always on a high level, and I recollect a saying of his which not only greatly impressed me at the time, but which I have ever since cherished as a test of the mental calibre of friends and acquaintances. Buckle said, in his dogmatic way: "Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons, the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas"… (Charles Stewart, "Haud immemor. Reminescences of legal and social life in Edinburgh and London. 1850-1900", 1901, p. 33 http://www.mocavo.com/Haud-Immemor-by-Charles-Stewart-Reminiscences-of-Life-in-Edinburgh-and-London-1850-1900/608008/13?browse=true#63). Disputed

People, Motivational, For women, Success

“Revolutionary in my ideas, liberal in my objectives and conservative in my methods.”

Luis A. Ferré (1904–2003) American politician

As quoted by the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/us/luis-a-ferre-dies-at-99-pushed-puerto-rican-statehood.html in an October 22, 2003 obituary.

“The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

in (1967), as quoted in Andrew Sinclair's Viva Che!: The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara

Death, World, Decision, Fight

“These principles [in art], forgotten over time, were rediscovered by a few geniuses such as Rembrandt, Vélazquez, Délacroix, Corot and Manet. These principles can be deduced from innate principles within us, ideas of harmony, common to all unspoiled men.... these are the laws of harmony and color.”

Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) French painter

Source: from: 'A letter to Maurice Denis, p. 237

Men, Law, Art, Color

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, People, Age

“You know, there’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America has lost — people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control. They tell voters there’s a “real America” out there that must be restored. This isn’t an idea, by the way, that started with Donald Trump. It’s been peddled by politicians for a long time — probably from the start of our Republic.
And it’s got me thinking about the story I told you 12 years ago tonight, about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up. See, my grandparents, they came from the heartland. Their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago. I don’t know if they have their birth certificates — but they were there. They were Scotch-Irish mostly — farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers. Hardy, small town folks. Some were Democrats, but a lot of them — maybe even most of them — were Republicans. Party of Lincoln.
And my grandparents explained that folks in these parts, they didn’t like show-offs. They didn’t admire braggarts or bullies. They didn’t respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, what they valued were traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility, helping each other out. That’s what they believed in. True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, DNC Address (July 2016)

Life, People, Way, Birth

“For most people the idea of someone else telling them how many children they should have is simply unacceptable so when governments attempt to do just that it always causes controversy. In 1979 the Chinese government introduced its infamous one-child policy, changing family life in China forever. Families were encouraged to have fewer children. Those that didn't were fined. The policy was a direct response to the preceding decades of famine and starvation. It's still in place today. According to official figures, without the one-child policy, there'd be four hundred million more people in China, that's more than the entire population of the USA. Its unlikely that other governments could undertake such an extreme path without major civil opposition. In the 1970s the Indian government also sought to bring down its birthrate. To start with it took a less aggressive path, setting up festivals around the country where vasectomies were carried out for small incentives. m31s56”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Life, Children, People, Family

“The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion.... His wilfulness may only be ego.... The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

as quoted in Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 88, note 17
Quotes of Sol Lewitt

“I have at last found a suitable spot and settled her. I have already spend a few days working and started eight canvases, which I hope, if the weather favours me, will give an idea of Norway and the environs of Christiania... This morning I was painting under constant falling snow. You would have burst out laughing seeing me white all over, my beard overgrown with icicles.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in his letter from Sandviken to Gustave Geffroy, late January 1895; (Geoffrey, 1922, vol 2 pp. 87-88); as cited in: Nathalia Brodskaya, Claude Monet, 2011, p. 106
Similar translation:
One should live here for a year in order to accomplish something of value, and that is only after having seen and gotten to know the country. I painted today, a part of the day, in the snow, which falls endlessly. You would have laughed if you could have seen me completely white, with icicles hanging from my beard like stalactites.
1890 - 1900
Source: Claude Monet, ‎Charles F. Stuckey (1985) Monet: a retrospective, p. 169

Hope, Painting, Weather

“Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

God, Pleasure, Truth, Way

“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Failure, Thinking

“I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven't any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood, physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain, the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man's worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess, in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the chief end even of school or college; still more of life.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)

Life, Pain, People, Pleasure

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731

Men, Soul, Parting, Forgetting

“In a covenant…among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P. 218.

Democracy, Communication, Nature, Sun

“European anti-Semites, Zionism believes that European Jews, unlike European Christians, are not Europeans but foreigners who need to leave Europe to its 'real' people and be 'repatriated' to their own state in Palestine. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists are reviving anti-Semitic ideas of the turn of the century that had accused Jews of seeking to control the world. From the infamous czarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion to genocidal Nazi propaganda, Jews as a 'power-hungry' people was a notion that was part and parcel of the anti-Semitic lexicon. Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists seem to agree with the anti-Semites that, if Jews do not control the world, they at least control America.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

People, World, Parting

“Not that this confusion signifies to them who never care to think about the matter at all, for they have the wit to be well pleased with themselves, however great the turmoil of their ideas. But you, if you are a philosopher, will, I believe, do as I say.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Thinking

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)

Education, Way, Democracy

“And I can tell you as a friend that sustainable prosperity in the 21st century depends upon education, health care, and environmental protection. But it also depends on the free and open exchange of ideas. If you can’t access information online, if you cannot be exposed to different points of view, you will not reach your full potential. And over time, the youth will lose hope.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)

Health, Youth, Education, Hope

“!-- Having no colour, no odour and no shape, the mind is not something that can be grasped by the senses. However, based on the principle that the mind and body are actually one, we can know the state of this ungraspable mind by testing the body, which is available to our senses. --> Ki tests are not founded on the idea of testing for strength or weakness. The most important factor in ki testing is to accurately inform the person of the state of his or her mind. Thus, the person performing ki tests must truly understand and exhibit oneness of mind and body from the outset and then perform the tests correctly.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

22 : The treasure of ki testing
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding, Sense, Personality

“The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71

God, Stupidity

“I view the award of the Nobel Prize to me as an expression of understanding of my intentions, my aspirations, the objectives of the profound transformation we have begun in our country, and the ideas of new thinking. I see it as your acknowledgment of my commitment to peaceful means of implementing the objectives of perestroika.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Nobel Address (1991)

Peace, Understanding, Thinking, Country

“This is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Preview; lead paragraph
The Administrative State, 1948

History, Study

“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”

Thomas Mann The War and the Future

Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)

Life, History

“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

Prologue
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

People, Religion, History, Parting

“Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Law, Dreams, Imagination, Nature

“My idea of Comic Relief is switching Victoria Wood off.”

Jerry Sadowitz (1961) Scottish comedian

The Pall-Bearer's Revue (1992)

“In some ways, though, the securing of civil rights, voting rights, the eradication of legalized discrimination -- the very significance of these victories may have obscured a second goal of the March. For the men and women who gathered 50 years ago were not there in search of some abstract ideal. They were there seeking jobs as well as justice, not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity. For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal? This idea -- that one’s liberty is linked to one’s livelihood; that the pursuit of happiness requires the dignity of work, the skills to find work, decent pay, some measure of material security -- this idea was not new. Lincoln himself understood the Declaration of Independence in such terms -- as a promise that in due time, “the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.””

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

Women, Men, Happiness, Justice

“The notion that every single human being – regardless of their peculiarities and their strangenesses and sins and crimes and all of that – has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role, at least an analgous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. It's a magnificent, remarkable and crazy idea. Yet we developed it. And I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system. I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system. That's the notion that everyone is equal before God. That's such a strange idea. It's very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea, because the manifold differences between people are so obvious and so evident that you could say the natural way of viewing someone, or human beings, is in this extremely hierarchical manner where some people are contemptible and easily brushed off as pointless and pathological and without value whatsoever, and all the power accrues to a certain tiny aristocratic minority at the top. But if you look way that the idea of individual sovereignty developed, it is clear that it unfolded over thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, where it became something that was fixed in the imagination that each individual had something of transcendent value about them. And, man, I can tell you – we dispense with that idea at our serious peril. And if you're going to take that idea seriously – and you do because you act it out, because otherwise you wouldn't be law-abiding citizens. It's shared by anyone who acts in a civilized manner. The question is, why in the world do you believe it? Assuming that you believe what you act out – which I think is a really good way of fundamentally defining belief.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

God, People, World, Law

“How does America find its way in this new, global economy? What will our place in history be? Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!” But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political stability.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Knox College Commencement Address (4 June 2005)
2005

Life, Health, Education, School

“In the midst of our high-tech, ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyle, among the dazzling monuments to history, art, religion, and commerce, there are the 'black boxes.' These are the biomedical research laboratories, factory farms, and slaughterhouses—faceless compounds where society conducts its dirty business of abusing and killing innocent, feeling beings. These are our Dachaus, our Buchenwalds, our Birkenaus. Like the good German burghers, we have a fair idea of what goes on there, but we don't want any reality checks.”

Alex Hershaft (1934) American activist

From his review of Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse; as quoted in Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), p. 145.

Religion, Art, Feeling, History

“Imagine that each of these layers of existence are like patterns. They're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns, and there's a way of making all that harmonious. That's what music models. That's why music is so meaningful. You take a beautiful orchestral composition, and they're doing different things are different levels. But they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener. And it fills you almost with a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist. The reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of Being that's harmonious. It's the proper way to exist. Religious writings, in the deepest sense, are guidelines to that mode of Being. They're not true like scientific knowledge is true. They're hyper true, or meta-true. It's like this: if you take the most true things about your life, and then you take the most true things about ten other people's lives, and then we amalgamate them into a single figure. That would be like a literary hero. And then we take a thousands literary heroes and we extract out from them what makes the most heroic person - that's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. He's a meta-hero. And that sits at the bottom of Western Civilization. Christ's archetypal mode of Being is True Speech. That's the fundamental idea of Western Civilization, and it's right.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, People, Beauty, Music

“For us, for our children, Africa and its people teach us a powerful lesson -- that we must uphold the inherent dignity of every human being. Dignity -- that basic idea that by virtue of our common humanity, no matter where we come from, or what we look like, we are all born equal, touched by the grace of God. Every person has worth. Every person matters. Every person deserves to be treated with decency and respect. Throughout much of history, mankind did not see this. Dignity was seen as a virtue reserved to those of rank and privilege, kings and elders. It took a revolution of the spirit, over many centuries, to open our eyes to the dignity of every person. And around the world, generations have struggled to put this idea into practice in laws and in institutions.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

God, Children, People, World

“We belong on the cutting edge of innovation. That's an idea as old as America itself. We're a nation of tinkerers, and dreamers, and believers in a better tomorrow.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks about the first White House Science Fair in 2010. “It’s a prototype!” Tune in for President Obama’s Last Science Fair, April 13th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxEch5nsNkk (quote from video published on April 12, 2016) 2016

“Don't get the idea that I'm one of these goddamn radicals. Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system.”

Al Capone (1899–1947) American gangster

As quoted in In Time of Trouble (1956) by Claud Cockburn

“I am not dreaming about Bollywood as of now but if I get a role in a film, I am open to doing it. I am not obsessed with the idea of being a part of Bollywood. I am happy with television. Television, today, isn’t just bread and butter; it is wine and cheese. TV actors are very well paid, happy and go abroad to spend their holidays. I do not just like TV, I love it.”

Sukirti Kandpal (1987) Indian actress

On Bollywood and Television http://www.tellychakkar.com/tv/interviews/television-today-isnt-just-bread-and-butter-also-wine-and-cheese-sukirti-kandpal/

Love, Happiness, Dreams, Wine

“The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.”

V.S. Naipaul book A Turn in the South

Source: A Turn in the South (1989), Ch. 5, p. 162

Family, Law, Confidence

Quotes about ideas and thoughts page 5

Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 5