Quotes about motivation
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“As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.”

Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist

Source: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

People, Religion, Evil

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
Source: Complete Essays 1, 1920-25

Stupidity, Spring

“Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Wisdom, Question

“Healthy striving is about striving for internal goals, and wanting to be our best selves. Perfectionism is not motivated internally. Perfectionism is about what people will think. And you do not see effective leaders in corporations sitting on an email for three hours to make sure it’s worded just perfectly. You don’t. They have work to get done.. You don’t see elite athletes letting themselves be discouraged by a bad workout or a single bad performance. It happens all the time. They’re accustomed to winning, they’re accustomed to losing. Once perfectionism becomes the goal, they’re out of the sport.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Washington Post, October 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exhaustion-is-not-a-status-symbol/2012/10/02/19d27aa8-0cba-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story_2.html Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

People, Thinking, Sport, Time

“Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.”

Stephen Kendrick book The Love Dare

Source: The Love Dare

Hate, People, Selfishness

“Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”

Jasper Fforde book The Eyre Affair

Source: The Eyre Affair

“I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Dreams, Question, Funny

“There's no such thing as. All evil is motivated - even mine {Lucifer}.”

Glen Duncan book I, Lucifer

Source: I, Lucifer

Evil

“Four things to learn in life: To think clearly without hurry or confusion; To love everybody sincerely; To act in everything with the highest motives; To trust God unhesitatingly.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Love, Life, God, Thinking

“A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Knowledge

“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“Chin held high, Miss Ohio beamed at an imagined crowd. "I want to be a motivational speaker."
"What are you going to motivate people to do?"
Smile still in place, she cut her eyes at Adina. "You know. Motivational… stuff.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

People, Smile, Imagination

“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)

Music, Feeling

“As long as I know that my motives are good, I'm Seldom very concerned with the opinions of others.
-Mandorallen, Baron of Vo Mandor.”

David Eddings book Queen of Sorcery

Source: Queen of Sorcery

“True we can not see God, but we can see the genius of God by works for His hands. We can see by the order of creation that a Creator must exist; reason, logic and common sense point to that conclusion. It is the epitome of foolishness to say our world with its seasons, weather patterns, trees, flowers, birds etc…was the result of some explosion in space of which our earth was a part. How can we say that the human body “just happened” with no intelligent creator behind it? The motive for saying there is no God is deeper than just ignorance.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, World, Intelligence, Flowers

“The now famous slogan 'keep calm and carry on' poster from 1939 was designed as a motivational poster for people living in cities expecting to be bombed by the Nazis. But the UK wasn't just 'keeping calm': we had taken a stand like no other country in the world and declared war on a barbaric regime which was a global threat to peace and security. Today, as we wait to hear news from Manchester following the slaughter and maiming of innocent children, we have people calling for us to do nothing. But it's not the same 'carry on' as in 1939: they want us to accept terror attacks as a part of life we should now accept. Well, I don't accept it. How many people are we going to sacrifice on the alter (sic) of political correctness before we build up the courage to confront what most people will happily admit to their friends and family: that we are facing a continuing threat from radical Islam which hashtags and tea lights will not stop?”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Jane Collins MEP responds to terror attacks in Manchester http://jane-collins.org/news.php?id=79. Item on official website (May 23, 2017).

Life, War, Children, People

“One who desired knowledge of man apart from the fruits of knowledge would seek it in the history of religious enthusiasm, of martyrdom, or of love; he would not seek it in the market-place. When we elect to watch the play of human motives that are ordinary — that are sometimes mean and dismal and ignoble — our impulse is not the philosopher's impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist's, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1

Love, History, Knowledge, Help

“Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking — what we call marching — is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Thinking

“You must not look at things casually. Your eyes must be like a microscope. Look carefully… Your eyes must conduct a dialogue with the world. There is beauty all around. And the great motivation is to design and discover this beauty, to communicate this beauty… Great pictures are not taken, they are made.”

T S Satyan (1923–2009) Indian photojournalist

As written at on his blog http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/ts-satyan/.

World, Beauty, Communication

“A state of individuals, such as we now have reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires that do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

People, Personality

“So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry. Sabotage is essentially a protest of the human spirit against dull mechanism. And the emphasis which democracy places upon political methods tends to transform mere sporadic acts of sabotage into an organized conspiracy against society.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: Democracy and freedom. 1919, p. 56

Democracy, Business, Nature

“The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical capacity for work. Those which arise from the condition of society consist of the capacity to divide up labour and to distribute different jobs amongst different People … and the power to exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these means. The motive which impels a man to give his services to another is self -interest- he requires a reward for the services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable to the establishment of exchange amongst men… Exchange and division of labour reciprocally condition each other.”

Fryderyk Skarbek (1792–1866) Polish noble

Fryderyk Skarbek (1828), cited in: Karl Marx. Human Requirements and Division of Labour https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm, Manuscript, 1844.

Men, People, Intelligence

“The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Ethos of Woman's Professions (1930)

Love, Life, God, Forgetting

“Much has been said in the present debate about conciliation and the value of conciliatory measures to Ireland…Conciliatory legislation is infinitely superior; but it depends for its efficacy on the circumstances under which it is used, and on the manner in which it is applied. Deterrent legislation, if vigorous and strong, at least deters, whatever the value of that process may be. But conciliatory legislation only conciliates where there is a full belief on the part of those with whom you are dealing that you are acting on a principle of justice, and not that you are acting on motives of fear. Where there is a suspicion or a strong belief that your conciliatory measures have been extorted from you by the violence which they are meant to put a stop to, all the value of that conciliation is taken away.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1882/jun/05/motion-for-papers in the House of Lords (5 June 1882) 1880s

Fear, Justice, Strong, Parting

“Once again we see Islam self-detonate (if you'll pardon the expression) and show once again why it's about as welcome on this planet as an asteroid. Once again we see thousands of Islamic nutcases take time out from beating up their wives to show their sensitive side. How? By smashing up the towns they live in, egged on by clerical ignoramuses whose motives are even lower than the literacy level of their followers. And once again we in the civilised world are being urged to censor ourselves out of respect for a religion that violates the human rights of half the people on the planet and that doubles as a political ideology indistinguishable from Nazism. It would be funny if it wasn't so obscene.”

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

"A Word To Rioting Muslims" (20 September 2012) http://youtube.com/watch?v=GCXHPKhRCVg 2012

People, World, Religion, Time

“I came to the understanding that individually we are responsible for the way in which we live and for the care of our human frame by good nutrition, proper exercise and a balanced lifestyle. It is this, together with a strong focused mind, that enables us to draw from our vast inner resources and strength to make the most of our time on this planet. The changes in my life came by way of a massive physical and psychological shock and were implemented for the purpose of healing and motivating my recovery. A change in our diet and lifestyle of course can be started at any time, and is of interest to anybody wishing to maximise their health and vitality, leading to a more fulfilling life. This was how I discovered the benefits of cutting meat and dairy from my diet and then taking the correct care of my body’s nutritional requirements to help heal my mind, body and soul.”

Heather Mills (1968) former glamour model, activist

"Discovering Veganism", in heathermills.org (2016) http://www.heathermills.org/veganism/

Life, Health, Way, Exercises

“What makes The Joker tick I wonder?” Fredric said. “I mean what are his real motivations?”
“Consider him at any level of conduct,” Bruce said slowly, “in the home, on the street, in interpersonal relations, in jail—always there is an extraordinary contradiction. He is dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and a scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and a puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, Republican and Democrat, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day—I tell you frankly, the man is a mess.”
“That’s extremely well said Bruce,” Fredric stated. “I think you’ve given a very thoughtful analysis.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“I was paraphrasing what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis,” Bruce replied.
“The Joker’s Greatest Triumph”.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964)

Women, Happiness, Fools, Art

“Politics may be defined as: the method adopted in governments for obtaining motivation toward a monopoly. In all political actions, a monopoly of control and method is sought.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Rampart Institute, p.411
The Fundamental of Liberty (1988)

“Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere if they are serious about this music…The is no valid motivation for it other than love– outlaw motivation in a profit-motivated society.”

Mike Zwerin (1930–2010) American jazz musician

La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis, Chapter. 4, 1985, Dictionary of Quotations, Chambers: Edinburgh, U.K, 2005, p. 937

Love, Music

“What matters is that religion should sway our motives, sustain our principles, surround and bathe our spirits like a secret atmosphere as we go about our work…Religion, as we are all agreed, is not merely an affair of Christians in churches; it is an affair of Christians in politics, in diplomacy, in trade, in industry, in school, in sport. I think the popular judgment has accepted that as axiomatic.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the annual assembly of the Congregational Union, London (12 May 1931), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 80-81.
1931

Secret, School, Religion, Thinking

“The worker is no longer the slave to his reproductive urge. He is a free bargaining agent who enters the market to dispose of the one commodity he commands — labor power — and if he gets a rise in wages he will not be so foolish as to squander it in a self-defeating proliferation of his numbers.
The capitalist faces him in the arena. His greed and lust for wealth are caustically described in those chapters that leave the abstract world for a look into 1860 England. But it is worth noting that he is not money hungry from mere motives of rapacity; he is an owner-entrepreneur engaged in an endless race against his fellow owner-entrepreneurs; he must strive for accumulation, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or one gets accumulated.
The stage is set and the characters take their places. But now the first difficulty appears. How, asks Marx, can profits exist in such a situation? If everything sells for its exact value, then who gets an unearned increment?”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 148

Money, World, Appearance, Wealth

“If we find, when we read again one of our classics—say Virgil for instance—that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 2
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life, Books, Beauty, Reading

“True Christian love cherished in the heart and exemplified in the life, would teach us to put the best possible construction upon the course of our brethren. We should be as jealous of their reputation as of our own. If we are forever suspecting evil, this very fact will so shape their course of action as to produce the very evil which we have allowed ourselves to suspect. In this way, a great many difficulties are manufactured that otherwise would never have had birth, and brethren are often wronged by our being suspicious, free to judge their motives, and express our opinion to others in regard to their actions. That which one may be ready to construe into grave wrongs, may be no more than we ourselves are chargeable with every day.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

The Review and Herald (15 April 1880); also in Mind, Character, and Personality (1977), Vol. 2, p. 789

Love, Life, Way, Birth

“He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 82)

Love, Cars, Nature, Training

“[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788) s:The_Federalist_Papers/No._51 Full text at Wikisource
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Personality

“Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means-to-survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 168.
Context: Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means-to-survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. It must be so because, in evolution, all sorts of contingincies and needs arise, calling for all sorts of different responses. An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.

“What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.”

Michael Bishop (1945) American writer

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 2, “Covenant: Derringer and Dascra” (p. 41)

“The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Source: The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12

Nature, Thinking, Universe, Animals

“The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 4, “The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae” (p. 124).
Jack Glass (2012)

Personality

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Hate, Health, Age, Fear

“. Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes... Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe... Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

In Renoir's letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, from Guernsey, 27 Sept, 1883; as cited in 'Renoir in Guernsey' (in 1883), text by John House http://museums.gov.gg/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=81297&p=0, Guernsey museum 1880's

Women, Men, People, World

“If we accomplish a good deed, a charity in the hope of (getting…) future rewards, or with a more or less confessed (or admitted) ulterior motive to profit from personal advantages ("d'en retirer quelque avantage personnel", Fr.), we are probably doing a useful thing, but which is devoided of any ("tout", Fr.) truly moral character (or disposition)"”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

p .39.
Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937)

Hope, Future, Personality

“Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

“Great Britain, will now have to determine its attitude toward the conflict, and it has the following possibilities: It can accept that the situation will never return to what it was before April 2, in which case we would maintain an attitude of negotiating for the recovery of our sovereignty. Or it can proceed toward the restoration of its colonial regime, with which there would be no security or definitive peace, and the responsibility of deepening the conflict would fall on Great Britain. In any case, the nation united, on its feet, motivated by the sentiment a united cause, will continue marching toward improving and strengthening itself.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

As quoted in "Galtieri bars peace if Britain restores its 'colonial rule'" http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/16/world/galtieri-bars-peace-if-britain-restores-its-colonial-rule.html, The New York Times (June 16, 1982)

Peace

“I think that if we would, every evening, come to our Master's feet, and tell Him where we have been, what we have done, what we have said, and what were the motives by which we have been actuated, it would have a salutary effect upon our whole conduct.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 466.

Thinking

“Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Austin (1956) " A Plea for Excuses http://www.ditext.com/austin/plea.html", in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956-7.

History, Nature

“[W]ork is good. Work is virtuous and inculcates virtue. Work gives people a sense of meaning and of being needed. Obviously, not everyone feels such satisfaction in the job they have now, but that dissatisfaction is precisely the motivation people need to find the job that might provide it. That motivation inspires virtue, too.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, A Free People Must Be Virtuous (2018)

People, Feeling, Sense

“In response on the motives of suicide bombers, he said that, Those who put others through hell will never go to heaven.”

Mohammad Khatami (1943) Iranian prominent reformist politician, scholar and shiite faqih.

In response on the motives of suicide bombers in a speech at Harvard University http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/11/AR2006091100315.html 11 September 2006) Attributed

Hell, Suicide

“As a teenager I started to learn about what was on my plate – where it came from and what it was doing to my body. I became vegetarian then later on vegan. … Each and every person who decides to be vegan makes a massive difference. From literally saving animals from suffering and death, to improving their health and the environmental benefits – being vegan means seeing the bigger picture and saying I'm going to do what I can and take a stand. … I'm motivated by being the best example I can of what can be achieved physically and ethically. I strive to excel in what I love doing and don't believe in the idea that I can't be strong and muscular because I'm vegan, that I can't be fast or flexible because I'm a bodybuilder, and that one person can't make a difference.”

Billy Simmonds (1980)

"Interview with Billy Simmonds: Vegan Body Builder" https://web.archive.org/web/20160201195350/http://www.vivalavegan.net/articles/467-interview-with-billy-simmonds-vegan-body-builder.html, Viva La Vegan! (2016).

Love, Death, Health, Idea

“Socialization consists of those patterns of action or aspects of action which inculcate in individuals the skills (including knowledge), motives, and attitudes necessary for the performance of present and anticipated roles.”

David Aberle (1918–2004) anthropologist

David Aberle (1961: 387), quoted in: William E. Willmott (1972) Economic Organization in Chinese Society,

Knowledge

“[I]f a politician won't trust you, why should you trust him? If he's a man — and you're not — what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If "he" happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she's eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn't want you to have?
On the other hand — or the other party — should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?
Makes voting simpler, doesn't it? You don't have to study every issue — health care, international trade — all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?" (3 August 1999).

Women, Hate, Health, Feeling

“My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

Learning, Teachers, Help

“Surveying the shifts of interest among computer scientists and the ever-expanding family of those who depend on computers for their work, one cannot help being struck by the power of the computer to bind together, in a genuine community of interest, people whose motivations differ widely.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 6: Summary
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

People, Family, Communication, Help

“It is not easy to remain motivated in the face of widespread apathy and self-indulgence.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Lautoka Rotary Club (Centenary Dinner), 12 March 2005 http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/printer_4326.shtml.

“Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Metro Weekly interview (2006)

People, Feeling, Sense, Time

“I think we're going to find some other things. And I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

White House years (1993–2000) Source: "Hillary Clinton Threatens Bill's Accusers on Today Show" https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4604929/hillary-clinton-threatens-bills-accusers-today-show-jan-28-1998, C-SPAN, Interview with Matt Lauer (28 January 1998)

People, Behavior, Thinking, Past

“But in too many cases the team has been defined through exclusion of women. This simply has to stop – both for altruistic and pragmatic reasons. I like to think I am as altruistic as the next person but my motives are essentially pragmatic. Organisations with high levels of what can be termed as ‘social capital’ are more effective, both in their performance and ability to retain their highly skilled personnel much longer.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Thinking, Personality

““Let him talk as he will!” scoffed Zamp. “His motives are not at all obscure.””

Jack Vance book Showboat World

Source: Showboat World (1975), Chapter 10 (p. 108)

“The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Pearl, Judea (2008) "Causal Inference," in: Pearl, Judea. The science and ethics of causal modeling. (2010).

Death, Health, Behavior, Question

“What is the motive which operates in every man's breast to counteract the impulse towards the gratification of his wants and appetites?”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter XIX, p. 207

“The Palestinian issue should be at the heart of our unity. It must motivate us to unite and stand in one row behind the Palestinian Mujahideen and the brave uprising.”

Mohammad-Ali Taskhiri (1948) Iranian ayatollah

Ayatollah Muhammad 'Ali Al-Taskhiri, Secretary General of the International Forum for Bringing Islamic Schools of Thought Closer on the Palestinian Struggle http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=66 May 2004.

Heart

“Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 129 (2009 edition)

World, Law, Thinking, Sense

“This naive manner of conceptualizing capitalism by reference to a “pursuit of gain” must be relegated to the kindergarten of cultural history methodology and abandoned once and for all. A fully unconstrained compulsion to acquire goods cannot be understood as synonymous with capitalism, and even less as its “spirit.” On the contrary, capitalism can be identical with the taming of this irrational motivation, or at least with its rational tempering. Nonetheless, capitalism is distinguished by the striving for profit, indeed, profit is pursued in a rational, continuous manner in companies and firms, and then pursued again and again, as is profitability. There are no choices. If the entire economy is organized according to the rules of the open market, any company that fails to orient its activities toward the chance of attaining profit is condemned to bankruptcy.
Let us begin by defining terms in a manner more precise than often occurs. For us, a "capitalist" economic act involves first of all an expectation of profit based on the utilization of opportunities for exchange; that is of (formally) peaceful opportunities for acquisition. Formal and actual acquisition through violence follows its own special laws and hence should best be placed, as much as one may recommend doing so, in a different category. Wherever capitalist acquisition is rationally pursued, action is oriented to calculation in terms of capital. What does this mean?”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

Peace, Law, History, Chance

“Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it — to reach God a posteriori — rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

God, Way

“Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principal motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Needs of the Soul (1949), p. 97

Men, Food, Hope, Exercises

“Scripture tells us that 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Captain Humayun Khan of the United States Army showed in his final moments that he was filled and motivated by this love. His name will live forever in American memory, as an example of true American greatness.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

Love, Life, Memory

“I am staying on in Geneva, this charming city. With each step I discover delightful motives. How pleasant it is to work here. And the light is just the way I like it, full of delicate nuances.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote in a letter to his friend, the painter Paul Tavernier, Geneva, July 1842; ; as quoted in 'Corot', Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 136
1820 - 1850

Way, Light

“An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended — the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and that it must therefore have been intended.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

People, Feeling

“From 1931 to 1935, I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my father's old college, Gonville and Caius, which was particularly strong in medicine and the law. However, after two years of law I switched to economics, much to my father's disappointment. At that time the world was in the depth of the great depression and my motive for wanting to change subject was the belief, bred of youthful ignorance and optimism, that if only economics were better understood, the world would be a better place.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

"Richard Stone - Biographical," 1984

Youth, World, Law, Disappointment

“Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.”

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

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 63

Money, Way, Game

“The beautiful Monique insists on joining their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has a nefarious motive, but no, she's probably taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that the film requires a sexy female lead. This could be the first case in cinematic history of a character voluntarily entering a movie because of the objective fact that she is required.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/around-the-world-in-80-days-2004 of Around the World in 80 Days (16 June 2004) Reviews, Three star reviews

Beauty, History, Thinking

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!"”

Bill Bryson book Notes from a Small Island

Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.
Notes from a Small Island (1995)

Men, People, Imagination, Thinking

“Let no one charge us with capricious inconsistency in our actions against Albinus, and let no one think that I am disloyal to this alleged friend or lacking in feeling toward him. 2. We gave this man everything, even a share of the established empire, a thing which a man would hardly do for his own brother. Indeed, I bestowed upon him that which you entrusted to me alone. Surely Albinus has shown little gratitude for the many benefits I have lavished upon him. 3. Now |87 he is collecting an army to take up arms against us, scornful of your valor and indifferent to his pledge of good faith to me, wishing in his insatiable greed to seize at the risk of disaster that which he has already received in part without war and without bloodshed, showing no respect for the gods by whom he has often sworn, and counting as worthless the labors you performed on our joint behalf with such courage and devotion to duty. 4. In what you accomplished, he also had a share, and he would have had an even greater share of the honor you gained for us both if he had only kept his word. For, just as it is unfair to initiate wrong actions, so also it is cowardly to make no defense against unjust treatment. Now when we took the field against Niger, we had reasons for our hostility, not entirely logical, perhaps, but inevitable. We did not hate him because he had seized the empire after it was already ours, but rather each one of us, motivated by an equal desire for glory, sought the empire for himself alone, when it was still in dispute and lay prostrate before all. 5. But Albinus has violated his pledges and broken his oaths, and although he received from me that which a man normally gives only to his son, he has chosen to be hostile rather than friendly and belligerent instead of peaceful. And just as we were generous to him previously and showered fame and honor upon him, so let us now punish him with our arms for his treachery and cowardice. 6. His army, small and island-bred, will not stand against your might. For you, who by your valor and readiness to act on your own behalf have been victorious in many battles and have gained control of the entire East, how can you fail to emerge victorious with the greatest of ease when you have so large a number of allies and when virtually the entire army is here. Whereas they, by contrast, are few in number and lack a brave and competent general to lead them. 7. Who does not know Albinus' effeminate nature? Who does not know that his way |88 of life has prepared him more for the chorus than for the battlefield? Let us therefore go forth against him with confidence, relying on our customary zeal and valor, with the gods as our allies, gods against whom he has acted impiously in breaking his oaths, and let us be mindful of the victories we have won, victories which that man ridicules.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book 3, Chapter 6.

Life, God, Hate, Hostility

“We should often be ashamed of our very best actions if the world only saw the motives which caused them.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

http://books.google.com/books?id=vQEzAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+should+often+be+ashamed+of+our+very+best+actions+if+the+world+only+saw+the+motives+which+caused+them%22&pg=PA47#v=onepage
Nous aurions souvent honte de nos plus belles actions, si le monde voyoit tous les motifs qui les produisent.
http://books.google.com/books?id=X8akMrBxYegC&q=%22Nous%22+%22aurions+souvent+honte+de+nos+plus+belles+Actions+si+le+monde+voyoit+tous+les+motifs+qui%22+%22les+produisent%22&pg=PA232#v=onepage
Maxim 409.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

World

“It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his policy of sulh-i-kul, at least among the learned Hindus. It is no more remembered that to start with he was also a pious Muslim who had viewed as jihãd his sack of Chittor. Nor is it understood by the learned Hindus that his policy of sulh-i-kul was motivated mainly by his bid to free himself from the stranglehold of the orthodox ‘Ulamã, and that any benefit which Hindus derived from it was no more than a by-product. Akbar never failed to demand daughters of the Rajput kings for his harem. Moreover, as our citations show, he was not able to control the religious zeal of his functionaries at the lower levels so far as Hindu temples were concerned. Jahãngîr, like many other Muslim kings, was essentially a pleasure-seeking person. He, however, became a pious Muslim when it came to Hindu temples of which he destroyed quite a few. Shãh Jahãn did not hide what he wanted to do to the Hindus and their places of worship. His Islamic record on this score was much better than that of Jahãngîr. The reversal of Akbar’s policy thus started by his two immediate successors reached its apotheosis in the reign of Aurangzeb, the paragon of Islamic piety in the minds of India’s Muslims. What is more significant, Akbar has never been forgiven by those who have regarded themselves as custodians of Islam, right upto our own times; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is a typical example. In any case one swallow has never made a summer.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Pleasure, Learning, Time, Summer

“Mappo Trell, I believe motivations prove, ultimately, irrelevant. Upon either side of the battlefield the face grins with blunt stupidity, even as smoke fills the sky from horizon to horizon, even as crops whither and die, even as sweet land turns to salt. Inequity ends, Trell, when no-one and no thing is left standing.”

Steven Erikson book The Bonehunters

The Bonehunters (2006)

Stupidity

“It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.”

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

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/04/hitchens.htm "Reactionary Prophet", The Atlantic, April 2004
2000s, 2004

“Even when the shadows of trial are falling around us, let us "pass through the cloud" with the sustaining motive— "All my wish, O God, is to please and glorify Thee!"”

John Ross Macduff (1818–1895) Scottish religious writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 283.

God

“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 1
An American Dream (1965)

Death, Universe

“Nobody supports what happened last Saturday in London. But what about stopping it happening? As long as we are in Ireland, people will be letting off bombs in London. I can see that we are a colonial power holding down a colony. For the rest of the time violence will recur again and again as long as we are in Ireland. People in Northern Ireland see themselves as subject peoples. If they were just criminals or psychopaths they could be crushed. But they have a motive force which they think is good.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Referring to the IRA's Chelsea Barracks bomb of 10 October 1981, in a speech to the Cambridge University Tory Reform Group (12 October 1981), quoted in The Times (13 October 1981).

People, Support, Thinking, Time

“Motives, attitudes, and expectations of consumers and businessmen play a significant role in determining spending, saving, and investing and that modern psychology provides conceptual as well as methodological tools for the investigation of economic behavior.”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona, Psychological economics. Elsevier, 1975.

Behavior

“A generous relationship rarely knows dramas. One is happy when the partner is happy. And one is happy when growing on three levels: on the physical level, which gives love, material things, and protection; on the inner level— through compassion and wisdom—which provides the motivation for development; and on a deep-lying, secret level where both partners enrich themselves with the qualities of the other and increasingly find their center.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Buddha & Love: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Relationships (2012)

Love, Wisdom, Happiness, Secret

“One thing seems at any rate certain, that the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the real originative and dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to act. That was not the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour, — whatever certain European critics or interpreters of her culture may say, — and it will not be the India of the future. Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Dreams, Hope, Thinking, Strong

“People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.”

Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 15, “Preparing for Ghosts and Dogs” (pp. 245-246)

People

“Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?”

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

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

“I desire to sever all connection with the Society of American Artists. In deference to some of its older members, who perhaps from sentimental motives requested me to reconsider my resignation last year, I shall explain… For the last three years my paintings have been rejected by you, one of them the Agnew portrait, a composition more important than any I have ever seen on your walls.Rejection for three years eliminates all elements of chance, and while in my opinion there are qualities in my work which entitle it to rank with the best in your Society, your Society's opinion must be that it ranks below much that I consider frivolous and superficial. These opinions are irreconcilable.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to the Society of American Artists (1892-05-07).

Chance, Painting

“Months later, Roger Cohen would write in The New York Time that preventing an attack on Banja Luka was "an acto of consummate Realpolitik" on our part, since letting the Federation [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] take the city would have "derailed" the peace process. Cohen, one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the was, misunderstood our motives in opposing an attack on Banja Luka. A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged the attack regardless of its human consequences. In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. Given the harsh behavior of Federation troops during the offensive, it seemed certain that the fall of Banja Luka would lead to forced evictions and random murders. I did not think the United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human suffering in order to take a city that would have to be returned later. Revenge might be a central part of the ethos of the Balkans, but American policy could not be party of it. Our responsibility was to implement the American national interest, as best as we could determine it. But I am no longer certain we were right to oppose an attack on Banja Luka. Had we known then that the Bosnian Serbs would have been able to defy or ignore so many of the key political provisions of the peace agreement in 1996 and 1997, the negotiating team might not have opposed such an attack. However, even with American encouragement, it is by no means certain that an attack would have taken palce - or, if it had, that it would have been successful. Tuđman would have had to carry the burden of the attack, and the Serb lines were already stiffening. The Croatian Army had just taken heavy casualties on the Sarva. Furthermore, if it fell, Banja Luka would either have gone to the Muslims or been returned later to the Serbs, thus making it of dubious value to Tuđman. There was another intriguing factor in the equation - one of the few things that Milošević and Izetbegović had agreed on. Banja Luka, they both said, was the center of moderate, anti-Pale sentiment within the Bosnian Serb community, and should be built up in importance as a center of opposition to Pale. Izetbegovic himself was ambivalent about taking the city, and feared that if it fell, it would only add to Croat-Bosnian tensions.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 166-167

Fear, Peace, Behavior, Communication

“A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger. In this case, the destruction or killing of the object is the biologically purposeful goal. The original motive is not pleasure in destruction. Rather the destruction serves the "life instinct"…and is an attempt to avoid anxiety and to preserve the ego in its totality. I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live…”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Source: The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Ch. V : The Development of the Character-Analytic Technique

Life, Pleasure

“If the character has the motivation to dance round trees, then I will dance round trees. If the motivation is strong enough, then I'll fly to the moon.”

Rahul Bose (1967) Indian actor

Rediff, April 4, 1997. " If the motivation is strong enough, I'll fly to the moon http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t3KMttIk5NwJ:www.rediff.com/entertai/apr/04rahl.htm+%22Still+dressed+in+his+night+clothes+and+sporting+a+hep+stubble,%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a" by Suparn Varma

Tree, Strong, Dance, Flying

“It doesn't matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

"The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation," Chronicle of Higher Education

“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340

Life, World, Dreams, Art

“The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

Life

“Contingency theorists suggest that we can best proceed by appointing 'the right people' to the job we have in mind, and by creating flexible authority, communications, and reward structures that will motivate them to satisfy their own needs through the achievement of organizational goals.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 78; as cited in: Steffen Blaschke (2008). Structures and Dynamics of Autopoietic Organizations. p. 42

People, Communication

“Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I. R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

Justice, Confidence, History, Fashion

“What motivates me now are ideas I developed 10, 20 or 30 years ago, and the feeling that these ideas may be lost if I don't push them a little bit further.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

New Scientist interview (2004)

Feeling, Idea

“As for 'taste' as a criterion of painting I find that it is most frequently applied to work that is essentially insensitive, brutal or vulgar beyond question. Could it now be a term with political undertones to seduce, or cover profounder motives of exploitation? I propose it be kept to the wine cellar. There it deceives no one but him who over-indulges.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still, in an interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 201
1960s

Question, Wine, Painting