Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 55

“Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Love, People, Game

“What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country. […] To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.”

Noam Chomsky book American Power and the New Mandarins

Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s, American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969

People, Light, Science, Country

“It is not likely," remarked Joséphin Leclerc, "that the future will be such as you have seen it. I do not wish for the coming of socialism, but I dread it not. Collectivism at the helm would be quite another thing than is imagined. Who was it who said, carrying back his thoughts to the time of Constantine and of the Church's early triumphs : 'Christianity is triumphant, but its triumph is subject to the conditions imposed by life on all political and religious parties. All of them, whatever they may be, undergo so complete a transformation in the struggle that after victory there remains of themselves but the name and a few symbols of the last idea'?”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Source: The White Stone (1905), Ch. VI, p. 238

Life, Imagination, Time, Future

“The men seldom have any real, concrete notions of what combat is like. Their minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero and winning ribbons and decorations.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 44

Men, Color, Future

“In a radio interview with San Antonio station WOAI on December 5, 2005, Dean said, "The idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea that, unfortunately, is just plain wrong." [29]”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

citation needed

War

“One of the factors that caused Spencer's ideas to lose popularity was social Darwinism… Social evolution is different from biological evolution: it's faster, it's Lamarckian, and it makes even heavier use of altruism and cooperation than biological evolution does. None of this was well understood at the time.”

J. Doyne Farmer (1952) American physicist and entrepreneur (b.1952)

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

Time

“To me, song writing is so therapeutic, it's just part of my life and I can't go through the day without having some kind of song idea pop into my head where I have to write Sharpie all over my arm trying to remember the song idea.”

Skye Sweetnam (1988) Canadian singer-songwriter

Life, Parting

“Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It's strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?”

Gideon Levy (1953) Israeli journalist

This Biography Makes It Clear: The Founder of the Palestinian Popular Front Was Right (April 15, 2018)

Failure, Strong

“I find the idea that you can introduce democracy by military force a very quaint idea. Moreover, if I wanted to choose a testing ground for doing it, Iraq would be the last nation I would choose.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

BuzzFlash interview (2004)

Democracy

“This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Color, Nature, Appearance

“I quickly realized that you had to have a good idea of the future if you were going to succeed as an inventor.”

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

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Future

“…I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, "What one fool can do, another fool can." What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it all deep and profound…”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From Omni interview, "The Smartest Man in the World" (1979) or from the book p. 194.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

People, Books, World, Fools

“The movement had likewise for its object the abolition of polygamy and premature marriages, the promotion of the remarriage of widows, the introduction of better ideas about marriage, its duties, and its responsibilities.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Speech after reception in the City Hall, Glasgow on 22nd August 1870.

Marriage

“It is my opinion, that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of Government and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen… The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power… When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty,— what? Our own property?— No! We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Commons of America… The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty… There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually represented in this House… Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?… Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?— a borough which perhaps its own representatives never saw.— This is what is called the rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If it does not drop, it must be amputated… I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest… The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when were they made slaves?”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons on the Stamp Act (14 January 1766), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 71-6.

People, Feeling, Nature, Time

“Trying to fault gays and lesbians for standing up for their rights is backwards and unconscionable. We have no idea how powerful we actually are. We were never considered part of the general, respectable population.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, SPEAKING UP

Parting

“Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations of their minds.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

"Thomson & Tait's Natural Philosophy" in Nature, Vol. 7 (Mar. 27, 1873) A review of Elements of Natural Philosophy https://archive.org/details/elementsnatural00kelvgoog (1873) by Sir W. Thomson, P. G. Tait. See Nature, Vol. 7-8, https://archive.org/details/nature7818721873lock Nov. 1872-Oct. 1873, pp. 399-400, or The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 328. https://books.google.com/books?id=lzlRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA328

Way, Effort

“The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century. …a cortical defect that affected [the] ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. …defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge)…”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Knowledge, Loss

“There are no guidelines for posting quotes from the Declaration of Independence. There don't need to be any guidelines… If you post a quote like that for the specific purpose of promoting the idea of revolution, you're going to lose your LGF account. I won't put up with that crap at my site.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

August 28, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34547_Sen._Inhofe_Says_US_is_Reaching_a_Revolution/comments/

Quotes

“There is nothing wrong in the idea of a body, nor even in the idea ‘I am the body.’ But limiting oneself to one body only is a mistake. In reality all existence, every form, is my own, within my consciousness. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Body
Source: I am That, P.136.

Reality

“[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist… [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion.”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

Quote of w:Richard Huelsenbeck (1961), as cited in Calvin Tomkins (1965) Ahead of the game: four versions of avant-garde, p. 160

“The cry that we have entered upon our imperial course in order to benefit the native populations in the lands that we have conquered is an old one. … I have before me McKinley's proclamation to the Filipinos, and I have placed it side by side with a proclamation of the King of Assyria, written eighteen hundred years before Christ. A man would think that McKinley had plagiarized the idea from Asshurbanipal.”

Richard F. Pettigrew (1848–1926) American politician

Imperial Washington (1922), pp. 345-346 http://books.google.com/books?id=ZKwcAAAAMAAJ&pg=345

Thinking, Christ, Cry

“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 122

Art, Thinking, Painting

“When we retell a Bible story at Big Idea we will go through the Bible story very carefully. We'll figure out the key plot points, they key themes and we'll set those aside as, you know, sacred, cannot be messed with. And then, we'll mess with everything else. We'll just have lots and lots of goofy fun with everything else to make the story fresh even to grown-ups.”

Phil Vischer (1966) American puppeter

From Disc Two; Behind the Scenes: Jonah and the Bible (00:00:00-00:00:21)
Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie DVD (2002)

“Spinoza, then, emerged as the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe. Admittedly, historians have rarely emphasized this. It has been much more common, and still is, to claim that Spinoza was rarely understood and had very little influence, a typical example of an abiding historiographical refrain which appears to be totally untrue but nevertheless, since the nineteenth century, has exerted an enduring appeal for all manner of scholars. In fact, no one else during the century 1650–1750 remotely rivalled Spinoza's notoriety as the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
G - L, Jonathan Israel

Religion, Appearance

“A man who has never looked on Niagra has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Mémoires de Bertrand Barère (1844)

Lie, Reading

“Recently I was discharged from the German army while in this prison and was informed that I am on the so-called war criminal list number seven. I haven't the faintest idea of what war crime I could have committed. The main thing is that I have a clear conscience.”

Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist (1881–1954) German general during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn (12 June 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews", Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellatel (2004).

War

“The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 32

Law, Nature

“But one day, some painter used 'Abstraction' as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title. And it wasn’t really a very good one. From then on the idea became something extra. Immediately it gave some people the idea that they could free art from itself. Until then, Art meant everything that was in it – not what you could take off it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood – that abstract and indefinable sensation, the aesthetic part – and still leave it were it was…”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Quote from De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

Life, People, Art, Mood

“In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization.”

Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) American economist and professor at Harvard Business School

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 20-21

Business, Thinking

“The pure emotion, from a very early age, of seeing a film and feeling it take you over like a high… At first it was all the things I loved as a kid -- James Bond films and Spaghetti Westerns and things like that (which I still love). Then I started discovering the masters and finding out which films spoke to me and when they did -- the total immersion, the experience of being taking to another world for a couple of hours, opening your mind to new things and ideas on such an emotional level. How could you not fall in love with that?”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[indieWire, SnagFilms, Park City ‘08 Interview - “Donkey Punch” director Olly Blackburn, 7 January 2008, http://www.indiewire.com/article/park_city_08_interview_donkey_punch_director_olly_blackburn, 23 February 2012]

Love, Age, World, Feeling

“I don’t really care whose free speech it is that is being trampled. I will stand up to protect them, whether it’s Randa Jarrar who I find to be one of the most reprehensible human beings in America, whether it’s the Nazi party or the KKK, or whether it’s the communist party. Every one of them has an equal right to be there and the intellectual texture of America, the strength of America, the idea of America erodes and begins to grow cancer if we don’t protect that.”

Marc Randazza (1969) American writer

“Men already had ideas on law, morality, the family, the state, and society itself before the advent of social science, for these ideas were necessary conditions of his life”

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

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 14

Life, Men, Family, Law

“What has set the mass in motion for any length of time is then called great. It is given the name of a historical power. When, for example, the vulgar mob has appropriated or adapted to its needs some religious idea, has defended it stubbornly and dragged it along for centuries, then the originator of that idea is called great. There is the testimony of thousands of years for it, we are told. But this is Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s idea the noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder’s greatness rather than for it.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 20

Religion, Time, Success

“In this book I try to show how models of self-organization can be applied to many economic phenomena - how the principle of "order from instability," which explains the growth of hurricanes and embryos, can also explain the formation of cities and business cycles; how the principle of "order from random growth" can explain the strangely simple rules that describe the sizes of earth quakes, meteorites, and metropolitan areas. I believe that the ideas of self-organization theory can add substantially to our understanding of the economy; whatever their ultimate usefulness, these ideas are very exciting, and playing around with them is tremendous fun.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
The Self-Organizing Economy (1996)

Books, Understanding, Business

“What fascinates me about Duchamp is the idea of tearing down the wall between the art object and reality.”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

Source: "Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger" Matthew Biro, Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 304

Art, Reality, Tear

“A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not "culturally appropriating" anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity. Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats. African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents. Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct. No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids. Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars. Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.”

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

2010s, Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos (2016)

War, Dogs, History, Nature

“Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

"Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism" http://www.dorislessing.org/unexamined.html, in Our Country, Our Culture - The Politics of Political Correctness (1994), Partisan Review Press, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips

Dogs, Motivation

“He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 54

Parting

“The defects of rationalistic, critical philosophy are much more important than they appear at first sight. By failing to take into account political faculties and the art of eloquence, this philosophy disregards two of the most important branches of human activity. … Vico formulates this idea clearly in De studiorum ratione: “But this order of studies brings with it the disadvantage for young people, that in the future they will neither show intelligence in civil life, not be able to enliven a speech with characteristic colors and warm it with the fire of emotions.””

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), p. 40

Life, People, Art, Color

“As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, "Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous." Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Own Your Own Snake
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Spring, Learning, Appearance, Passion

“First of all I was like, ‘I’m the most hated celebrity?’ More than, like, Chris Brown? What did I do? All I can do is be my authentic self, but I think there are things about me that make people draw conclusions. For example, there is the perception that I grew up very wealthy and that I was given, you know, that I was sort of raised with a silver spoon in my mouth, which inspires a lot of resentment. He [my father] said, ‘You are completely on your own. So he never gave me anything. I never had any supplementation, he never helped me with my rent, I never had a trust fund. So the idea that I am spoiled or that I didn’t work for what I have, that’s just not accurate. But I can see how somebody might have that perception.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Hate, People, Thinking, Help

“Our reason tells us that a community based on ideas held in common is a far more advanced manifestation of human life than a community resulting from race or language or geographical location.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 96

Life, Communication

“My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury

“There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving…. I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted…. For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son…. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Love, Home, Strong

“Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power.”

Ian Bremmer (1969) American political scientist

"Democracy in Cyberspace," Foreign Affairs (November/December 2010).

“Most of the writers I know come from a variety of backgrounds: history, journalism, engineering, physics. The common element here is not what you study, but the fact that you learn how to study, to do research, and to synthesize new ideas out of old. The soul of science fiction, and perhaps even all fiction, is to look at a situation and ask, “what would happen if….” Change some variables and see how that makes people react to the situation. So, getting yourself a good grounding in any field of study will supply you with a great background wealth of material to use to build your stories. Then you really just need to start writing and keep writing. Writing is a skills-based endeavor and there is no easy way to become successful at it. Writers write.”

Michael A. Stackpole (1957) science fiction author

"Interview" at his official website http://www.michaelastackpole.com/?page_id=8

People, Way, Soul, History

“When we use a tool in everyday life, it usually remains a detached instrument under my control and activated only when, where, and how I decide. … In contrast, conceptual innovations often “stick,” escape our control and become part of reality itself. Once Hobbes invents the idea of the “state” this idea can come into contact with real social forces with unforeseeable results. The “tool” develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 49.

Life, Reality, Parting

“Everyone’s decrying tribalism, and yet the idea that we should rejigger the constitutional order to make sure that Asian Americans in California have the same “representation” in the Senate as Hispanics in, say, Texas or Rhode Island is profoundly tribal. Maybe Hispanics in Texas have different political interests than Hispanics in California? Maybe Hispanics — an incredibly diverse category of people — don’t vote based upon an abstract designation?”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Say No to a Parliament of Tribes (2018)

People

“Yes, they are beautiful… The shirt, the blouse are garments the folds of which yield simple planes and effects that, rightly rendered, are those of true sculpture. But there is something better still, and that is sackcloth. If I had clothed my 'Burghers of Calais' in sackcloth, they would certainly be more beautiful. I did not dare to. Some one else will do this and will succeed. It is sufficient to express an idea and leave it to its destiny.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 295-296; About the sculpture The Burghers of Calais

Beauty, Clothes

“It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed…. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition…Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.”

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) American avant-garde composer

quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

Music, Appearance, Memory

“To me there is nothing more important in a democracy than free speech and debate. We should debate everything, we should talk about everything, we should engage ideas we aren't comfortable with, and we should let the best ideas win, that's how a healthy society based on rational ideas and a secular government should work, but too often these days it's simply isn't what's happening, and while the far right in this country went off the deep end a while ago, what I've really been affected by is seeing my side, the people on the Left cherry-picking, fact stifling, debate and labeling everyone they disagree with a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, or worse. These aren't liberal principles, much less are they the ideals our founders intended for us to use when they started this country.”

Dave Rubin (1976) American comedian

Dave Rubin Explains The Rubin Report Rules https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97SafVeKoF4 (September 9, 2015)

People, Democracy, Country

“The term closed loop-learning process refers to the idea that one learns by determining what s desired and comparing what is actually taking place as measured at the process and feedback for comparison. The difference between what is desired and what is taking place provides an error indication which is used to develop a signal to the process being controlled.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1984) in: Lawrence P. Grayson, Joseph M. Biedenbach eds. Engineering--images for the future": proceedings, 1983 Annual Conference. p. 923

Error, Learning

“Dr. Bob managed so successfully to turn the answer to every question into a mini-lecture on self-esteem and positive thinking, that Ethan wanted Hazard to arrest him on charges of Felony Cliché and Practicing Philosophy Without An Idea.”

Dean Koontz book The Face

Source: The Face (2003), Chapter 67; Ethan and Hazard's questioning of a pop-psychology university professor

Question, Thinking

“Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.”

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

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

God, Appearance, Change, Horse

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called 'Pharmacy' after assign two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store an snow shovel on which I wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'. It was around that time that the word 'Readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, Apropos of Ready Mades', 1961

Winter, Time, Happiness

“The Kahal is the corrupting factor which changes our state - it is the cause of the seizure, the trusts, the failures that undermine trade, industry and agriculture in Romania - it is the body that wanders through the public newspapers which it subsidizes - it is the agent spreading the insidious ideas of materialism and liberalism, socialism, anarchism - it is the power of occult Freemasonry. The Kahal is, finally, the agent of revolutions that shook the world and, for some time, troubled the peace of the wretched Romanian people. This is the occult Jewish power against which mankind is disarmed, because they do not know.”

Nicolae Paulescu (1869–1931) Romanian academic

From Fiziologia Filozofică: Spitalul, Coranul, Talmudul, Cahalul, Franc-Masoneria ("Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry"), vol. II., Bucharest, 1913.

People, World, Peace, Failure

“The idea of comparative advantage—with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both—is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Ricardo's Difficult Idea," in G. Cook (ed.), Freedom and Trade: The Economics and Politics of International Trade, Volume 2 (1998)

Understanding, Nature, Sense

“I loved to talk about music to Nicky … His influence came from people like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and he had these ideas about layering vocals, painting landscapes with music. Roma knew about Irish mythology, told stories, wrote poetry and had this special feeling for lyrics. My grounding came from the classics.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Love, People, Music, Feeling

“Descartes… complained that Greek geometry was so much tied to figures "that is can exercise the understanding only on condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination." Descartes also deplored that the methods of Euclidean geometry were exceedingly diverse and specialized and did not allow for general applicability. Each theorem required a new kind of proof… What impressed Descartes especially was that algebra enables man to reason efficiently. It mechanizes thought, and hence produces almost automatically results that may otherwise be difficult to establish…. historically it was Descartes who clearly perceived and called attention to this feature. Whereas geometry contained the truth about the universe, algebra offered the science of method. It is… paradoxical that great thinkers should be enamored with ideas that mechanize thought. Of course, their goal is to get at more difficult problems, as indeed they do.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics for the Nonmathematician (1967), pp. 255-256.

Truth, Exercises, Imagination, Understanding

“It is important to challenge the idea held by many critics--some Marxists among them--that the Black feminist concept of intersectionality is just about the experience of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression on an individual level. The Black feminist tradition has always been tied to collective struggle against oppression--against slavery, segregation, racism, police brutality, poverty, sterilization abuse, the systematic rape of Black women and the systematic lynching of Black men.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Men

“You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

August 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Imagination, Thinking

“In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 11 (p. 130)

Understanding, Knowledge, Science, Joy

“They like the idea of recusing women. […] Everyone hates the bloody army till someone needs rescuing, then we're all bloody heroes and white knights.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain William Frederickson, p. 100
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Enemy (1984)

Women, Hate

“Biological systems are dynamical, not easily predicted, and are creative in many ways… In the old equilibrium worldview, ideas about change were dominated by the action-reaction formula. It was a clockwork world, ultimately predictable in boring ways.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton in: Roger Lewin (1990) Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos New York, Macmillan. p. 190 as cited in: Sohail Inayatullah (1994) " Evolution and Complexity http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/evolution-complexity.htm#_edn1"

World, Way, Change

“It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.”

Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and sexiest man

biographyonline.net http://www.biographyonline.net/scientists/alex-fleming.html

“When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. It's the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

1981 - 2008
Source: 'Colour Chart I', interview with Christoph Grunenberg, 1 May 2009; 'Sixty years at full intensity', Tate 2009

Painting

“If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front:
The content of this book is distributed on an 'as is' basis, without warranty as to accuracy of content, quality of writing, punctuation, usefulness of the ideas presented, merchantability, correctness or readability of formulae, charts, and figures, or correspondence of (a) the table of contents with the actual contents, (2) page references in the index (if any) with the actual page numbering (if present), and (iii) any illustration with its adjacent caption. Illustrations may have been printed reversed or inverted, the publisher accepts no responsibility for orientation or chirality. Any resemblance of the author or his or her likeness or name to any person, living or dead, or their heirs or assigns, is coincidental; all references to people, places, or events have been or should have been fictionalized and may or may not have any factual basis, even if reported as factual. Similarities to existing works of art, literature, song, or television or movie scripts is pure happenstance. References have been chosen at random from our own catalog. Neither the author(s) nor the publisher shall have any liability whatever to any person, corporation, animal whether feral or domesticated, or other corporeal or incorporeal entity with respect to any loss, damage, misunderstanding, or death from choking with laughter or apoplexy at or due to, respectively, the contents; that is caused or is alleged to be caused by any party, whether directly or indirectly due to the information or lack of information that may or may not be found in this alleged work. No representation is made as to the correctness of the ISBN or date of publication as our typist isn't good with numbers and errors of spelling and usage are attributable solely to bugs in the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. If sold without a cover, this book will be thinner than those sold with a cover. You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party. This disclaimer is a copyrighted work of Jef Raskin, first published in 2004, and is distributed 'as is', without warranty as to quality of humor, incisiveness of commentary, sharpness of taunt, or aptness of jibe.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)

Death, People, Books, Art

“Unfortunately, the comments were misconstrued. I was saying that we needed to speak to the supporters of the EDL, not, as some people made out, that we should speak to the EDL itself. The idea that we should speak to upset, angry and dispossessed people, to try build a better life together, must be addressed and historically the Labour movement has been the vehicle to do this. It is a broad-based approach. Where there are mass outpourings of discontent, you have two choices, either you demonise them or you break them.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

On his "controversial" comments about engaging with the EDL, First published: Jewish Renaissance Magazine, October 2012 https://thesocialenterprise.wordpress.com/tag/maurice-glasman/

Life, People, Support

“Strange as it sounds, although Man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, Man was in action much the superior of God, whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under restraints that Man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas did not allow God even an undetermined will; he was pure Act, and as such he could not change. Man alone was, in act, allowed to change direction. What was more curious still, Man might absolutely prove his freedom by refusing to move at all; if he did not like his life, he could stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being done for him; while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a single instant his continuous action. If Man had the singular fancy of making himself absurd,— a taste confined to himself but attested by evidence exceedingly strong,— he could be as absurd as he liked; but God could not be absurd. Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures. While Man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an unlimited freedom to be wicked,— a privilege which, as both Church and State bitterlly complained and still complain, he has outrageously abused,— God was Goodness and could be nothing else. […] In one respect, at least, Man's freedom seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God's thought was his act and will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think, he is. Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as Abélard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself. The atmosphere of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas, and its pure ether shuts out the corruption and pollution to come,— the Valois and Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes's, the Tudors and the Medicis of an enlightened Europe.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Life, God, Pleasure, Thinking

“… the huge church […] was thundering its gospel under her eyes.To have Niagara for a rival is no joke. Hazard spoke with no such authority; and Esther's next idea was one of wonder how, after listening here, any preacher could have the confidence to preach again. "What do they know about it?" she asked herself. "Which of them can tell a story like this, or a millionth part of it?"”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Source: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. IX

Confidence, Parting

“p>Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

...
And these same everlasting "Youths" are with us again today, immature, destitute of the slightest experience or even real desire for experience, but writing and talking away about politics, fired by uniforms and badges, and clinging fantastically to some theory or other. There is a social Romanticism of sentimental Communists, a political Romanticism which regards election figures and the intoxication of mass-meeting oratory as deeds, and an economic Romanticism which trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics. They can only feel in the mass, where they can deaden the dull sense of their weakness by multiplying themselves. And this they call the Overcoming of Individualism.
The Hour of Decision (1933)

Men, Children, Personality

“It is true: Europe is no club of christians. But the following is also true: Europe is a club of core values. Here Human and Civil Rights apply. These Human and Civil Rights substantially are based on the christian idea of man.”

Angela Merkel (1954) Chancellor of Germany

Es ist wahr: Europa ist kein Christenklub. Aber wahr ist auch: Europa ist ein Grundwerteklub. Hier bei uns gelten Menschen- und Bürgerrechte. Diese Menschen- und Bürgerrechte beruhen bei uns ganz wesentlich auf dem Menschenbild des Christentums.
Speech at the 20th federal party convent of the CDU in the Dresdner Frauenkirche on November 27, 2006
2006

“The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps? Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou? What would Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes have done at the International Center of Photography or at the Tate? What could Friedrich Nietzsche have done at the Louvre Museum? What indeed could Georges Bataille have haughtily done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

Joseph Nechvatal (1951) American artist

Joseph Nechvatal. " Painting and Philosophy: An Assessment http://hyperallergic.com/90646/painting-and-philosophy-an-assessment/," at hyperallergic.com, October 28, 2013

Dreams, Art

“The creative artist has an essential role in modern society. By expressing his individual ideas and emotions he adds to the sum of human awareness.”

Lloyd Goodrich (1897–1987) American art historian

'The Artist in American Society' - Colorado Magazine Vol. 15 No 2 Autumn 1966

“The idea that God’s Providence means that he looks after those who serve him by a special use of his power in terms of favoritism is an immoral idea and insulting to both man and God. No true Christian wants to opt out of the trials that beset others, and no worthy idea of God could include his establishment of a kind of insurance scheme by which, if God be worshiped, cancer, for example, could be avoided.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.208-209

God

“As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Our Right to Drugs (1992), p. 35.

People, Justice

“Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the times and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, "Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself," then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: "Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant."”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Army of Altruists (2007)

Money, World, Religion, Nature

“[R]acial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as expected. That would be a great tragedy, but a catastrophe entirely predictable if citizens seek symbolic solidarity with their tribe rather than in the common idea of just being American.”

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

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

Country

“The socio-technical concept arose in conjunction with the first of several field projects undertaken by the Tavistock Institute in the coal-mining industry in Britain. The time (1949) was that of the postwar reconstruction of industry in relation to which the Institute had two action research projects.(2) One project was concerned with group relations in depth at all levels (including the management/labor interface) in a single organization - an engineering company in the private sector. The other project focused on the diffusion of innovative work practices and organizational arrangements that did not require major capital expenditure but which gave promise of raising productivity. The former project represented the first comprehensive application in an industrial setting of the socio-clinical ideas concerning groups being developed at the Tavistock.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 7

Time

“Alas that the artist… may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the beautiful, but must chase the fitting mystery beyond the verge of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a material grasp. Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external reality to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of their visions.”

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

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

World, Beauty, Reality

“I often hear people call climbing a selfish, egocentric pursuit. I consider this idea a lot. On the surface, as a sport or activity, this may be true. But for most soul climbers, climbing has never been merely about athletics. Climbing has shown me how to look beyond myself and my own desires. It has taught me how to be a part of a community, rather than living in a narrow world of my own making. I have learned, painfully, how to accept help from others. I have learned that my powerful emotions can be my greatest strength, as well as my greatest weakness. Physically and intellectually, climbing has tugged me into the larger world, beyond my own culture and comfort zone. Above all, climbing has shown me the existence of forces beyond the seen world. It has taught me to ponder the meaning of reality. It has shown me that I am small.”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity (2007)

People, World, Soul, Communication

“The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

Men, People

“[I]f…a society adopts a constitution and incorporates in that constitution safeguards of individual liberty, these safeguards do indeed take on a general moral rightness or goodness. They assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by the people.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

The Notion of a Living Constitution https://web.archive.org/web/20071031034406/http://www.claremont.org/publications/precepts/id.169/precept_detail.asp.

People, Justice, Nature

“So I had carved one face with hollows curving in-out, in-out, very simple really. I set the timber upright and Frank Stella came in and came over and looked at the chiseling and said it looked good. He turned around to the back of the piece which was uncut – the backside of the timber – and he said, you know that's sculpture too. I supposed what he meant to say was, that cutting was a good idea and the idea of not cutting was good too. But you know, I thought to myself, yes the uncut side is really much better than the cut side. The form of the timber was by no way improved by my cutting into it. From that time, I began to think that the next timbers I get I'm not going to cut. I'm going to combine the timbers; I'm going to use them as cuts in space. I began to look for what I call 'particles”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

that is, units which are identical in shape – and finding ways to combine these particles by properties of the individual particles. That is, no gluing and no nailing and no joining.
Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 29

Way, Thinking, Time

“Traditionally, economic analysis treats the economic system as one of the givens. The term "design" in the title is meant to stress that the structure of the economic system is to be regarded as an unknown. An unknown in what problem? Typically that of ﬁnding a system that would be, in a sense to be speciﬁed, superior to the existing one. The idea of searching for a better system is at least as ancient as Plato’s Republic, but it is only recently that tools have become available for a systematic, analytical approach to such search procedures. This new approach refuses to accept the institutional status quo of a particular time and place as the only legitimate object of interest and yet recognizes constraints that disqualify naive Utopias.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz, " The design of mechanisms for resource allocation http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/hurwiczaer.pdf," The American Economic Review, (1973): 1-30.

Search, Problem, Sense, Time

“The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America, we have a national interest, we're working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them — they're our servants. And that's all there is in the world — no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it.”

Noam Chomsky book The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

"The Unmentionable Five-Letter Word" in How the World Works, p. 121
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, 1993

People, World, Family, Happiness

“Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet, says, "Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' no longer makes any sense." I humbly add that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. Let us make this field a much bigger place. Let us all meet in that field.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

Women, Men, War, World

“What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Life, Problem, Christ

“I pretty much use sketchbooks to note down great ideas of somebody else I've just had. A good sketchbook means you don't actually need to bother with having a memory yourself. You can get away with a fair bit of substance abuse if you always carry a notepad and a sharp pencil around with you.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

from "Street Sketchbook" by Tristan Manco
Other sources

Memory

“I was against the idea to commit the ground American troops in South Vietnam for the simple reason that we do not need that. We need the support, the technical support, the technology of the of the uh…American armed forces but we do not need the combat troops at that time…You know, uh…how can we justify with the population if the American come to fight for us? We just can't. So, this error…is main, one of the main error that we made…in the year '65, to bring in the combat troops, American combat troop in South Vietnam. And, then the South Vietnamese armed forces become a kind of uh subletive, you know, the the second reign on the, and the, the national mission of these forces cannot be uh in the Vietnamese hand. Then it, 't…are under the American hand. And later, later on when we see the American withdrawal we changing government back in Washington 'n 'n policy, and then when the element of the American troops is getting out of the country, the disaster we saw later on in '75 is a result of the decision to send the…the troops, the American troop to fight for the Vietnamese troops.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

Error, Support, Decision, Change

““Gay panic” is insidious. It appeals to juries, who are allegedly made up of random members of the community. What defense lawyers know is that most people are repulsed by the idea of gay —especially gay male— sex. Those lawyers know that a claim of defense against an alleged gay sexual advance will win points with the jury of peers.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

America...You Kill Me

People, Sex, Communication

“What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim – mostly violence against fellow Muslims – who don’t subscribe to its sick worldview. But you don’t have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish. Ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality. Ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation. Ideas – like those of the despicable far right – which privilege one identity to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of others. And ideas also based on conspiracy: that Jews exercise malevolent power; or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam. In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached – that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan; that British security services knew about 7/7, but didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash. And like so many ideologies that have existed before – whether fascist or communist – many people, especially young people, are being drawn to it. We need to understand why it is proving so attractive.”

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

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

Hostility, People, Exercises, Democracy

“Now, everything Marx did was intentionally anti-Christian. If the Bible is for it, he's against it. See, the Bible makes private property a real serious issue. Ownership of private property is critical. You can't have freedom without property rights. What good does it do to say that you have all kinds of freedom if there's no place to exercise your freedom? […] You could not possibly lose your property permanently in the Biblical system. Since every man has his own vine and his own fig tree, drink waters out of your own cistern, waters out of your own well. Private property is essential. […] Karl Marx developed the idea of a graduated income tax. The more you make, the more they take. That's Karl Marx's idea. He's said, "You need to abolish rights of inheritance." The Bible says a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children. Karl Marx was against that. Confiscate property rights. Evolution is a foundation of Communist philosophy behind the money powers. Karl Marx said, "We need a central bank." This was a Communist idea. The banking system we're using today in America, the Federal Reserve, is a direct result of Karl Marx's thinking. There is nothing Federal about it. It's private bankers that run our currency. The Bible says, "The love of money is the root of all evil". All evil.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Love, Money, Children, Exercises

“Impressionism is at the root of all modern art, because it was the first movement that managed to free itself from preconceived ideas, and because it changed not only the way life was depicted but the way life was seen.”

Francesco Salvi (1953) Italian actor, writer, comedian, singer and architect

Source: Nancy Bachus The Modern Piano: The Influence of Society, Style, and Musical Trends on the Great Piano Composers http://books.google.co.in/books?id=azsmp3dvjk8C&pg=PA10, Alfred Music Publishing, 1 August 2006, p. 10

Life, Art, Way, Change

“Our whole past shall be made a part of the world’s life. That is what is called the realization of the national idea. But it must be realised everywhere”

Sister Nivedita (1867–1911) Scots-Irish social worker, author, teacher and a disciple of Swami Vivekananda

Life, World, Past, Parting

“The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. xvii

Truth, Intelligence

“If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.”

Charles Dickens book Dombey and Son

Source: Dombey and Son (1846-1848), Ch. 48

“Creationists contend that they don’t believe in magic. But “speaking” anything into existence is an incantation, and the Bible is full of spells of one sort or another. Animating golems, or conjuring interdependent systems, and causing complex organisms to appear out of thin air -are each logically implausible and physically impossible according to everything we know about anything at all, yet this is exactly what religiously-motivated pseudoscientists actually promote! How do we test these ideas? How can we tell them apart from any of the thousands of fables men have concocted for the ghosts and gods of other religions? How can we tell whether any of this is even real, and not something someone just made up? Because despite anyone’s assertions of personal conviction, it is impossible to distinguish miracles from subjective impressions imagined out of nothing. In the realm of fantasy, it’s easy to demonstrate psionic talents, astral entities, and magical manifestations. Until they do that in reality too, then science has nothing but nature to work with.”

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

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, God, Religion, Imagination

“Another point is the meaning of professionalism. With Judo, we have no professionals in the same sense as other sports. No one is allowed to take part in public entertainment for personal gain. Teachers certainly receive remuneration for their services, but that is in no way degrading. The professional is held in high regard like the officers of a religious organization or a professor in the educational world. Judo itself is held by us all in a position at the high altar. To reconcile this point of view with the Western idea is difficult. Success or a satisfactory result of joining the Olympic Games would much depend on the degree of understanding of Judo by the other participating countries.”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

Budokwai Bulletin (1947)

World, Education, Way, Game

“I have a terrible problem with procrastination… a friend told me, "Well, you should go to therapy." And I thought about it, but then I said, "Wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?"”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

And that's when I got the idea of touring.
Here and Now

Problem, Waiting

Quotes about ideas and thoughts page 55

Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 55