Quotes about loss
page 5

“center>Sacred to the Memory
of the Honorable
Sir Joseph Yates, Knight,
of Peel Hall in Lancashire,
successively a Judge of the Courts
of King's Bench and Common Pleas;
whose merit advanced him to the
feat of Justice, which he filled with the most
distinguished abilities and invincible integrity.
He died the 7th day of June 1770,
in the 48th year of his age,
leaving the world to lament the loss
of an honest Man and able Judge,
firm to assert
and strenuous to support
the laws and constitution
of his Country.

Joseph Yates (judge) (1722–1770) English barrister and judge

Monument inscription, British History Online: Cheam http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45375. About

Age, World, Justice, Law

“In my computation, however, sufficient historical evidence has been set forth for any demographic behaviour and on that basis I have arrived at the conclusion that the population of India in A. D. 1000 was about 200 million and in the year 1500 it was 170 million…. The loss of Indian population during Mahmud of Ghaznavi's invasions was about 2 million as studied in some detail in Appendix A of the Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Source: Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999), Chapter 7

Study

“Handy, jun. Zounds, the room's in a blaze!
Sir Abel. Don't say so, Bob.
Handy, jun. What's to be done? Where's your famous preparation for extinguishing flames?
Sir Abel. It is not mixed.
Handy, jun. Where's your fire escape?
Sir Abel. It is not fixed.
Handy, jun. Where's your patent fire engine?
Sir Abel. 'Tis on the road.
Handy, jun. Well, you are never at a loss.
Sir Abel. Never.
Handy, jun. What's to be done?
Sir Abel. I don't know.”

Thomas Morton (playwright) Speed the Plough

Speed the Plough (1798), Act IV, scene iii.

“The word “loser” is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgment. The money he invested in that casino in Atlantic City that went bust, the university course he enrolled in that promised to teach him the secrets of success but instead he wound up unemployed and 40 grand in debt, the candidate whose hat he wore who turned out to be tone-deaf and deluded — dumb, dumb, dumb, and yet his loved ones did not chortle and point and do the nyaa-nyaa. They put an arm around him and said, “This is how we learn.””

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

And it is. "Garrison Keillor: God help us. We’re in trouble down here." in The Washington Post (26 July 2016) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/god-help-us-were-in-trouble-down-here/2016/07/26/989cde08-535d-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html

Love, Life, Money, Secret

“No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition. We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another. Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality. The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat. Every business has its risk and its times of depression. It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries. Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss. The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Law, Business, Support

“In New Mexico he always awoke a young man…Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests… That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”

Willa Cather book Death Comes for the Archbishop

Book IX, Ch. 3
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Women, Men, Beauty, Art

“You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you! That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them, then; not one of you cares for the loss of them, now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening, — Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light — walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley — you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange — you Fools Everywhere.”

John Ruskin book Fors Clavigera

Fors Clavigera, letter v (1 May 1871).
Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)

Love, God, Fools, Way

“Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 56

People, World, Communication, Sense

“Yet all does the sire himself ruthlessly condemn to the murky flames, and bid his own signs of rank be borne withal, if by their loss he may sate his devouring grief.”
Cuncta ignibus atris damnat atrox suaque ipse parens gestamina ferri, si damnis rabidum queat exaturare dolorem.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book VI, Line 81 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

“ […] we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions, and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police…. Again, the reader's past experience of his language is sufficient to restore the missing elements, sufficiently accurately for the purpose. But of course, not only does the reader have experience of sentence structure, enabling him to supply the missing syntactical elements, but also he has experience of typical contexts in which the various words are used; many words bear an aura about with them. It might be more difficult to tell a tale about a policeman who robbed a woman, for instance, with so little redundancy! ”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Words and Meaning: Semantics, p.122

Communication, Past

“There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain.”

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

City of Truth as reprinted in Nebula Awards 28, p. 257
Short fiction

Thinking

“On the security front the entire Nato exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.”

Hamid Karzai (1957) President of Afghanistan

Quoted on BBC News, "Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai says Nato caused 'great suffering'" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24433433, (October 7, 2013). 2013

Life, Exercises, Suffering, Country

“I was going to buy a book on hair loss, but the pages kept falling out.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

Books

“From thence the King marched towards the mountains of Nagrakote, where he was overtaken by a storm of hail and snow. The Raja of Nagrakote, after sustaining some loss, submitted, but was restored to his dominions. The name of Nagrakote was, on this occasion, changed to that of Mahomedabad, in honour of the late king. Some historians state, that Feroze, on this occasion, broke the idols of Nagrakote, and mixing the fragments with pieces of cows flesh, filled bags with them, and caused them to be tied round the necks of Bramins, who were then paraded through the camp. It is said, also, that he sent the image of Nowshaba to Mecca, to be thrown on the road, that it might be trodden under foot by the pilgrims, and that he also remitted the sum of 100,000 tunkas, to be distributed among the devotees and servants of the temple.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated into English by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, 4 Volumes, New Delhi Reprint, 1981. p. 263 Vol I.
Variant: From thence the King marched towards the mountains of Nagrakote, where he was overtaken by a storm of hail and snow. The Raja of Nagrakote, after sustaining some loss, submitted, but was restored to his dominions. The name of Nagrakote was, on this occasion, changed to that of Mahomedabad, in honour of the late king. Some historians state, that Feroze, on this occasion, broke the idols of Nagrakote, and mixing the fragments with pieces of cows flesh, filled bags with them, and caused them to be tied round the necks of Bramins, who were then paraded through the camp. It is said, also, that he sent the image of Nowshaba to Mecca, to be thrown on the road, that it might be trodden under foot by the pilgrims, and that he also remitted the sum of 100,000 tunkas, to be distributed among the devotees and servants of the temple.

Mountain, Change

“Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible. While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things. If I become President, I will make America safe again.”

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

2010s, 2016, July

People, World, Feeling, Problem

“Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammatic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form.
Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil.
We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death.
Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (p. 117)

Love, Death, Age, Fear

“You could have articulated how a 7th century savage and barbaric ideology inspired by a murderous warlord, psychopath, and, by modern day standards, a pedophile, was not a radical but the leader of a militant phase of Islam introduced after the 622 AD event referred to as Al Hijra. Mr. Khan, I grieve for the loss of your son. However, I grieve even more that you used his sacrifice and loss as nothing more than a damn politicized stunt. May God forgive you for it.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Open letter to Khizr M. Khan (31 July 2016)

God, Forgiveness

“There is always hope, we can always love, we can always be kind; we have neither excuse or loss by degree of suffering.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Facebook" (20 November 2017)

Love, Hope, Suffering

“[T]hat’s something Roth does extraordinarily well – explain the toughest parts of life. Love, loss, heartbreak, joy and faith.”

Veronica Roth (1988) American author

Book Review: Allegiant by Veronica Roth, Parkin, Lisa, Read. Breathe. Relax., October 28, 2013, November 4, 2013 http://www.readbreatherelax.com/book-review-allegiant-by-veronica-roth/, About

Love, Life, Faith, Joy

“In the Great War ledger, the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figure. Five or eight Million?”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

As quoted in With Snow on Their Boots : The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France During World War I (1999) by Jamie H. Cockfield, p. 28
Undated

War

“I could heartily wish that you and all others concerned in this sad loss, were more taken up in minding the happy exchange that she hath made, than with your present loss. She hath exchanged earth for heaven, a wilderness for a paradise, a prison for a palace, a house made with hands for one eternal in the heavens (2 Cor 5:1-2). She hath exchanged imperfection for perfection, sighing for singing, mourning for rejoicing, prayers for praises, the society of sinful mortals for the company of God, Christ, angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect, Heb 12:22-24; an imperfect transient enjoyment of God for a more clear, full, perfect, and permanent enjoyment of God. She hath exchanged pain for ease, sickness for health, a bed of weakness for a bed of spices, a complete blessedness. She hath exchanged her brass for silver, her counters for gold, and her earthly contentments for heavenly enjoyments.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

A String of Pearls

Men, God, Pain, Happiness

“The world, the system, moves forward out of fear. That’s why they have to threaten us to play the game. We’re threatened with loss of job, money, reputation, or prestige. It’s all based on fear.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (1999), p. 85-86

Money, World, Fear, Game

“The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain (1998)

Secret, Youth, Age, World

“Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the mysterious source of the economic loss? If productivity is increasing, why should we sacrifice services and wages?”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Epilogue: Politics, p. 272
The Economic Illusion (1984)

“I hope I have just had simply an artist's freak, and then a lot of fever after very considerable loss of blood, as an artery was severed, but my appetite came back at once. My digestion is all right, and so from day to day serenity returns to my brain.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, Jan. 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 569), p 24 Vincent wrote this letter about two weeks after his first attack, during which he had cut off his ear 1880s, 1889

Hope

“Cheerful with wisdom, with innocence gay,
And calm with your joys gently glide thro' the day.
The dews of the evening most carefully shun —
Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

"Advice to a Lady in Autumn", published in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. I. (1763), printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley

Wisdom, Tear, Sun, Joy

“It is, therefore, possible to extend a partially specified interpretation to a complete interpretation, without loss of verifiability, […] This fact offers the possibility of automatic verification of programs, the programmer merely tagging entrances and one edge in each innermost loop.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

Source: Assigning Meanings to Programs http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/2007-615/reading/FloydMeaning.pdf (1967), p. 25.

“Candyman tempting the thoughts of a
Sweet tooth tortured by the weight loss
Program cutting the corners.
Loose end, loose end, cut, cut.
On the fence, could not to offend.
Cut, cut, cut, cut.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Ants Marching
Remember Two Things (1993)

“[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Time

“The loss of one lion alone drew a tear from mighty Caesar's eye.”
Magni quod Caesaris ora... unius amissi tetigit jactura leonis.

Statius Silvae

v, line 27 (tr. J. H. Mozley)
Silvae, Book II

Tear

“Many things can cause a loss of balance. One cause is danger, another is hardship, and another is surprise. You must research this.
In large-scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

“A moment of truth here: If you continue to eat processed foods full of sugar and fat, you won’t lose weight. But you knew that. And that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to discover how good you’ll feel on a diet of vegetarian proteins, whole grains, and all the glorious and diverse vegetables and fruits of the earth. If you look around, you won’t see many fat vegans. Vegans tend to be slim and strong, gorgeous and glowing, and that’s because a healthy, plant-based diet creates vitality and vigor—and weight loss simply happens as a result of not eating fatty animal protein. And lest you think a plant-based diet is for weaklings, consider bulls, elephants, gorillas, orangutans, and stallions. These plant eaters are pure lean and powerful muscle.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

Source: Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (2011), p. 3

Truth, Food, Feeling, Thinking

“Is the Minister aware that he is getting a reputation for being a parsimonious philistine, and that he ought to give an undertaking that any income that library services choose to get from the lending of tapes or whatever else will not be taken away by loss of income support for the local authority from the Exchequer? Would it not be better if all library services of all sorts were declared free, for the benefit of everybody? That would be better than this creeping privatisation and creeping charging in the library service that the Minister seems to be encouraging.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/feb/08/public-libraries in the House of Commons (8 February 1989). 1980s

Support

“In such times as this, we look for sources of strength to sustain us. And in this moment of loss, you're finding these sources everywhere around you. These sources of strength are in this community, this college community. You have a compassionate and resilient community here at Virginia Tech. Even as yesterday's events were still unfolding, members of this community found each other; you came together in dorm rooms and dining halls and on blogs. One recent graduate wrote this: "I don't know most of you guys, but we're all Hokies, which means we're family. To all of you who are okay, I'm happy for that. For those of you who are in pain or have lost someone close to you, I'm sure you can call on anyone of us and have help any time you need it."”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2007, Virginia Tech Prayer Vigil (April 2007)

Pain, Happiness, Family, Guy

“Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while. It is surely not worth all the struggle and sacrifice, the stupendous loss in human life and cultural values that result from every revolution. If such a revolution were even to bring greater social well being (which has not been the case in Russia) then it would also not be worth the terrific price paid: mere improvement can be brought about without bloody revolution.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life, Change, Personality

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

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

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/803567993036754944, quoted in * 2019-10-29 When They Come for You: How Police and Government Are Trampling Our Liberties - and How to Take Them Back David Kirby St. Martin's Press 1466870052 Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Donald Trump / Quotes / Donald Trump on social media / Twitter 2010s, 2016, November

“It is no longer true in the sense in which it was true when these dicta were uttered, that " Christianity is part of the law of the land." Nonconformists and Jews were then under penal laws, and were hardly allowed civil rights. But now, so far as I know the law, a Jew might be Lord Chancellor. Certainly he might be Master of the Rolls, and the great Judge whose loss we have all had to deplore2 might have had to try such a case, and if the view of the law supposed be correct, he would have had to tell the jury, perhaps partly composed of Jews, that it was blasphemy to deny that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, which he himself did deny, and which Parliament has allowed him to deny, and which it was part of " the law of the land " that he might, deny.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Reg. v. Ramsay and Foote (1883), 15 Cox, C. C. 235.

Law, Sense, Christ, Parting

“And one false step entirely damns her fame.
In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,
In vain look back on what she was before;
She sets like stars that fall, to rise no more.”

Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) English poet, dramatist

Jane Shore (1714), Act I.

Star, Tear, Falseness

“There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.”

Alan Simpson (1931) American politician

As quoted in The New York Times (26 September 1982).

People

“The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Gaia Atlas of Planet Management

War, Forgiveness, Nature

“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

This is also from the 1965 essay by Justice Millard Caldwell http://www.aapsonline.org/brochures/cicero.htm. It is not clear if this is based in any specific dialogue. Misattributed

Money, People, Freedom, Dance

“Victor I will remain
Or on this earth lie slain,
Never shall she sustain
Loss to redeem me.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

Source: To the Cambro-Britons and Their Harp, his Ballad of Agincourt (1627), Lines 37-40.

Lie

“Bernie Madoff, who was put in jail for losing $64B actually looks damn good against the Cook's near 5X bigger loss.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

The impossible task of fixing Apple http://tgdaily.com/opinion-features/70874-the-impossible-task-of-fixing-apple in TG Daily (10 April 2013)

Cooking

“My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death! Still, even in those moments of terrible faintheartedness, when despair overmasters reason, and when man forgets that life is a task imposed upon him to finish, I have always said to myself: "There are some things which I would regret not to have tasted — a mother's milk, a father's love, that relationship of heart and soul between brothers, household affections, joys, and even cares!" Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book I, Note II, p. 19
Les confidences (1849)

Love, Life, Death, God

“Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,—O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Model Prisons (March 1, 1850)

Lie, Soul, Light, Strong

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Way, Feeling

“It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better."… From A. D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still?"”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Horace, Odes, III.6]
Chap. III: The Height Of The Times
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Time, Past

“Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Still Falls the Rain (1940)

World

“Something had been given back to him. And because [she] had been a part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind.”

Orson Scott Card book Homebody

Homebody (1998)

Parting

“Life is brutal that way…the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 60 (p. 561)

Life, Way

“To the memory of Sir Thomas Denison, Knt., this monument was erected by his afflicted widow. He was an affectionate husband, a generous relation, a sincere friend, a good citizen, an honest man. Skilled in all the learning of the common law, he raised himself to great eminence in his profession; and showed by his practice, that a thorough knowledge of the legal art and form is not litigious, or an instrument of chicane, but the plainest, easiest, and shortest way to the end of strife. For the sake of the public he was pressed, and at the last prevailed upon, to accept the office of a judge in the Court of King's Bench. He discharged the important trust of that high office with unsuspected integrity, and uncommon ability. The clearness of his understanding, and the natural probity of his heart, led him immediately to truth, equity, and justice; the precision and extent of his legal knowledge enabled him always to find the right way of doing what was right. A zealous friend to the constitution of his country, he steadily adhered to the fundamental principle upon which it is built, and by which alone it can be maintained, a religious application of the inflexible rule of law to all questions concerning the power of the crown, and privileges of the subject. He resigned his office February 14, 1765, because from the decay of his health and the loss of his sight, he found himself unable any longer to execute it. He died September 8, 1765, without issue, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He wished to be buried in his native country, and in this church. He lies here near the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, who by a resolute and judicious exertion of authority, supported law and government in a manner which has perpetuated his name, and made him an example famous to posterity.”

Thomas Denison (1699–1765) British judge (1699–1765)

Memorial inscription, reported in Edward Foss, The Judges of England, With Sketches of Their Lives (1864), Volume 8, p. 266-268.
About

Health, Truth, Age, Justice

“I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight. I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage. I knew I had been cheated of a future, but I felt I'd been cheated of a past, too. The underpinnings of my life had been kicked out from under me… and it wasn't just the loss of Neilia and Naomi. All my life I'd been taught about our benevolent God. This is a forgiving God, a just God, a God who knows people make mistakes. This is a God who is tolerant. This is a God who gave us free will to be able to doubt. This was a loving God, a God of comfort. Well, I didn't want to hear anything about a merciful God. No words, no prayer, no sermon gave me ease. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me, and I was angry. I found no comfort in the Church. So I kept walking the dark streets to try to exhaust the rage.”

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

Page 81
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

Love, Life, God, People

“There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate “motives,” as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.
Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as Moralists, Poets or Priests, did, without neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the Dynamical; applying themselves chiefly to regulate, increase and purify the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake. But a wide difference is manifest in our age. For the wise men, who now appear as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical province; and occupying themselves in counting-up and estimating men's motives, strive by curious checking and balancing, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide them to their true advantage”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love, Men, Age, Fear

“Men take their misfortunes to heart, and keep them there. A gambler does not talk about his losses; the frequenter of brothels, who finds his favorite engaged by another, pretends to be just as well off without her; the professional street-brawler is quiet about the fights he has lost; and a merchant who speculates on goods will conceal the losses he may suffer. All act as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac-Maker (1686).

Men, Dogs, Suffering, Heart

“So, all through the medieval period, Foreign and Indian Muslims strove hard to make India a Muslim country by converting and eliminating the Hindus. They killed and converted, and converted and killed by turns. In the earlier centuries of their presence here, the picture was sombre indeed. Turkish rule was established in northern India at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Within fifteen years of Muhammad Ghori’s occupation of Delhi, the Turks rapidly conquered most of the major cities of northern India. Their lightening success, as described by contemporary chroniclers, entailed great loss of life. Qutbuddin Aibak’s conquests during the life-time of his master and later on in the capacity of king (c.1200-1210) included Gwalior, parts of Bundelkhand, Ajmer, Ranthambhor, Anhilwara, as well a parts of U. P. and Malwa. In Nahrwala alone 50,000 persons were killed during Aibak’s campaign.8 No wonder, he earned the nickname of killer of lacs.9 Bakhtiyar Khalji marched through Bihar into Bengal and massacred people in both the regions. During his expedition to Gwalior Iltutmish (1210-36) massacred 700 persons besides those killed in the battle on both sides. His attacks on Malwa (Vidisha and Ujjain) were met with stiff resistance and were accompanied by great loss of life. He is also credited with killing 12,000 Khokhars (Gakkhars) during Aibak’s reign.10 The successors of Iltutmish (Raziyah, Bahram, etc.) too fought and killed zealously. During the reigns of Nasiruddin and Balban (1246-86) warfare for consolidation and expansion of Turkish dominions went on apace. Trailokyavarman, who ruled over Southern U. P., Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand, and is called “Dalaki va Malaki” by Persian chroniclers, was defeated after great slaughter (1248). In 1251, Gwalior, Chanderi, Narwar and Malwa were attacked. The Raja of Malwa alone had 5,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry and would have been defeated only after great loss of life. The inhabitants of Kaithal were given such severe punishment (1254) that they ‘might not forget (the lesson) for the rest of their lives.’ In 1256 Ulugh Khan Balban carried on devastating warfare in Sirmur, and ‘so many of the rebellious Hindus were killed that numbers cannot be computed or described.’ Ranthambhor was attacked in 1259 and ‘many of its valiant fighting men were sent to hell.’ In the punitive expedition to Mewat (1260) ‘numberless Hindus perished under the merciless swords of the soldiers of Islam.’ In the same year 12,000 men, women and children were put to the sword in Hariyana.”

K. S. Lal book Indian Muslims: Who Are They

Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Game theory, analyzing in a novel mathematical framework, rational competition between two or more antagonists for maximum gain and minimum loss.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

Game, Mathematics

“On a novel plan, I have combined the historical progress with the scientific developement of the subject; and endeavoured to lay down and inculcate the principles of the Calculus, whilst I traced its gradual and successive improvements…. there is little doubt, the student's curiosity and attention will be more excited and sustained, when he finds history blended with science, and the demonstration of formulae accompanied with the object and the causes of their invention, than by a mere analytical exposition of the principles of the subject. He will have an opportunity of observing how a calculus, from simple beginnings, by easy steps, and seemingly the slightest improvements, is advanced to perfection; his curiosity too, may be stimulated to an examination of the works of the contemporaries of Newton; works once read and celebrated: yet the writings of the Bernoullis are not antiquated from loss of beauty, nor deserve neglect…”

Robert Woodhouse (1773–1827) English mathematician

Preface p. iv-v
A Treatise on Isoperimetrical Problems, and the Calculus of Variations (1810)

Beauty, History, Science, Reading

“Each and every loss becomes an instance of ultimate tragedy—something that once was, but shall never be known to us. The hump of the giant deer—as a nonfossilizable item of soft anatomy—should have fallen into the maw of erased history. But our ancestors provided a wondrous rescue, and we should rejoice mightily. Every new item can instruct us; every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake; every rescue from history's great shredding machine is—and I don't know how else to say this—a holy act of salvation for a bit of totality.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"A Lesson from the Old Masters", p. 195
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Beauty, History

“No, I don’t think it’s correct to define my writing as fables. There are themes, yes, but I’m not trying to offer some categorical cure-it-all to the problematic situation of Man. I’m neither theologian nor a politician. My concern in my first novel, The Zoo, was loss of inner life. After long years of writer’s block, the novel just exploded out of me. Thirty days. All too quickly to really do it justice. With my second novel, The Nihilesthete, I was taken by the spiritual diminishment and the all-pervasive powerlessness that I felt was taking over our culture which in turn prevented and inverted my lead character’s full expression. Such is the motive-force behind almost banal, cerebralized cruelties he harbours upon his arch-enemy, the artist, Brodski.”

Richard Kalich novelist

Richard Kalich in conversation with Lucy Sweeney Byrne - Books Go Social http://booksgosocial.com/2015/01/13/richard-kalich-in-conversation-with-lucy-sweeney-byrne/ January 13, 2015.

Life, Justice, Motivation, Thinking

“American corporations often say human resources are their most important asset. In our national discourse, everyone talks about jobs. Yet as a society we somehow tolerate persistent high unemployment, 30 years of stagnating wages and growing wage inequality, two decades of declining job satisfaction and loss of pension and retirement benefits, and continuous challenges from the consequences of unemployment on family life. If we really valued work and human resources, we would address these problems with the vigor required to solve them.”

Thomas A. Kochan (1947) American academic

Thomas A. Kochan in: "An interview with Thomas A. Kochan," in: Harvard Magazine, Sept. 2012. online at harvardmagazine.com.

Life, Family, Problem

“The goal of public policy is to make our lives better. Does that mean richer? Or healthier? No policy change is good for everyone, so we must weigh total gains against total losses. But even that task is more complicated than it first appears.”

Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician

Introduction to Public Policy (2011), Ch. 5 : Evaluating Social Welfare

Appearance, Change

“A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love, Death, Women, Imagination

“Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845), p. 48

Pain, Feeling, Time, Help

“Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O. A. U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence."”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

Life, Hope, Support, Freedom

“To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“You have to ration your opponents' victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.”

Lee Child book Gone Tomorrow

Source: Gone Tomorrow (2009), Ch. 43.

Way, Victory

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. …it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. …by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors.”

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

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

Age, Error, Feeling, Imagination

“The Cymry will be lamenting
While their souls will be tried
Before a horde of ravagers.
The Cymry, chief wicked ones,
On account of the loss of holy wafers.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The First Address of Taliesin

Soul

“It has been said that Sweden's loss has been America's gain, and I think this is true. Swedish immigrants and their descendants have contributed a great deal to America and it is worthwhile to remember our Swedish heritage.”

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

Address at a Swedish Colonial Society luncheon in Philadelphia (9 April 2001).
Books, articles, and speeches

Thinking

“Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2005 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2005.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Men, Law, Star, Sea

“I have a "Task": To foster all mankind and ensure for all of them lives full of ananda (bliss). I have a "Vow": To lead all who stray away from the straight path again into goodness and save them. I am attached to a "work" that I love: To remove the sufferings of the poor and grant them what they lack. I have a "reason to be proud", for I rescue all who worship and adore me, aright. I have my definition of the "devotion" I expect: Those devoted to me have to treat joy and grief, gain and loss, with equal fortitude. This means that I will never give up those who attach themselves to me.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

Letter that he wrote to his older brother Seshama Raju (1947) [Better dating and sourcing of any publication would be useful here]

Love, Suffering, Joy

“Might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison," would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Atheist Delusion (2008)

People, World, Religion, Freedom

“I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking, written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. (Norman Vincent Peale).. He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'… Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing… But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden…”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

God, People, Books, Disappointment

“I for my part still conceive it to be the paramount duty of a British member of parliament to consider what is good for Great Britain…I do not envy that man's feelings, who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man, who can look without emotion at Italy – plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation – who can look at all this, and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe? As little do I envy the feelings of that man, who can view the peoples of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merciless tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance. Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples, by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding, and his heart, still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

Speech in 1798, quoted in Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 66.

People, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“A great deal of study has been directed to denning 'best decisions,' particularly since the pioneering work of mathematical statisticians (such as Wald), of mathematicians (such as von Neumann), of economists (such as Arrow)… The main effect of this development on the practice of OR has been the growing realization that there are decision objectives other than maximizing expected return and minimizing maximum loss. That is, in many practical situations there are criteria of optimality that are more appropriate than these two mentioned.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1950s, The development of operations research as a science, 1956, p. 270.

Mathematics, Optimism, Decision, Study

“Muslim historians credit all their heroes with many expeditions each of which “laid waste” this or that province or region or city or countryside. The foremost heroes of the imperial line at Delhi and Agra such as Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak (1192-1210 A. D.), Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (1210-36 A. D.), Ghiyãsu’d-Dîn Balban (1246-66 A D.), Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî (1296-1316 A. D.), Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325-51 A. D.), Fîruz Shãh Tughlaq (135188 A. D.) Sikandar Lodî (1489-1519 A. D.), Bãbar (1519-26 A. D.) and Aurangzeb (1658-1707 A. D.) have been specially hailed for “hunting the peasantry like wild beasts”, or for seeing to it that “no lamp is lighted for hundreds of miles”, or for “destroying the dens of idolatry and God-pluralism” wherever their writ ran. The sultans of the provincial Muslim dynasties-Malwa, Gujarat, Sindh, Deccan, Jaunpur, Bengal-were not far behind, if not ahead, of what the imperial pioneers had done or were doing; quite often their performance put the imperial pioneers to shame. No study has yet been made of how much the human population declined due to repeated genocides committed by the swordsmen of Islam. But the count of cities and towns and villages which simply disappeared during the Muslim rule leaves little doubt that the loss of life suffered by the cradle of Hindu culture was colossal.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Life, God, Study, Light

“I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.”

Paula Poundstone (1959) American comedian

" Paula Poundstone: Look What the Cat Dragged In http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896560/", Bravo channel, November 7, 2006.

Thinking, Memory

“All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance. Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. Nor has the danger yet entirely ceased. Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people. Time is a great corrective. Political subjects which but a few years ago excited and exasperated the public mind have passed away and are now nearly forgotten. But this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation, which since the recent legislation of Congress is without any legitimate object.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Inaugural address (4 March 1857).

Love, Happiness, People, Family

“In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age—each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.”
Denique isto bono utare, dum adsit, cum absit, ne requiras: nisi forte adulescentes pueritiam, paulum aetate progressi adulescentiam debent requirere. cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae eaque simplex, suaque cuique parti aetatis tempestivitas est data, ut et infirmitas puerorum et ferocitas iuvenum et gravitas iam constantis aetatis et senectutis maturitas naturale quiddam habet, quod suo tempore percipi debeat.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 33 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D33 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Life, Youth, Age, Nature

“We may fill our purses, but we pay a heavy price for it in the loss of picturesqueness and beauty.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

Source: James Nasmyth engineer, 1883, p. 153 (in 2010 edition)

Beauty

“I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was — the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one.”

Peter Cook Beyond the Fringe

"The Great Train Robbery" (1964)
Beyond the Fringe (1960 - 1966)

Training

“Take care to sell your horse before he dies.
The art of life is passing losses on.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Ingenuities of Debt
1940s

Life, Art, Horse

“Is it not highly disgraceful and dangerous to make increasingly frequent attempts, either directly or indirectly (through silence), to publicly rehabilitate Stalin, his associates, and his policy, his pseudosocialism of terroristic bureaucracy, a socialism of hypocrisy and ostentatious growth that was at best a quantitative and one-sided growth involving the loss of many qualitative features?”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

Silence

“If civilization is to be bound up with material advancement, we must accept its inevitable consequence, loss of freedom in enact proportion to the forward march.”

C. Rajagopalachari (1878–1972) Political leader

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (1960) The voice of the uninvolved: speeches and statements on atomic warfare and test explosions. p. 167

Freedom

“No suffering can be foreign to a Christian, not even the anguish that comes with the loss of God.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), p. 23

God, Suffering

“Putting one’s chips on Trump is a gamble with a real possibility of losing. Betting on Clinton, however, is no gamble because we already know that her personal qualities aside, she is likely to reproduce the losses that the Obama administration has inflicted on the US and its allies. Having said that, American voters should have one concern above all: Which candidate might heal the rift that is damaging to the very fabric of their nation?”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Clinton or Trump – Better or Less Bad? http://english.aawsat.com/2016/11/article55361471/opinion-clinton-trump-better-less-bad, Ashraq Al-Awsat (November 4, 2016)

Personality

“Social costs… are all direct and indirect losses sustained by third persons or the general public as a result of unrestrained economic activities.”

Karl William Kapp (1910–1976) American economist

Source: Social Costs of Business Enterprise, 1963, p. 12. Cited in: M. Rangone & S. Solari (2012) "Southern European capitalism and the social costs of business enterprise". in: Studi e Note di Economia, Anno XVII, n. 1-2012, pp. 3-28

Personality

“What became a problem is there was a clause that allowed investors to cover losses. As long as you made losses one year, you could carry them over to the next and to the next. And because of that they would pay no taxes. So this fellow takes all the gold away and he says he makes losses and so he does not pay us anything. So he is the only one that is being protected. Those of us who are losing our resources are not protected. This is the thing that created the kind of debate that we had and we had to renegotiate.”

Jakaya Kikwete (1950) Tanzanian politician and president

On Tanzania's mining sector. Interviews, Interview with Financial Times, 2007-10-04 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8a07e28-72a3-11dc-b7ff-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check1/

Problem

“He [Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school, as I point out extensively in Love, Poverty and War. But his decline and fall is a loss, and you miss the point by denying it.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

Love, War, People, World

“Management is not a matter of pressing a button, pulling a lever, issuing orders, scanning profit and loss statements, promulgating rules and regulations. Rather, management is the power to determine what shall happen to the personalities and to the happiness of entire peoples, the power to shape the destiny of a nation and of all the nations which make up the world. Executive work, therefore, is statesmanship and the techniques which the executive employs are only incidental to the forces which he sets in motion and helps to direct. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the management of the nation's large institutions, both in business and in government, determines the fate of millions of individual lives as well as the lives of generations unborn.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: The Executive in Action, 1945, p. 3-4, as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 419

Fate, Happiness, People, World

“Think thou, without loss of time, of some celestial, and thou shall certainly obtain from him a child like unto him.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Kunti to Madri
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIV

Thinking, Time

“The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Pétur Þríhross
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, Life, Understanding, Dead

“Among the common changes in forests over the past two centuries are loss of old forests, simplification of forest structure, decreasing size of forest patches, increasing isolation of patches, disruption of natural fire regimes, and increased road building, all of which have had negative effects on native biodiversity.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[Assessing and monitoring forest biodiversity: a suggested framework and indicators, Forest Ecology and Management, 115, 2–3, 22 March 1999, 135–146, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112798003946] (quote from p. 135)

Nature, Change, Past

“Consciously risk the loss of something before losing it, and you will lose the fear of losing it.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle

Fear

“The search continues for the absolute model-form which shall do justice to every dimension without loss of inner force.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 8.

Justice, Search

“Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

World, Religion

“I have three objections to my honourable Friend’s wider proposal that exchange control powers be used to require the fixing of exchange by merchants on entering into both export and import contracts. The first is that I think it excessively paternalistic to require a merchant to protect himself against a risk he is prepared to take. Secondly, I think it wrong to impose a condition which is likely to cause one group of merchants a loss, for the purpose of providing the other group with protection at no cost to them. Thirdly, I do not think it is in fact practicable to enforce such a system. I am sorry to be so negative, but I am sure that the solution to my honourable Friend’s problem should not depend on compulsion but on the provision of voluntary protection on insurance principles.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 27, 1968, page 208.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Problem, Thinking, Dependency

“What has caused confusion and misunderstanding about his Hinduism is the concept of sarva-dharma-samabhAva (equal regard for all religions) which he had developed after deep reflection. Christian and Muslim missionaries have interpreted it to mean that a Hindu can go aver to Christianity or Islam without suffering any spiritual loss. They are also using it as a shield against every critique of their closed and aggressive creeds. The new rulers of India, on the other hand, cite it in order to prop up the Nehruvian version of Secularism which is only a euphemism for anti-Hindu animus shared in common by Christians, Muslims, Marxists and those who are Hindus only by accident of birth. For Gandhiji, however, sarva-dharma-samabhAva was only a restatement of the age-old Hindu tradition of tolerance in matters of belief. Hinduism has always adjudged a man’s faith in terms of his AdhAra (receptivity) and adhikAra (aptitude). It has never prescribed a uniform system of belief or behavior for everyone because, according to it, different persons are in different stages of spiritual development and need different prescriptions for further progress. Everyone, says Hinduism, should be left alone to work out one’s own salvation through one’s own inner seeking and evolution. Any imposition of belief or behaviour from the outside is, therefore, a mechanical exercise which can only do injury to one’s spiritual growth. Preaching to those who have not invited it is nothing short of aggression born out of self-righteousness. That is why Gandhiji took a firm and uncompromising stand against proselytisation by preaching and gave no quarters to the Christian mission’s mercenary methods of spreading the gospel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Age, Faith, Religion, Behavior

“Afterwards Nadir Shah himself, with the Emperor of Hindustan, entered the fort of Delhi. It is said that he appointed a place on one side in the fort for the residence of Muhammad Shah and his dependents, and on the other side he chose the Diwan-i Khas, or, as some say, the Garden of Hayat Bakhsh, for his own accommodation. He sent to the Emperor of Hindustan, as to a prisoner, some food and wine from his own table. One Friday his own name was read in the khutba, but on the next he ordered Muhammad Shah's name to be read. It is related that one day a rumour spread in the city that Nadir Shah had been slain in the fort. This produced a general confusion, and the people of the city destroyed five thousand1 men of his camp. On hearing of this, Nadir Shah came of the fort, sat in the golden masjid which was built by Rashanu-d daula, and gave orders for a general massacre. For nine hours an indiscriminate slaughter of all and of every degree was committed. It is said that the number of those who were slain amounted to one hundred thousand. The losses and calamities of the people of Delhi were exceedingly great….
After this violence and cruelty, Nadir Shah collected immense riches, which he began to send to his country laden on elephants and camels.”

Nader Shah (1688–1747) ruled as Shah of Iran

Tarikh-i Hindi by Rustam ‘Ali. In The History of India as Told by its own Historians. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H. M. Elliot. John Dowson, ed. 1st ed. 1867. 2nd ed., Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956, vol. 22, pp. 37-67. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_tarikh-i5_frameset.htm

Men, People, Food, Wine

“Every generation of Americans since has had to reenact the loss of our innocence. Smog over L. A. was the loss of our innocence. Vietnam was the loss of our innocence. Gettysburg was the loss of our innocence. Ingrid Bergman’s baby was the loss of our innocence. Oklahoma City was the loss of our innocence. The World Trade Center was the loss of our innocence. Other nations are cynical. America has preferred the child’s game of “discovering” evil—Europe’s or Asia’s, her grandfather’s, even her own.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

World, Game, Evil, Baby

Quotes about loss page 5

Quotes about loss
page 5