Quotes about reason
page 30

“The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc.”

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

Broken Lights p. 33 Diaries 1951.

Love, World, Jealousy

“I am asking the U. S. A and Great Britain if, just for once, they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmers instead of that of the French… My people will tell you: 'We don't know what communist slavery means. But the slavery imposed by the French we know well, for we are now living under it. If we fight alongside the French against the Viet Minh and the Issaraks, we are simply strengthening the chains of that slavery…' [The problem is that] in Indochina, you are either a communist or a lackey of the French: there is no middle course. We are not allowed to hope for an independence like that of India or Pakistan within the British Commonwealth… The question is: Does French military power on its own have any chance of defeating communism in Indochina? To fight without having the autochtonous population on one's side makes no sense… What is at stake in this struggle, and what will determine its outcome, is the [native] population. The Viet Minh have understood that from the start. If we [who oppose communism] wish to have the population with us, we must… make [our country's] independence… real and unquestionable, so that [no one] will listen any more to the Viet Minh propaganda about 'liberation'… This is the whole problem. It is a political matter. It has nothing to do with the science of war… If France does not boldly face up to [this]… then one day, sooner or later, it will be forced to abdicate from Indochina.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Secret memorandum drafted for the American and British legations (1953), as quoted in Philip Short (2004) Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, pages 92-93.
Speeches

War, People, Hope, Communication

“The historian is not only a lover of truth, not only a chronicler of events. These, indeed, he must be at his peril, but how much more! Insight into human nature—and this implies the rarest knowledge and finest sympathy of which man is capable; the power of tracing the delicate relation between deed and motive, and the pressure of action upon circumstance and circumstance upon action; knowledge of the world, in short, in the highest sense of that expression.”

Henry Nettleship (1839–1893) British schoolteacher

Lectures and Essays https://archive.org/details/lecturesandessa00havegoog (1895), p. 245

Truth, World, Lovers, Motivation

“They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i. e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Interview in The Believer magazine, (July 2004) http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

Life, Beauty, Music, Cars

“You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

People

“Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed valuable and commendable, — the accepted test of success, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is accepted as the measure of productiveness.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Source: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914, p. 349

Money, Business, Success

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God, War, People, Books

“Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism.”

Charles Seeger (1886–1979) American musicologist

Unsourced

Law, Reality, Parting

“Naturally, since I am not concerned with normative allegations, I cannot be concerned here with the invocation of the overtone series as a 'natural' phenomenon, and that application of equivocation which then would label as 'un-natural' (in the sense, it would appear, of morally perverse) music which is not 'founded' on it. Now, what music, in what sense, ever had been founded on it?”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

Quoted in Maus, Fred Everett (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music, p. 158. ISBN 1580461433.

Music, Nature, Appearance

“(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.
Source: The Quest For Wilhelm Reich (1981), pp. 2-3

People, Feeling, Water, Victory

“Aristotle was guided by that which appears to be the nature of things. The Ashariyah refused to ascribe to God ignorance about anything… they preferred to admit the above-mentioned absurdities. The Mu'tazilites refused to assume that God does what is wrong and unjust; on the other hand, they would not contradict common sense and say that it was not wrong to inflict pain on the guiltless, or that the mission of the Prophets and the giving of the Law had no intelligible reason. They likewise preferred to admit the above-named absurdities. But they even contradicted themselves, because they believe on the one hand that God knows everything, and on the other that man has free will. By a little consideration we discover the contradiction.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

God, Pain, Law, Intelligence

“With all the wonderful vegetarian foods available today, it doesn’t take a mentalist to realize that eating meat just doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s not healthy, it’s devastating to our planet, and it means a cruel and painful death for literally billions of animals every year. So why not give vegetarianism a try? You will have a lot more energy, you can lose weight, and best of all you will know that you are creating a better world for all the animals that live here.”

Owain Yeoman (1978) British actor

“The Mentalist's Owain Yeoman,” second ad for PETA (13 May 2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qskHxSKdmJg.

Death, Pain, World, Food

“A man who possesses common sense and the use of reason must not expect to learn from treatises or lectures on textual criticism anything that he could not, with leisure and industry, find out for himself. What the lectures and treatises can do for him is to save him time and trouble by presenting to him immediately considerations which would in any case occur to him sooner or later.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921

Learning, Time

“They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain
Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single
And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest
The boundaries
Of our distances.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

from "Of Being Numerous" #26, 1968; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Feeling, Future

“In the most basic sense, imaginization invites a way of thinking. It encourages us to become our own theorists and to feel comfortable about acting on the basis our insights. It invites us to develop a skill that I believe we all have, even though we may not realize that this is the case. By recognizing this, and thinking creatively and intelligently about ourselves and our situations, we can 'push the envelope' on our realities and reshape them positively.”

Gareth Morgan (1943) Organizational theorist

Source: Imaginization (1993), p. 16, as cited in: Colin M. Beard, ‎John Peter Wilson (2006), Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and and Trainers. p. 272

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Intelligence

“The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay—that is, nonacademic—interest in reading it.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), pp. 5-6.

Art, Reading

“I do not want this material to be considered any sort of mumbo jumbo. It is not a cult in the terms people often consider material that seems to come from a source beyond the individual who gives it. The designations spirit, and medium, and so forth, are ridiculous to begin with. You are simply using your inner senses. These senses are not magical, they certainly are not religious in any sense of the word, and I am not some degenerated secondary personality of Ruburt's. Nor will I be compared with some long-bearded, beady-eyed spirit sitting on cloud nine.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1, p. 143

People, Personality

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age, Art, Help

“The opinion appears to be gaining ground that this very general conception of functionality, born on mathematical ground, is destined to supersede the narrower notion of causation, traditional in connection with the natural sciences. As an abstract formulation of the idea of determination in its most general sense, the notion of functionality includes and transcends the more special notion of causation as a one-sided determination of future phenomena by means of present conditions; it can be used to express the fact of the subsumption under a general law of past, present, and future alike, in a sequence of phenomena. From this point of view the remark of Huxley that Mathematics "knows nothing of causation" could only be taken to express the whole truth, if by the term "causation" is understood "efficient causation." The latter notion has, however, in recent times been to an increasing extent regarded as just as irrelevant in the natural sciences as it is in Mathematics; the idea of thorough-going determinancy, in accordance with formal law, being thought to be alone significant in either domain.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290 ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 29): The Nature of Mathematics.

Truth, Law, Mathematics, Idea

“O Friend! Don't even speak of war. Get rid of atomic weapons.
Become immortal with the help of the treasure of camaraderie. Practice control over the senses, compassion and charity in your heart and in your actions.
By doing so, the humanity in you will rise even above divinity. Worship Lord Dattatreya, who is Bahudhari (one who possesses many aspects or one who is of the form of the tune 'Bahudhari'), the One who bestows auspiciousness and peace.
Experience Truth, Knowledge and Bliss and become exalted.”

Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji (1942) Indian guru

Jaya Jaya Bhuvi Divi Manava (2002)

War, Truth, Peace, Knowledge

“Yet its essence was the certitude that his life was not totally at the mercy of chance. Somehow, it was more important than that. This sense of power inside his head — which he could intensify by pulling a face and wrinkling up the muscles of his forehead — aroused a glow of optimism, an expectation of exciting events. He knew that for him, fate held something special in store.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), p. 26

Life, Fate, Optimism, Chance

“If we're serious about keeping our country safe, we also can't afford to have a President who's in the pocket of the gun lobby. I'm not here to repeal the 2nd Amendment. I'm not here to take away your guns. I just don't want you to be shot by someone who shouldn't have a gun in the first place. We should be working with responsible gun owners to pass common-sense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and all others who would do us harm.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), (July 28, 2016)

Country

“The Great Books show … that even those thinkers of the past who are now often looked upon as the most reactionary, the medieval theologians, insisted, as Aristotle had before them, that the truth of any statement is its conformity to reality or fact, and that sense experience is required to discover the particular matters of fact that test the truth of general statements about the nature of things.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Truth, Books, Nature, Reality

“The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition... We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 36-37

Art, Feeling

“It would be nice if things changed in the sense that they became more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, wider rather than narrower, with a kind of a view towards the future and a view towards many different kinds of people and people from different cultures living together. Because that's what a city really is about…That's the beauty of a great city. And the sad thing is, there was a time when you thought Bombay had it.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

On the cultural change
Jeet Thayil on why 'Where are you from?' is a complicated question for all of us

People, Sadness, Beauty, Change

“My brother and I have, after many years, achieved our importance to each other as a difference. Because it is sometimes difficult for my brother to climb the steps to my apartment, he will often come by and we will sit in his car and talk. We quite enjoy one another’s company. My brother is no less a good man for not believing in God; and I am no better a man because I believe. It is simply that religion gives me a sense—no, not a sense, a reason, no, not exactly a reason, an understanding—that everyone matters.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

God, Religion, Cars, Understanding

“Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 11

Men, Jerk, Time, Parting

“For Fascists, the state, animated by a profound sense of unity, was understood to be the ‘educator of civic virtue, rendering citizens conscious of their historic mission.’ Italy was to be Fascist, and Fascism was to be Italy. The nation was to be one indissoluble union; the interest of each was to be the interest of all. By 1929, what had emerged from the Fascist revolution was an unmistakable variant of the Gentilean neo-Hegelian state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 62

Education, Animals

“Anything that affects your senses … is your business. If you want to kill yourself through nicotine or cyanide, it's your business.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Harvard Law School Forum (1966)

Business

“In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

“Mr. Parnell said the other night, that Ireland is a "nation". Well, if a nation only means a certain number of individuals collected between certain latitudes and longitudes, I admit in that sense Ireland is a nation. But if there is anything further necessary— if to make a nation you require a past united history, traditions in which you can all join, achievements of which you all are proud, interests which you share in common, and sympathies which belong to all— then emphatically Ireland is not a nation; Ireland is two nations.”

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

Source: Speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in St. James's Hall, London (15 May 1886), quoted in The Times (17 May 1886), p. 6

History, Past, Night

“I've reached the pinnacle of my career. I just feel that I don't have anything else to prove. When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense of 'to prove something' as a basketball player, it's time for me to move away from the game of basketball.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Announcing his retirement from the Bulls (1993-10-06) Classic NBA Quotes: Michael Jordan, 2006-11-24, NBA Encyclopedia, NBA Media Ventures http://www.nba.com/history/Classic_NBA_Quotes_Jordan.html,

Feeling, Game, Motivation, Time

“To the question, What is the right relation between reason and religion, you will now understand me to answer, It is that reason should be the source of which religion is the issue; that reason, when most itself, will unquestionably be religious, but that religion must for just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is the final authority from which religion must derive its warrant, and with which its contents must comply; that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all religious practices, all religious institutions, and all records of religion, whether in tradition or in scripture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of general human reason, and that only those approved in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of obligation; in short, that the only real basis of religion is our human reason, the only seat of its authority our genuine human nature, the only sufficient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this world only, but does cover all the range of being, and found and rule the world eternal; it is not merely natural, it is also spiritual; it is itself, when come to itself, the true divine revelation.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.224-5

God, World, Religion, Soul

“When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (19 August 1986)

Food, Communication

“I would meet screenwriters in L. A. who would write these very complicated sitcoms like Cheers and who'd have the most extraordinary sense of plot of anybody I've ever met. I saw the insides of lots of great houses. And I met people who you and I would regard as famous, and then realized some very interesting things about them, like how lonely they are. It was those years I was least a minority. In a sense, I owned the world. I owned it because I had certain charms that allowed me to insinuate myself into the world. Intellectually, it was very satisfying to be at the edge of this world. But when it became clear to me that I wanted to write this book, I had to divorce myself from that world and move to San Francisco.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

People, Books, World, Housing

“Then, finally, it can become so morbid that it rises to ominous proportions and leads to a tragic sense of persecution. There are persons who come to the point that they are so self-centered that they end up with a persecution complex and the end result is insanity. They end up thinking that the universe stands against them, that everybody is against them. They are turning around within themselves. They are little solar systems within themselves and they can’t see beyond that. And as a result of their failure to get out of self, they end up with a persecution complex and sometimes madness and insanity. These are some of the effects of selfcenteredness.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Failure, Thinking, Universe, Personality

“The present book is not a methodology of mathematics in the sense that I will systematically show how some teaching matter should taught; it is not even a systematic analysis of subject matter. I hardly ever refer to well-organized classroom experiments evaluated by statistical methods, nor do I cite experimental results of developmental psychology or the psychology of learning. Maybe the most striking feature is that this book contains few quotations. I will try to justify all these features.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Mathematics as an Educational Task (1973), p. v;As cited in: Ben Wilbrink (2013)

Books, Mathematics, Learning

“Most Christians know next to nothing about the life and teachings of Christ and are afraid to learn, sensing that the knowledge will upset their preconceptions.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Sun of Helioscope", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

Life, Knowledge, Learning, Christ

“By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"The Art of Fiction: An Interview" (The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 218.

Communication

“Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh).”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

In Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, Sam Hunter; as quoted in Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, Spain, 2006, p. 37
1950's

Art, Mountain, Teachers, Success

“It seems to me that any action that arbitrarily limits the citizen's access to sight, sound and print, upon which opinion can be based, is, in the true sense of the phrase, un-American.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

In response to the House Un-American Activities Committee's ban on radio recording and television cameras from public hearings (1 February 1949), quoted in The New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9500E1DC173FE03ABC4E53DFB4668382659EDE&legacy=true

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p. 14

Men, God, World, Religion

“Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

V. S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980) [Random House, ISBN 0-394-74683-X], "Edmund Wilson: Towards Revolution," p. 141
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Books

“If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 15

Democracy, Change

“Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection raised as to the first principles of our organisation."Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Penser, c'est voir! me dit-il un jour emporté par une de nos objections sur le principe de notre organisation. Toute science humaine repose sur la déduction, qui est une vision lente par laquelle on descend de la cause à l'effet, par laquelle on remonte de l'effet à la cause; ou, dans une plus large expression, toute poésie comme toute oeuvre d'art procède d'une rapide vision des choses. Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Louis_Lambert (1832), translated by Clara Bell

Art, Thinking, Science

“Humans have super senses that appear sometimes in their dreams and sometimes in their daily lives”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Dreams, Appearance

“I've kind of fallen out of love with politics. … Whatever experience and talents I've gained over the years — I think it may well be that the highest and best use of that is to try to bring enough awareness of the solutions to the climate crisis and enough of a sense of urgency that we come together across party lines on behalf of our children.”

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

As quoted in "Gore: I've 'fallen out of love with politics'" at CNN (6 July 2007) http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/05/gore.office/index.html.

Love, Children, Thinking

“It is not enough for a leader to have a vision. A leader needs to attract followers, men and women who can commit themselves to the new ideal of customer focus. But if the mobilization process is to succeed, those followers must become leaders, too, finding their own sense of purpose in the shared challenge and spreading the call and vision of change.”

James A. Champy (1942) American businessman

Cited in: Don Soderquist (2005), The Wal-Mart Way, p. 7
Reengineering management, 1995

Women, Men, Change

“The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house — is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense. And so conflicts that cannot be addressed politically have expressed themselves by other means. From public psychodramas like the O. J. Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal and Columbine to disaster movies, talk shows and "reality TV," popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Dreaming of War," The Nation (15 October 2001)

Life, Youth, Family, Cars

“I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

Intelligence, Thinking, Wedding

“There is no doubt that we cannot do without variable quantities in the sense of the potential infinite. But from this very fact the necessity of the actual infinite can be demonstrated.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

"Über die verschiedenen Ansichten in Bezug auf die actualunendlichen Zahlen" ["Over the different views with regard to the actual infinite numbers"] - Bihand Till Koniglen Svenska Vetenskaps Akademiens Handigar (1886)

“We are in rapid transition today to a new world which threatens to be dominated by technological advance. In that new World. (1) man will have learned so much about nature's store of energy and its release that he will have the ability to virtually destroy civilization; (2) production, communication and transportation will all be "automatic" --these operations of man's material world will have become so vast and complex that they will have to proceed with a minimum of participation by man, his muscles, brains and senses; and (3) man will conquer space.”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

Ramo, Simon. " A new technique of education http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1767/1/ramo.pdf." Engineering and science 21.1 (1957): 17-22.

World, Communication, Nature, Learning

“Free will is as philosophical a question, in that sense, as there is. Kantian ethics should not represent itself as having a solution to it. If the problem of freedom is a philosophical open wound, then the right way to think about Kant’s utterly unacceptable theory of noumenal freedom is that it is the salt that philosophers have a professional obligation to rub in the wound so that they can’t forget about it.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Way, Question, Problem, Thinking

“Whatever the source of the leader's ideas, he cannot inspire his people unless he expresses vivid goals which in some sense they want. Of course, the more closely he meets their needs, the less "persuasive" he has to be, but in no case does it make sense to speak as if his role is force submission. Rather it is to strengthen and uplift, to make people feel that they are the origins, not the pawns, of the socio-political system.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

David C. McClelland in: Robert A. Portnoy (1986), Leadership: what every leader should know about people. p. 16

People, Feeling, Idea

“The failing of contemporary criticism is double: Hand in hand with the suppression of aesthetic autonomy, one finds also a growing reluctance to recognize the complex and dynamic temporality of literature. By dynamic temporality I mean that immanent sense of time within the literary work, its ability to reach backward, as part of a tradition, and forward, as a vehicle of innovation and anticipation. This sort of temporality is quite different from a single-minded and frequently reductionist focus on historical context.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 5.

Literature, Time, Parting

“I'm a Jewish boy from Jersey. I was born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a strong sense that the world can be a ludicrous, unfair, inhumane place.”

Barry Sanders (1938) American academic, author

Oregon Live Saturday, April 16, 2011 http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/anna_griffin/index.ssf/2011/04/oregon_book_award_finalist_bar.html

World, Boy, Strong

“My mother … had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”

Richard Feynman book What Do You Care What Other People Think?

"The Making of a Scientist," p. 19
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

Understanding, Laughter, Learning

“I think for it to be unhip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me had some sense of hope in them.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Interview With Alan Bangs (1999)

Hope, Thinking

“Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 249)

Age, Personality

“Men remain feeling guilty, for a false sense of guilt has no cure save the truth, and this is not forthcoming. Since the citizens are now guilt-ridden because of their education and political indoctrination, they are more amenable to robbery, and even murder. If the white man feels guilty towards the Negro, he is less capable of defending himself against the Negroes who turn into a revolutionary rabble, bent on theft and murder. The state finds it easier to rob men when men feel guilty for what they are and have, and the state drones on and on about the needs of the poor of the nation and of the world.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, Politics of Guilt and Pity (1978), p. 46

Men, Truth, World, Education

“Losing hope is easy
When your only friend is gone
And every time you look around
Well, it all, it all just seems to change
But hanging on is easy
When you've got a friend to call
When nothings making sense at all
You're not the only one that's afraid of change”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Losing Hope
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Hope, Change, Time

“Long has reality belied ethnicity-oriented conceptions of the Nation. In a country where resident foreigners make up almost half of the population, and where foreigners constitute two thirds of the working population, it no longer makes any sense. Wider conceptions of the Nation have come into being.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Déi éischter ethnesch orientéiert Konzeptioun vun der Natioun ass zanter laangem vun de Realitéiten dementéiert ginn. An engem Land ewéi äist, wou praktesch d’Halschent Net-Lëtzebuerger wunnen a wou se zwee Drëttel vun der aktiver Populatioun ausmaachen, ergëtt dat kee Sënn méi. Aplaz hu sech vill méi offe Konzeptiounen vun der Natioun imposéiert. Speech on National Day, http://www.monarchie.lu/fr/actualites/discours/2014/06/23062014-fetnat/index.html (23 June 2014) Luxembourg, Immigration

Reality, Country

“The religious sense planted within the human heart leads us to meet the needs of others and to search for concrete ways to contribute to the common good. Religion has a special role in this regard, for it teaches people that authentic service requires sacrifice and self-discipline, which in turn must be cultivated through self-denial, temperance and a moderate use of the world's goods.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Inter-religious Meeting (17 July 2008)

People, World, Religion, Way

““But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature,—bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation,””

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.118-9

Life, Death, Imagination, Nature

“No serious challenge on the Left exists to Third Way thinking anywhere in the world. This is hardly surprising as globalisation punishes hard any country that tries to run its economy by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finances. In this strictly narrow sense, and in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all "Thatcherite" now.”

Peter Mandelson (1953) British Labour politician

"There's plenty of life in the 'new' Third Way yet", The Times, 10 June 2002, p. 16.

World, Way, Thinking, Reality

“Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

People

“God' is the name given to the most ‘important’ human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

God, Idea, Question

“Fight virtue's cause, stand up in wit's defence,
Win us from vice, and laugh us into sense.”

Thomas Tickell (1685–1740) English poet and man of letters

On the Prospect of Peace (1713), line 428.

Fight

“I think there is a danger with young people of being dependent in the sense that they don't acquire any identity or self-image of themselves as thinkers. They just go and look it up or they just chat with someone. In other words, relying on something rather than saying: "Okay, I've got the information, how do I create value from it?"”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

When asked "Have we become too reliant on computers?"
[Hamish, Mackintosh, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/1999/sep/23/onlinesupplement2, Deep thought, The Guardian, 1999-09-23, 2008-10-15]

People, Thinking, Dependency

“In due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense because that is the personal faith of an individual, but in a political sense as citizens of one state.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)

Faith, Time, Personality

“Friends and fellow citizens, the story of our presence here is soon and easily told. We are here in the District of Columbia, here in the city of Washington, the most luminous point of American territory; a city recently transformed and made beautiful in its body and in its spirit; we are here in the place where the ablest and best men of the country are sent to devise the policy, enact the laws, and shape the destiny of the Republic; we are here, with the stately pillars and majestic dome of the Capitol of the nation looking down upon us; we are here, with the broad earth freshly adorned with the foliage and flowers of spring for our church, and all races, colors, and conditions of men for our congregation — in a word, we are here to express, as best we may, by appropriate forms and ceremonies, our grateful sense of the vast, high, and preeminent services rendered to ourselves, to our race, to our country, and to the whole world by Abraham Lincoln.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Men, World, Law, Beauty

“.. the rejection of impressionistic copies of nature and a move towards sensing the content, abstraction, – expressing the extract..”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

as quoted in the exposition-text 'Alexej von Jawlensky', Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen Rotterdam; 25/9 – 27/ 11-1994, p. 21
this quote of Gabriele Münter was the leading idea for her early painting during the period she worked with Kandinsky in and around Murnau..

Nature

“I believe that here we are in full agreement on the tremendous role that faith schools can play in Scottish society. And they do so by endowing our children with a strong moral foundation. A positive and distinctive identity. A keen sense of personal responsibility and the common good. A strong commitment to charity - the true meaning of which is helping others.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)

Children, School, Faith, Strong

“I fall into the category of Weird West, but I think it may be more of a “Down West” as I’d like to call it, for its sense of macabre western humor.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

interview with Lorin Morgan-Richards by Laura LaVelle of Newswhistle (28 November 2017).

Thinking

“Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set. They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is! We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that. Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more. Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record. And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species.”

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

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

People, Idea, Thinking

“I am a member of a Liberal Government. I am in association with the Liberal party. I have never swerved from what I conceived to be those truly Conservative objects and desires with which I entered life. I am, if possible, more fondly attached to the institutions of my country than I was when as a boy I wandered among the sand-hills of Seaforth or the streets of Liverpool. But experience has brought with it its lessons. I have learnt that there is wisdom in a policy of trust, and folly in a policy of mistrust. I have not refused to receive the signs of the times. I have observed the effect that has been produced by Liberal legislation, and if we are told…that all the feelings of the country are in the best and broadest sense Conservative,—that is to say, that the people value the country and the laws and institutions of the country; if we are told that, I say honesty compels us to admit that result has been brought about by Liberal legislation.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Liverpool (18 July 1865), quoted in The Times (19 July 1865), p. 11.
1860s

Life, Wisdom, People, Law

“The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985), p. 26

Truth, World, Home, Nature

“The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

William Temple, in "Heads Designed for an Essay on Conversation" in The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart. in Four Volumes (1757), Vol. III, p. 547.
Misattributed

Truth, Nature

“[W]hy are Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway not that far behind us, ranking in the top twelve countries for antidepressant use? Is it just the long winters? Why are their drug-related deaths booming? Isn’t it possible that a generous, far-reaching welfare state depletes people’s sense of drive, purpose, and self-respect, and enables them to explore chemical forms of happiness?”

Jim Geraghty (1975) American journalist

Ten Reasons We Can't, and Shouldn't, Be Nordic (2018)

Death, Happiness, People, Winter

“That first novel of mine, Non-Stop, is directly attributable to Heinlein. His "Common Sense" seemed to me such a good story, but bereft of any human feelings. I thought long about that story, and then I thought how wonderful it would be to write about a spaceship in which people have been imprisoned for generations and to put in something of the human feeling. So that novel is directly attributable to Heinlein. I thought, in my youthful arrogance, that I could do it better — I didn't! I thought I could do it differently, and I think I did do it differently. And I suppose that on the whole, I've concentrated on doing things differently ever since.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Locus interview (2000)

People, Youth, Feeling, Thinking

“India represents the new world in a unique sense. Traditionally democracies were trying to bring equality to all walks of life, today there is a change. Democracy wants to enable every country to have the equal right to be different; it's a collection of differences, not an attempt to force or impose equality on every country. I think India is the greatest show of how so many differences in language, in sects can coexist facing great suffering and keeping full freedom… Many of the countries in the Middle East should learn from you how to escape poverty. You didn't escape poverty by getting American dollars or Russian Roubles but by introducing your own internal reforms and by understanding that the new call of modernity is science. In between the spiritual wealth of Gandhi and the earthly wisdom of Nehru, you combined a great performance of spirit and practice to escape poverty…I know you still have a long way to go but you do it without compromising freedom. The temptation when you're such a large country to introduce discipline and imposition is great but you tried to do it, to make progress not with force and discipline but in an open way. Many of us were educated on the literature of India when we fell in love we read Rabindranath Tagore and when we matured we tried to understand Gandhi.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

Israeli President Shimon Peres praises India as greatest 'show of co-existence' http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-04/news/35594466_1_greatest-show-mahatma-gandhi-democracies (4 December 2012)

Love, Life, Wisdom, World

“Income taxation appeals to the governing class because in its everlasting urgency for power it needs money. Income taxation appeals to the mass of people because it gives expression to their envy; it salves their sense of hurt. The only beneficiaries of income taxation are the politicians, for it not only gives them the means by which they can increase their emoluments but it also enables them to improve their importance. The have-nots who support the politicians in the demand for income taxation do so only because they hate the haves; although they delude themselves with the thought that they might get some of the pelt the fact is that the taxing of incomes cannot in any way improve their economic condition. So that, the sum of all the arguments for income taxation comes to political ambition and the sin of covetousness.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), p. 27

Money, Hate, People, Way

“Believing in development, in a new generation of those who create and those who enjoy, we call together the youth of today. And as a youth which bears the future, we aim to create space to live and work, as opposition to the well-established, older powers. Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

from the group manifesto of Die Brücke, written by Kirchner in Dresden, 1906; as quoted in 'The Artists' Association 'Brücke' – Chronology' http://www.bruecke-museum.de/chronology.htm, Brücke Museum. Retrieved 29 September 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner 1905 - 1915

Youth, Future

“Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

Source: Why Evolution is True (2009), p. 64

Thinking

“The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

Hurt, Dependency, Personality

“But in such perfect Animals as Sheep and Oxen, in whom the Heart, the Brain and Nerves differ so little from ours, and in whom the Separation of the Spirits from the Blood, the Organs of Sense, and consequently Feeling it self, are the same as they are in Human Creatures; I can't imagine how a Man not hardened in Blood and Massacre, is able to see a violent Death, and the Pangs of it, without Concern. In answer to this, most People will think it sufficient to say, that all Things being allow'd to be made for the Service of Man, there can be no Cruelty in putting Creatures to the use they were design'd for; but I have heard Men make this Reply, whilst their Nature within them has reproach'd them with the Falshood of the Assertion.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

Remark P, pp. 187-8
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Death, Men, People, Feeling

“M: If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don't impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that's not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that's in the very nature of being alive.
PM: Wanting to be loved?
M: To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are 13 or 14, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn't happen, if the love isn't there, you can quite easily just fade away. … In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn't sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I'm not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one's weekend activities”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From "Wilde child", interview by Paul Morley, Blitz (April 1988).
In interviews etc., About himself and his work

Love, Life, People, Way

“When the mind grasps the universe, the senses retreat.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Prajna Sutra (2007)

Universe

“Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Ignorance of the Learned" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Knowledge, Learning

“Economics presents us with a powerful, and not necessarily complex, set of analytical tools that can be used to look back and explain why events unfolded the way they did; to look around and make sense of the world; and to look forward so that we can anticipate the effects of major policy changes. Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.”

Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician

Introduction
Naked Economics (rev. and updated ed., 2010)

World, Way, Change

“[T]hough religious thinkers will fight fiercely to show its standpoint to be the one religion really sanctions, each religion has signposts pointing in both ways. One the one hand towards a fundamentalist, authoritarian strain that insists if you want to be faithful you have to crucify your intellect; that is to believe just because your belief is absurd. And on the other hand, each of the three western religions has a rationalist tradition… far from viewing our capacity for reason as threatening our capacity to obey god, this tradition sees thinking as its very fulfillment. There are actually some wonderful Jewish parables, which show God laughing with pleasure as human beings defeat him with a particularly good argument. That is, god would rather be impressed than right on certain Jewish rationalist traditions. So if reason is God’s gift then he meant us to use it even against him if he is wrong or hasty. On this tradition our ability to make sense of the world whether with science or through the right moral actions, is just one more proof of gods goodness.”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)

God, Pleasure, World, Faith

“The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

X. Some Communication Machines and Their Future. p. 184
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

God, Hostility, World

“It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 205

Knowledge

“Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the inaugural axiom of philosophy - Leibniz formulation is excellent; 'What is not a being is not a being - yet it is also its impasse; an impasse in which the revolving doors of Plato's Parmenides introduce us to the singular joy of never seeing the moment of conclusion arrive. For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not. But this is unacceptable for thought because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside all presentation. If presentation is not, does it still make sense to designate what presents (itself) as being? On the other hand, if presentation is, then the multiple necessarily is.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
Being and Event (1988)

Joy

“I would not enter on my list of friends,
(Though graced with polish'd manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path;
But he that has humanity, forewarn'd,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 560.

“Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Weick, Karl E. Organizational culture as a source of high reliability. National Emergency Training Center, 1987. p. 98
1980s-1990s

People

“Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography", The American Economic Review (Jun., 2009)

People, World, Thinking, Learning

“Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "no news is bad news," except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "no news is no news," except that it is so obvious that it is hardly an expression at all.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People, Way, Change

“Tomasz Vetulani's work balances between two fascinating axes, producing an image of an artist juggling various means of expression. From intriguing and expressive objects, made by him from, say, hot white glue or black silicon, with strong social and political connotations - to subtle images-objects, evoking fleeting states, where the sensitive eye of the artist touches the sublimation of certain senses.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Agnieszka Gołębiewska, Curatorial text accompanying exhibition There is no threat. Weapons and colour http://www.olympiagaleria.pl/en.tomasz_vetulani.html, 2017

Strong

“One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.”

Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright

On his play Tiny Alice, in National Observer (5 April 1965)

Understanding

Quotes about reason page 30

Quotes about reason
page 30