Quotes about space
page 18

“We must examine the degree to which we coddle middle-class girls. There is something sick about it. The girls I see on campuses are often innocuous, with completely homogenized personalities, miserable, anorexic and bulimic. The feminist movement teaches them that it's men's fault, but it isn't. These girls go out into the world as heiresses of all the affluence in the universe. They are the most pampered and most affluent girls on the globe. So stop complaining about men. You're getting all the rewards that come with the nice-girl persona you've chosen. When you get into trouble and you're batting your eyes and someone is offending you and you are too nice to deal with it, that's a choice. Assess your persona. Realize the degree to which your niceness may invoke people to say lewd and pornographic things to you — sometimes to violate your niceness. The more you blush, the more people want to do it. Understand your part of it and learn to parry. Sex talk is a game. The girls in the Sixties loved it. If you don't want some professor to call you honey, tell him.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love, Men, People, World

“We expect to learn new tricks because one of our science based abilities is being able to predict. That after all is what science is about. Learning enough about how a thing works so you'll know what comes next. Because as we all know everything obeys the universal laws, all you need is to understand the laws.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

The Day the Universe Changed (1985)

Law, Understanding, Learning, Science

“(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[10187@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

People, Thinking

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Love, World, Memory

“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

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

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Question

“Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), p. 244.

Beauty, Nature, Time, Dance

“Why is this soe long detaind in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, & a Universal Blessing?”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

Anonymous 17th century comment on the flyleaf of the Lambeth Manuscript of Traherne’s works; cited from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 55, p. 208.
Criticism

World, Light

“Orwell's 1984 refers more directly to contemporary events than does Huxley's book: the narrative takes place in the near rather than the distant future and obviously sets its sights on Stalinism. When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Books, World, Travel, Distant

“Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 198)

Love, Understanding, Personality

“Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. … Oone man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth, Law, Spring, Nature

“It is urgent and important to legalise universal blood transfusion by immune adoption.”

André Gernez (1923–2014) French physician

'Il est urgent et important de légaliser la transfusion sanguine universelle par adoption immunitaire.'
From Le scandale du siècle tome 2, DVD of Bilien (2008)

“Many of those who read history at Delhi in the mid-1970s and later, still bear the ugly scars inflicted by the thought police of sarkari Marxism. 'There are two interpretations of history', a leading representative of the Red Cretin Brigade used to inform his students casually, 'the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation, and the Marxist interpretation is the correct one.'… Whereas the British Marxists established their reputation by crafting their radical concerns their Indian counterparts took cheeky short cuts. it may also explain why substantive research on Indian history has increasingly become the prerogative of British, and a few American and Australian universities. The presiding deities of Indian historiography have meanwhile devoted themselves to writing politically correct text books that present history as chapters of received wisdom. They have also drafted resolutions for the Indian History Congress and written articles in the press on the Ayodhya issue.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

Swapan Dasgupta Indian Express of July 23, 1995. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Wisdom, Books, History, Reading

“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.
Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 15 (pp. 178-179)

Life, Smile, Understanding, Time

“Flanagan, Thomas(1998). Game Theory and Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-7946-6.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

References

Game

“Kapila's arguments are listed [by Dr. Ambedkar], and the last one introduces yet another fundamental concept of Buddhism: suffering (dukkha). It is brought in from an unusual angle: 'Kapila argued that the process of development of the unevolved is through the activities of three constituents of which it is made up, Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. These are called three Gunas. [Sattva is] light in nature, which reveals, which causes pleasure to men; [Rajas is] what impels and moves, what produces activity; [Tamas is] what is heavy and puts under restraint, what produces the state of indifference or inactivity (') When the three Gunas are in perfect balance, none overpowering the other, the universe appears static (achetan) and ceases to evolve. When the three Gunas are not in balance, one overpowers the other, the universe becomes dynamic (sachetan) and evolution begins. Asked why the Gunas become unbalanced, the answer which Kapila gave was that this disturbance in the balance of the three Gunas was due to the presence of Dukkha (suffering).”

Kapila Vedic sage, of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy

Buddhism is quite close to the Samkhya-Yoga viewpoint: to Samkhya for its philosophical framework, to Yoga for its methods of meditation.
Quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743, with quote from Ambedkar: The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1:5:2.

Men, Pleasure, Nature, Light

“What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.”

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

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Sense

“After all, animal rightists have not invented the vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6, or the universal command to be vegetarian in Genesis 1:29, or indeed the vision of the earth in a state of childbirth awaiting its deliverance from suffering in Romans 8: in these, and in other ways, animal rightists can claim to be rediscovering and reactualizing visionary elements already present within the Western religious tradition.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), pp. 54-55

Way, Lying, Suffering, Wolf

“The charge of "sentimentalism" is frequently brought against those who plead for animals' rights. Now "sentimentalism," if any meaning at all can be attached to the word, must signify an inequality, an ill balance of sentiment, an inconsistency which leads men into attacking one abuse, while they ignore or condone another where a reform is equally desirable. That this weakness is often observable among "philanthropists" on the one hand, and "friends of animals" on the other, and most of all among those acute "men of the world," whose regard is only for themselves, I am not concerned to deny; what I wish to point out is, that the only real safeguard against sentimentality is to take up a consistent position towards the rights of men and of the lower animals alike, and to cultivate a broad sense of universal justice (not "mercy") for all living things. Herein, and herein alone, is to be sought the true sanity of temperament.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

Source: Animals' Rights, Chapter 1

Men, World, Justice, Sense

“The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is “noble” in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the “system of free competition,” on the other hand, the notions on life’s tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No “place” is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56

Life, Sense

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

Life, Truth, Education, School

“Why then are the arts and sciences important? I suppose with the sciences we could say that the answer is obvious: we have radium, penicillin, television and recorded sound, motor-cars and aircraft, air-conditioning and central heating. But these achievements have never been the primary intention of science; they are a sort of by-product, the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. That task is simply stated: to be curious, to keep on asking the question 'Why?' and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found. The scientist is curious about the universe: he wants to know why water boils at one temperature and freezes at another; why cheese is different from chalk; why one person behaves differently from another. Not only 'Why?' but ‘What?' What is salt made of? What are the stars? What is the constitution of all matter? The answers to these questions do not necessarily malke our lives any easier. The answer to one question—'Can the atom be split?' - has made our lives somewhat harder. But the questions have to be asked. It is man's job to be curious; it is man's job to try to find out the truth about the world about us, to answer the big question 'What is the world really like?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Truth, World, Art, Cars

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life, Truth, Books, Education

“The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may so say) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realized in the one case than in the other.”

Henry Sidgwick book The Methods of Ethics

The Methods of Ethics (1884), p. 381

“Solipsism,” said Felise. “I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

The Hour of Babel (p. 62)
Short fiction, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)

Cats, Thinking

“I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 64

Flying

“Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."”

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

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

World, Knowledge, Science, Future

“Leibnitz, the great mathematician, published his 'Protogaea' in 1680. He imagined this planet to have been originally a burning luminous mass, and that ever since its creation it has been undergoing gradual refrigeration. Nearly all the matter of the earth was at first encompassed by fire. When the outer crust had at length cooled down sufficiently to allow the vapors to be condensed, they fell and formed a universal ocean, investing the globe, and covering the loftiest mountains. Further consolidation produced rents, vacuities, and subterranean caverns, and the ocean, rushing in to fill them, was gradually lowered. The principal feature of this theory, the gradual diminution of the original heat, and of an ancient universal ocean, were adopted by Buffon and De Luc, and entered under different modifications, into a great number of succeeding systems.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 45
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Imagination, Mountain

“Poetry is a transfusion of the ephemeral blood that sustains the universal heartbeat within human society.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“If you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home. These are all burning injustices, and – as I did with the misuse of stop and search and deaths in police custody and modern slavery – I am determined to fight against them.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Death, Health, Education, School

“A criticism with which we have become familiar in this country is that an alarmingly large number of students receiving university education, and the universities are responsible for wastage and unnecessary duplication of teaching arrangements…

… Take the whole of British India with a population of two hundred and sixty-three million. India has only sixteen universities and the number of their students will be about one lac and twenty thousand. The total expenditure on higher education in India is less than four crores rupees.

Let me now turn to other countries. The British Isles afford a good illustration for comparison from the point of view of population which is about is about forty five million; but the number of universities is as many as sixteen – what we have for the whole of India – and fifty-five thousand students receive instructions under their jurisdiction. About six crores and forty lacs of rupees are spent on higher education only in England and Wales. To universities alone within this area the state annually contributes two crores and twenty-seven lacs of rupees.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Calcutta University Convocation on 22nd February 1936.
Source: one crore is equal to ten million
Source: ten lacs is equal to one million

Education, Country

“Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Earlier in the chapter Holmes says that all the comparisons and analogies ever made "would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe".
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Roaming in Thought, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Evil, Dead

“We need never look for universal peace on this earth until men stop killing animals for food.”

Charles Fillmore (1854–1948) American mystic

Source: The Vegetarian, Unity Magazine, May 1920. Quoted in Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet (2005), ch. 3.

Men, Peace, Food, Animals

“Along with this element of universal tolerance, I should couple our Republican system of Government, which gives to every man a share and a responsibility in the direction of public affairs. And third, I should place our system of universal free education.”

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

1920s, The Genius of America (1924)

Education

“If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Truth, Mathematics

“The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Alan Guth and Paul Steinhardt, The inflationary universe, edited by [Paul Davies, The New Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 0-521-43831-4, 54]

“My wife [painter Musa McKim, ] on her own, did several other murals for the Section of Fine Arts. Then in 1940 and 1941 we moved out of New York City and came to Woodstock [at the age of 54] where we did the Laconia murals and several murals for the Presidents Lines, which were later turned into troop ships. I then went to teach at the University of Iowa where I finished the mural for the Social Security Building in Washington, D. C., in 1942 or 1943, I'm not sure which. With the exception of some visual aid material for the navy flight program in Iowa - navigational maps, etc.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

this marks the end of the mural period.
n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

Age, Art

“Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

[Screen Burn, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2145124,00.html, The Guardian, 11 August 2007, 2007-08-19]
Guardian columns, Screen Burn

Stupidity, World, Faith, Problem

“Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected…The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

As quoted in by Ken Wilber in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (2001) Shambhala, ISBN 1570627681.

World, Thinking, Sense

“When the Shah departed towards the close of the day, a false rumour was spread through the town that he had been severely wounded by a shot from a matchlock, and thus were sown the seeds from which murder and rapine were to spring. The bad characters within the town collected in great bodies, and, without distinction, commenced the work of plunder and destruction…. On the morning of the 11th an order went forth from the Persian Emperor for the slaughter of the inhabitants. The result may be imagined; one moment seemed to have sufficed for universal destruction. The Chandni chauk, the fruit market, the Daribah bazaar, and the buildings around the Masjid-i Jama’ were set fire to and reduced to ashes. The inhabitants, one and all, were slaughtered. Here and there some opposition was offered, but in most places people were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody; cloth, jewels, dishes of gold and silver, were acceptable spoil…. But to return to the miserable inhabitants. The massacre lasted half the day, when the Persian Emperor ordered Haji Fulad Khan, the kotwal, to proceed through the streets accompanied by a body of Persian nasakchis, and proclaim an order for the soldiers to resist from carnage. By degrees the violence of the flames subsided, but the bloodshed, the devastation, and the ruin of families were irreparable. For a long time the streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves. The town was reduced to ashes, and had the appearance of a plain consumed with fire. All the regal jewels and property and the contents of the treasury were seized by the Persian conqueror in the citadel. He thus became possessed of treasure to the amount of sixty lacs of rupees and several thousand ashrafis… plate of gold to the value of one kror of rupees, and the jewels, many of which were unrivalled in beauty by any in the world, were valued at about fifty krors. The peacock throne alone, constructed at great pains in the reign of Shah Jahan, had cost one kror of rupees. Elephants, horses, and precious stuffs, whatever pleased. the conqueror’s eye, more indeed than can be enumerated, became his spoil. In short, the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.”

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

About Shah’s sack of Delhi, Tazrikha by Anand Ram Mukhlis. A history of Nâdir Shah’s invasion of India. In The History of India as Told by its own Historians. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H. M. Elliot. John Dowson, ed. 1st ed. 1867. 2nd ed., Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956, vol. 22, pp. 74-98. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_tazrikha_frameset.htm

Pain, People, World, Family

“Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 8 : The West and the Rest: Intercivilizational Issues, § 1 : Western Universalism, p. 184

Democracy

“For my own part, not believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

On Representative Government (1861)

Communication, Parting, Selfishness

“Well, what that means is that it doesn’t happen very often. Now it’s happened to one small group of people—us—twice in a short time. That would seem to indicate that,” he ticked a finger, “something’s seriously out of whack in general, or,” he ticked the next finger, “someone’s out to get us in particular; which I feel is quite unlikely. At times in my paranoid past I would have assumed that the Universe is teaming up to get me, but now I’m more objective and I don’t believe that. I think it, but I don’t believe it.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 4 (p. 40)

People, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Preface, p. xiii (2012 ed.)

Communication, Problem, Time

“Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)

World, Democracy

“Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew... I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial; it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it [Pop Art] won’t be American; it will be universal.”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

World, Art, Way, Thinking

“In a most generous and humane manner you, Mr. Field Marshal, plead the cause of those members of the Jewish people who were once compelled, by the requirements of universal military service, to serve in the war.
I entirely understand these lofty sentiments, Mr. Field Marshal. But, with the greatest respect, may I point out that members and supporters of my movement, who are Germans, for years were driven from all government positions, without consideration for their wives and children or their war service… Those responsible for this cruelty were the same Jewish [political] parties which today complain when their supporters are denied the right to official positions, with a thousand times more justification, because they are of little use in these positions but can do limitless harm…”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

1930s

War, Children, People, Understanding

““No one is like the Emperor of Abhinaya- Mani Madhava Chakyar, and there won't be any” - Prof. Maria Christopher Byrski (first foreigner disciple of Guru and Kutiyattam), Department of Indology, Warsaw University, 1987”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya

“Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine… The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe.”

Peter F. Hamilton (1960) English novelist

Quin Dexter of the Lightbringer Sect on faith
The Night's Dawn Trilogy (1996-1999), The Naked God (1999)

Life, God, Faith, Religion

“Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Introduction, p. xviii
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

Nature, Animals

“The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 3, The Beginning Of Modern Cosmology, p. 54

Way, Distant

“We know by actual observation only a comparatively small part of the whole universe. I will call this "our neighborhood." Even within the confines of this province our knowledge decreases very rapidly as we get away from our own particular position in space and time. It is only within the solar system that our empirical knowledge extends to the second order of small quantities (and that only for g44 and not for the other gαβ), the first order corresponding to about 10-8. How the gαβ outside our neighborhood are, we do not know, and how they are at infinity of space or time we shall never know. Infinity is not a physical but a mathematical concept, introduced to make our equations more symmetrical and elegant. From the physical point of view everything that is outside our neighborhood is pure extrapolation, and we are entirely free to make this extrapolation as we please to suit our philosophical or aesthetical predilections—or prejudices. It is true that some of these prejudices are so deeply rooted that we can hardly avoid believing them to be above any possible suspicion of doubt, but this belief is not founded on any physical basis. One of these convictions, on which extrapolation is naturally based, is that the particular part of the universe where we happen to be, is in no way exceptional or privileged; in other words, that the universe, when considered on a large enough scale, is isotropic and homogeneous.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Way, Mathematics, Nature, Knowledge

“Evolutionism, as taught by Darwinism, has nothing - nothing - to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe - gravity, thermodynamics, motion, fluid motion - how any of those originated. It's…it's got some gigantic missing pieces.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Ben Stein on CNN: Impolite Conversation, Ben Stein on CNN: Impolite Conversation, 18 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://impoliteconversation.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/ben-stein-on-cnn/,

Life

“Your predator is close behind you and will infallibly be your death.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Carmody said, in a moment of strange calm.” But in terms of long-range planning, I never did expect to get out of this Universe alive.”
“That is meaningless,” the Prize said. “The fact is, you have lost everything.”
“I don’t agree,” Carmody said. “Permit me to point out that I am presently still alive.”
“Agreed. But only for the moment.”
“I have always been alive only for the moment,” Carmody said. “I could never count on more. It was my error to expect more. That holds true, I believe, for all of my possible and potential circumstances.”
“Then what do you hope to achieve with your moment?”
“Nothing,” Carmody said. “Everything.”
“I don’t understand you any longer,” the Prize said. “Something about you has changed, Carmody. What is it?”
“A minor thing,” Carmody told him. “I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the Gods run in their heavenly sideshow. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don’t need it. I have my moment, which is quite enough.”
“Saint Carmody,” the Prize said, in tones of deepest sarcasm. “No more than a shadow’s breadth separates you and death! What will you do now with your pitiable moment?”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

“I shall continue to live it,” Carmody said. “That is what moments are for.”
Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 28 (pp. 189-190; closing words)

Death, God, Hope, Error

“We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life, Freedom, Cry

“The great fact underlying the claim for universal suffrage is that every man is himself and belongs to himself, and represents his own individuality, not only in form and features, but in thought and feeling. And the same is true of woman. She is herself, and can be nobody else than herself. Her selfhood is as perfect and as absolute as is the selfhood of man.”

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

Speech at the New England Woman Suffrage Association (May 24, 1886) Nicholas Buccola, edit., The Essential Douglass: Selected Writings & Speeches, Hackett Publishing Company, 2016, p. 307. Sometimes referred to as his “Who and What is Woman?” speech
1880s

Feeling, Perfection

“Since the word "knowledge" occurs in my general title… I am going to be talking about epistemology, although I prefer to use the eighteenth-century, indeed, medieval phrase, "natural philosophy."… that enterprise of the human mind which attempts to trace lawfulness to nature, dead and living, but which is not directed to specific inquiries into how this or that law works. Philosophy in the sense in which I practice it, natural philosophy, is concerned with lawfulness rather than with laws and the general nature of laws rather than with the specific structure of this or that law. Natural philosophy was one of the three topics (moral philosophy and metaphysical philosophy were the others) to which one graduated in medieval universities after having studied the seven liberal arts.
I believe that we need to review the whole of our natural philosophy in the light of scientific knowledge that has arisen in the last fifty years.”

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

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

Law, Art, Nature, Knowledge

“Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter II: Interstellar Travel (pp. 17-18)

Love, Wisdom, Idea, Question

“All this was obvious enough at the time even though it was not always put forward exactly in this form and in this language. Schlegel found India "the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race." J. C. Herder asked the question: "All the peoples of Europe, where are they from?" And he answered: "From Asia." Schopenhauer thought that India was the "fatherland of mankind," and he expressed the hope that European peoples "who stemmed from Asia… would re-attain the holy religions of their home." All this however changed under a growing consciousness of Imperial power and Euro-centricity. New theories reflected new power realities and new Imperial needs. Aryan dispersion from a common centre was retained, but its direction was changed and it became the theory of the Aryan invasion of India. The theory was meant to justify and to help the British Imperialism. The theory has little intellectual respectability left, but it has not lost its political usefulness and it is quite popular with the representatives of preceding Imperialisms and their Hindu apologists.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

People, Religion, Hope, Home

“On the most usual assumption, the universe is homogeneous on the large scale, i. e. down to regions containing each an appreciable number of nebulae. The homogeneity assumption may then be put in the form: An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time.”

Hermann Bondi (1919–2005) British mathematician and cosmologist

Sir Hermann Bondi, "Review of Cosmology," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 1948, p. 107-8, as cited in: Hermann Friedmann. Wissenschaft und Symbol, Biederstein, 1949, p. 472

Time

“Sir Walter Scott was the Luther of literature. He reformed and he regenerated. To say that he founded a new school is not saying the whole truth; for there is something narrow in the idea of a school, and his influence has been universal. Indeed, there is no such thing as a school in literature; each great writer is his own original, and "none but himself can be his parallel." We hear of the school of Dryden and of Pope, but where and what are their imitators? Parnassus is the very reverse of Mont Blanc. There the summit is gained by treading closely in the steps of the guides; but in the first, the height is only to be reached by a pathway of our own. The influence of a genius like Scott's is shown by the fresh and new spirit he pours into literature.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Truth, School, Literature, Idea

“Society is everybody's way of punishing one another because they daren't take it out on the universe.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

Way

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

Men, Communication, Christ

“Undergirding what Christians call the Old Testament is a message of particularism, not universalism.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Busted: Scripture-Twisting Reverend Pushing Borderless US http://www.wnd.com/2017/12/busted-scripture-twisting-rev-pushing-borderless-u-s/," WND, December 13, 2017 2010s, 2017

“Rimbaud has epitomized for me the true function of the artist when he wrote: 'The poet should define the quantity of the unknown which awakes in his time, in the universal soul. He should give more than the formula of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward progress. The enormous becoming the normal, when absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplication of progress.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Quote of Gorky, in his text 'My murals for the Newark Airport: an interpretation', Arshile Gorky, 1936
1930 - 1941

Soul, Time

“[Human]] history is the story of that 'Good Fight', of the effort of man to attain that universal liberty to which, he feels himself born. All wars are but battles in this war. It is fought by the tongue and pen as earnestly as with the sword and shell. It is called by various names. The combatants rally under various banners. Whatever in human nature is hopeful, generous, aspiring, the love of God and trust in man, is arrayed on one side. The meaner passions, the baser purpose, stand upon the other.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Love, God, War, Hope

“Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered to him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of the paper. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Ballad of Beta-2

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

Books

“(…) everything is inter-linked. And therefore everything has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is because the world is as it is. (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Inter-connectedness
Source: "I am That." P.40.

World

“Universal History Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 17 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
Context: The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World? And the expression implies that that design is destined to be realised! Two points of consideration suggest themselves: first, the import of this design its abstract definition; and secondly, its realization. It must be observed at the outset, that the phenomenon we investigate Universal History belongs to the realm of Spirit. The term “World" includes both physical and psychical Nature. Physical Nature also plays its part in the World's History, and attention will have to be paid to the fundamental natural relations thus involved. But Spirit, and the course of its development, is our substantial object. Our task does not require us to contemplate Nature as a Rational System in itself though in its own proper domain it proves itself such but simply in its relation to Spirit. On the stage on which we are observing it, Universal History Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. Notwithstanding this (or rather for the very purpose of comprehending the general principles which this, its form of concrete reality, embodies) we must premise some abstract characteristics of the nature of Spirit. Such an explanation, however, cannot be given here under any other form than that of bare assertion. The present is not the occasion for unfolding the idea of Spirit speculatively; for whatever has a place in an Introduction, must, as already observed, be taken as simply historical; something assumed as having been explained and proved elsewhere; or whose demonstration awaits the sequel of the Science of History itself.

History, Reality

“Neither antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. — This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 215 from Frederick to Voltaire (1776-03-19)

God, Imagination

“Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.”

Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Perfection

“Haven't you ever seen a 3-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him "Look at what you made me do!" That's the moral universe that [they] always lived in.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthfall (1995)

“If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?
If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?
If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers?
If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?
If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?
If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them?
If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him?
If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable?
If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees?
If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him?
If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

God, Fear, Knowledge, Change

“I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"”

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

Reb Saunders to Reuven Malter (p. 264)
The Chosen (1967)

Pain, Soul, Suffering, Heart

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s

Way, Feeling, Thinking

“Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.
None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"Reginald's Choir Treat"
Reginald (1904)

Family, Way, Sense, Weather

“Music is the universal language of mankind.”

John Wilson (1785–1854) Scottish advocate, literary critic and author (1785-1854)

Nocted Ambrosianae (1822-5).

Music

“I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras… I have no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling"…. Very recently I came across a tract published by you styled Orders of Infinity in page 36 of which I find a statement that no definite expression has been as yet found for the number of prime numbers less than any given number. I have found an expression which very nearly approximates to the real result, the error being negligible. I would request that you go through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published. I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressons that I get but I have indicated the lines on which I proceed. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly…”

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) Indian mathematician

Letter to G. H. Hardy, (16 January 1913), published in Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary American Mathematical Society (1995) History of Mathematics, Vol. 9

Education, School, Error, Mathematics

“It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2000), "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF (EWD 1305). 2000s

“But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government; that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism.”

Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) American physician, educator, author

A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools American Tract Society, 1820. http://www.biblebelievers.com/Bible_in_schools.html

Money, Pain, Books, Youth

“The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

As quoted in "Scientists & Their Gods" in U.S. News & World Report Vol. 111 (1991)

God, Law, Idea, Sense

“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 2

Law, Sex, Failure, Nature

“Undoubtedly, looking back, we nearly all allowed ourselves, for decades, to be frozen into rates of personal taxation which were ludicrously high… That frozen framework has been decisively cracked, not only by the prescripts of Chancellors but in the expectations of the people. It is one of the things for which the Government deserve credit… However, even beneficial revolutions have a strong tendency to breed their own excesses. There is now a real danger of the conventional wisdom about taxation, public expenditure and the duty of the state in relation to the distribution of rewards, swinging much too far in the opposite direction… I put in a strong reservation against the view, gaining ground a little dangerously I think, that the supreme duty of statesmanship is to reduce taxation. There is certainly no virtue in taxation for its own sake… We have been building up, not dissipating, overseas assets. The question is whether, while so doing, we have been neglecting our investment at home and particularly that in the public services. There is no doubt, in my mind at any rate, about the ability of a low taxation market-oriented economy to produce consumer goods, even if an awful lot of them are imported, far better than any planned economy that ever was or probably ever can be invented. However, I am not convinced that such a society and economy, particularly if it is not infused with the civic optimism which was in many ways the true epitome of Victorian values, is equally good at protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain's scientific future. And if we are asked which is under greater threat in Britain today—the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilised public services—it would be difficult not to answer that it was the latter.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1988/feb/24/opportunity-and-income-social-disparities in the House of Lords (24 February 1988).

Wisdom, People, Health, School

“God prior to this time, had given revelation to this youth, on many occasions. The first one that he gave to him was in the spring of 1820, before Joseph Smith was of the age of fifteen. Then a wonderful revelation was given to him, the first one he ever received. In a great and glorious open vision, in answer to his prayers, there was the manifestation of two of the great personages in the heavens-not angels, not messengers, but two persons that hold the keys of authority over all the creations of the universe. Who were they? God the Eternal Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through whom God the Father made the worlds!”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 21:308 (September 19, 1880).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

God, Youth, Age, World

“Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crushes it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures are best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 383

Life, Death, Pain, Family

“They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Profiles of the Future (1962)
1960s

God, Imagination, Knowledge, Time

“My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930.
I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature.
I told him I would like to make them [Mondrian's flat painting] oscillate, he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly - but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials.
I think that at that time and practically ever since, the underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Quote (1951), in 'What Abstract Art Means to Me' http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250, George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis; as cited in the The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15 1950s - 1960s

Art, Color, Home, Nature

“The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Source: On the Pragmatics of Communication, 1998, p. 21

Understanding

“The landscape problem represents a serious problem in the development of science. Its solution requires… the construction of speculative cosmological scenarios, which posit regions or epochs of our universe for which we presently have no observable evidence. Nonetheless we must insist on taking seriously only scenarios and hypotheses that make falsifiable or strongly verifiable predictions, otherwise people can just make stuff up and the distinction between science and mythology becomes porous. …there are already candidate solutions that make real, falsifiable predictions.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (Feb 15, 2012)

People, Problem, Science

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

Ayn Rand book Philosophy: Who Needs It

Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

Soul

“Beloved guests, in what form does God, the Creator of all things in the universe, exist? God exists as the dual characteristics of a subject partner in the male position and object partner in the female position. God created Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, by dividing the male and female positions within Himself. The children of Adam and Eve were to have been created in the same pattern of male and female as a result of the union formed by Adam and Eve.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

The Holy Marriage Blessing is the Path to Unite the Virtues of Heaven and Earth and Harmonize and Unify the Universe as One http://www.unification.net/2005/20050820.html (2005-08-20)

God, Children

“in the mainland, a university has a party committee secretary (黨委書記). Do they want a party committee secretary at HKU? Is he a party committee secretary? They want to put him here as party committee secretary.”

Arthur Li (1945) Hong Kong politician

Leaked recording: Arthur Li speaks against Johannes Chan, EJ Insight, http://www.webcitation.org/6cfxbjx4k, 30 October 2015 http://www.ejinsight.com/20151028-leaked-recording-arthur-li-speaks-against-johannes-chan/,

“Cordellas are invisible symbols that surface. As they do, they show the universe in a new light by the very nature of their relationships. In a very limited fashion, alphabets do the same thing, for once you have accepted certain basic verbal symbols they impose their discipline even upon your thoughts… and throw their particular light upon the reality you perceive. Alphabets are nevertheless tools that shape and direct perception. They are groups of relationships that you transpose upon "reality". To this extent they shape your conceptions of the world that you know. Their discipline and rigidity is considerable. Once you think of a "tree" as a tree, it takes great effort before you can see it freshly again, as a living individual entity. Cordellas do not have the same rigidity. Inner invisible relationships are allowed to rise, [with] the acknowledgment recognized reality viewed through the lenses of these emerging relationships.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), p. 100

World, Fashion, Nature, Thinking

“A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: "Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science," 1987, p. 1317

Behavior, Mathematics, Nature, Learning

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

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

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

Love, Life, Money, Secret