Quotes about space
page 35

“this complex form of realism.... totally destroys the integrity of the subject-matter... The abstract colors and forms that we portray belong to Universe outside time and space.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

In his manifesto 'The Plastic Analogies of Dynanism', c. 1914; as quoted in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 218

Color, Time

“[My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language.”

Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) German mathematician

Source: V. Peckhaus, "19th Century Logic between Philosophy and Mathematics," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1999), 433-450.

Nature, Effort, Time

“In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled."”

James A. Michener book Return to Paradise

Return to Paradise (1951) First lines

Travel, Question

“If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.”

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

The Guardian, 25 August 2006, Supposing... It's time to smother romance in its sleep http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1858034,00.html Guardian columns

Love

“Open your mouth wide
A universal sigh”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

Bloom
Lyrics, The King of Limbs (2011)

“Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language “ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes.” They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.””

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 67

Behavior, Hell, Evil

“Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation. Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies. Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

"Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable," w:Good Reads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/53895656-building-the-new-american-economy-smart-fair-and-sustainable

Effort, Science

“After earning the PhD degree and acquiring some relatively extensive experience in digital computers… It was time to leave the University. The result of an extensive search for the right job was a family move to Arlington Heights, Illinois, where it was a short commute to the Research Laboratories of the Pure Oil Company at Crystal Lake. I was given the title of Mathematical and Computer Consultant. The Labs were set in a beautiful campus, the professional personnel were eager to learn what I had to teach and to include me in many interesting projects where my knowledge and skills could be put to good use. I was encouraged to initiate my own program of research. I went to work with enthusiasm.
The corporate headquarters of Pure Oil were located in down town Chicago. Pure Oil had been trying to install an IBM 705 computer system for all their accounting needs including calculation of all data necessary for the management of exploration, drilling, refining and distribution of oil products and even royalties to shareholders in oil wells. Typical for those early days, the programming team was in deep difficulties and needed help; they lacked adequate resources and suitable training. The Executive Vice President of Pure Oil, when he heard that there was a computer expert already on the payroll at the Crystal Lake lab, ended our family blissful dream and I was reassigned to the down town office.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Family, Beauty, Dreams, Search

“What is at stake is more than one small country [Kuwait], it is a big idea — a new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Comment on a "new world order" (29 January 1991), as quoted in The Watchtower magazine, In Search of a New World Order (15 July 1991)

World, Peace, Law, Idea

“The mysterious universe cannot be explained from one angle alone; instead it requires multiple paradigms including Newtonian physics, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“Only in a small sailboat at sea are we reminded of our natural place in the universe. The sea forces upon us a natural scale. The sea limits one day’s passage to a hundred miles, not too different from the scale used by the ancient Hebrews to measure the throne of God. Small boat sailors parse the structures of the sea in days and weeks and months, not flashing minutes as the land bound do. They have recaptured nature’s pendulum.”

Reese Palley (1922–2015)

“Unlikely Passages” 1984

God, Nature, Sea

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women, Men, People, World

“Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Atheist Delusion (2008)

History, Question, Knowledge

“This is what fascinates Shaw: this enormous force that ignores our human preferences, our logic and intellect. It fascinates him because to be suddenly gripped by it is to see that human beings are not the accidental products of a mechanical universe — that they are not 'alone'. As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe. And in fact, if we judge this 'rational universe' by its own laws, we see that it is not self-complete and self-explanatory; space must end somewhere, time must have a stop; but the alternative propositions sound equally 'logical': space is infinite; time has neither beginning nor end. The answer to these paradoxes must be that the outer universe is not self-complete; it is only half a universe. The inner world is the other half. But at present we know very little about this inner world. It is only within the present century that its existence has been clearly recognized by psychology.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167

World, Law, Star, Time

“The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of arrogance. … To become an outlaw, I must decide that my personal experience rather than the mores of the tribe is the authority upon which I will base my judgments. In a bold act of self-love and self-trust, the outlaw proclaims that individual to be higher than the universal.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 130

Love, Personality

“I went there to try to get my head around this idea, this idea that the problem in the universe lives within me. I can't think of anything more progressive than the embrace of this fundamental idea.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Idea, Problem, Thinking

“The last decades of scientific development have led us to the recognition of a new universal law of all natural phenomena, which, from its extraordinarily extended range, and from the connection which it constitutes between natural phenomena of all kinds, even of the remotest times and the most distant places, is especially fitted to give us an idea of what I have described as the character of the natural sciences, which I have chosen as the subject of this lecture.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 279
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)

Law, Idea, Nature, Distant

“What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong.””

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that. Skepticality http://www.skepticality.com/index.php ep. 52 http://www.skepticality.com/notes/sn_Ep52.php (15 May 2007) 23:11 - 24:46 Interviews

People, Religion, Boy, Study

“But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it).”

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

S. Kierkegaard 1846 Journals, Hannay 1996, VII IB200, p. 252
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Life, Beauty, Way

“To believe it possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons. On this basis alone is it possible to overcome divisions and to journey together towards full truth”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998 Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

Truth, Way, Personality, Sincerity

“Quality education and thesis should be the yardstick in gauging the standing of the university.”

Yao Leeh-ter (1962) Taiwanese educator and politician

Yao Leeh-ter (2018) cited in " Quality education in Taiwan should be the top choice for Malaysians: Yao Leeh-ter http://annx.asianews.network/content/quality-education-taiwan-should-be-top-choice-malaysians-yao-leeh-ter-78220" on Asia News Network, 2 August 2018

Education, Gauge

“I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

As quoted in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 293.
1930s

Intelligence

“What are the Qualifications of a Secretary of State? He ought to be a Man of universal Reading in Laws, Governments, History. Our whole terrestrial Universe ought to be summarily comprehended in his Mind.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

As quoted in Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026646540;view=1up;seq=69 (1927), edited by Worthington C. Ford, Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company. p. 57 Attributed

Law, History, Reading

“Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier times. If you want to teach comparative religion in college, you can do it in sociology departments, and if you want to teach the history of religion or of how scripture was confected, you can do it in history departments. There is no rationale for a modern secular university to teach theology, for it is the study of a nonexistent being and its supposed wants.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Theology schools are dying https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/03/19/theology-schools-are-dying/" March 19, 2016

Wisdom, School, Religion, History

“Vegan Bodybuilding is not only possible, it’s optimal. Within three years from first lifting weights properly and walking on a Bodybuilding stage as a novice, I had won Mr. Universe and become a Pro Bodybuilder. Steroids? Meat? Not a chance.”

Billy Simmonds (1980)

Interview with Living Vegan magazine (Autumn 2012); quoted in "Billy Simmonds" https://web.archive.org/web/20120708224928/http://www.treehugger.uproar.org.au/billy-simmonds/, Not Your Typical TreeHugger.

Chance

“Growing has no connection with audience.
Audience has no connection with identity.
Identity has no connection with a universe.
A universe has no connection with human nature.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

The Geographical History of America (1936)

Nature

“[The consequences of] beliefs that go against the providence of a perfectly good, wise, and just God, or against that immortality of souls which lays them open to the operations of justice…. I even find that somewhat similar opinions, by stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and by slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything toward the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened, and are completing the destruction of what still remains in the world of the generous Greeks and Romans who placed love of country and of the public good, and the welfare of future generations before fortune and even before life.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (1704)

Love, Life, Men, God

“I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" At last it happens: a professor blames ISIS’s sex slavery on the West https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/at-last-it-happens-a-professor-blames-isiss-sex-slavery-on-the-west/" August 23, 2015

Cats

“A constructive work is an embodiment of freedom itself, and is unconsciously perceived, even by those who are consciously against it. The desire to live is the strongest universal emotion, it springs from the depths of our unconscious sensibility – and the desire to give life is our most potent, constructive, conscious expression of this intuition.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

1932 - 1946
Source: 'Circle', 1937; as quoted in Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York 1991, p. 279

Life, Spring, Freedom

“The man who is right is a majority. We, who have God and conscience on our side, have a majority against the universe.”

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

As quoted in Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (1969) by Frederic May Holland, p. 212 http://books.google.it/books?id=GLbBa5OOhxMC&pg=PA212

God

“I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient; each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"Morreion", Ch. 6
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

“I was bothered by a sense of entitlement among many Finns, especially younger people. Sirpa Jalkanen, a microbiologist and biotech entrepreneur affiliated with Turku University in that ancient Finnish port city, told me she was discouraged by "this new generation we have now who love entertainment, the easy life." She said she wished the government would require every university student to pay a "significant but affordable" part of the cost of their education, "just so they'd appreciate it."”

Robert G. Kaiser (1943) American journalist

As quoted in "Ten Reasons We Can't, and Shouldn't, Be Nordic" https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/ten-reasons-we-cant-and-shouldnt-be-nordic/ (12 March 2018), by Jim Geraghty, National Review 2000s, "Why can't we be more like Finland?" (2005)

Love, Life, People, Education

“And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions—students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,—might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men, Children, Democracy, Personality

“The crime is how we deliberately keep out of touch,
Pretending it has nothing to do with us…

How familiar the metaphors, we think, suspecting our
House servants of having killed & eaten our pet cats!

At the University, expatriate lecturers gesticulate,
Finger the leaves of Marx to a batch of yawning students,
Nervously trying to define something or other…

Colonies of storks in flamboyant trees look down on
The valley dust and the last of the sweet bananas.”

Jack Mapanje (1944) Malawian poet

"When the Shire Valley Dries Up Patiently"
The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993)

Cats, Thinking, Tree, Housing

“The moment we recognize God as supreme in power and infinitely good and loving toward all His intelligent creatures, that moment we admit the doctrine of universal and special providence.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 279.

Love, God, Intelligence

“The success with which we have met in all of these undertakings is a matter of universal knowledge. We are at peace with all the world. Those of this generation who passed through the World War have had an experience which will always cause them to realize what an infinite blessing peace is. We are in an era of unbounded prosperity. The financial condition of our National Government is beginning to be more easy to be borne. While many other nations and many localities within our own country are struggling with a burden of increased debts and rising taxes, which makes them seek for new sources from which by further taxation they can secure new revenues, we have made large progress toward paying off our national debt, have greatly reduced our national taxes, and been able to relieve the people by abandoning altogether many sources of national revenue. We are not required to look altogether to the future for our rewards and find in our lot nothing but sacrifices for the present. Now, here, to-day, we are all able to enjoy those benefits which come from universal peace and nation-wide prosperity.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

War, People, World, Peace

“Contemporary with Vitellio and Peccam was… Roger Bacon, a man of almost universal genius, and who wrote on almost every branch of science. He frequently quotes Alhazen on the subject of optics, and seems to have carefully studied his writings, as well as those of other Arabians, which were the fountains of natural knowledge in those days, and which had been introduced into Europe by means of the Moors in Spain. Notwithstanding the pains this great man took with the subject of opticks, it does not appear that, with respect to theory, he made any considerable advance upon what Alhazen had done before him.”

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) English theologian, chemist, educator, and political theorist

Period I To the Revival of Letters in Erope
The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772)

Pain, Quotes, Nature, Knowledge

“Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

Death

“The gravitational repulsion created by this small patch of repulsive gravity material would be, then, the driving force of the Big Bang and it would cause the region to undergo exponential expansion… there is a certain doubling time, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again… and it's because these doublings build up so dramatically, it doesn't take very much time to build the whole universe. In about 100 doublings this tiny patch of 10-28 cm can become large enough, not to be the universe, but to be a small marble-sized region which will then ultimately become the observed universe, as it continues to coast outward after inflation ends.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I
The Early Universe (2012)

Time, Waiting

“This could be the most serious event in American political history. Because you're no longer dealing with a rural government where most of the the workers were postmen, like in the nineteenth century. You're dealing with an unstable personality who takes everything personally in terms of a bruised ego, has stated again and again that he'll lash back even if he has to get up at 3 A. M. and twitter about an overweight former Miss Universe … and he's got his finger on the nuclear trigger, or on drones, or on, you know, aircraft carriers.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

Ralph Nader, "This Could Be the Most Serious Event in History", The Big Picture RT (7:02 of 12:57), Nov. 9, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRkqYuv3_8

History, Personality

“Overall, most of the non-Chinese students do not experience any language and culture issues when they study in Taiwan. Furthermore, we (Ministry of Education) have also requested all the universities and colleges (in Taiwan) to provide suitable counselling arrangements for these students should they encounter any issues in adapting the study environment in Taiwan.”

Tsai Ching-hwa politician

Tsai Ching-hwa (2017) cited in " No issue for Malaysian non-Chinese students in adapting Taiwan education culture http://www.thesundaily.my/news/2017/07/09/no-issue-malaysian-non-chinese-students-adapting-taiwan-education-culture" on The Sun Daily, 9 July 2017

Education, Study

“For a discussion of some of the contents of this significant cultural volume, see Adriana Craciun, ‘Fatal Women of Romanticism’, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 204. The section ‘The Enchantress’ here begins by describing that first story as a ‘self-consciously Byronic text’ that ‘develops a Promethean, distinctly Luciferian model of poetic identity and self-creation’.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Women

“The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Attributed without source to Einstein in Mieczyslaw Taube, Evolution of Matter and Energy on a Cosmic and Planetary Scale (1985), page 1
Disputed

Books, Understanding

“I am old. I am young. I am Gwion,
I am universal, I am possessed of penetrating wit.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

A tradition about Taliesin states that he was once a boy named "Gwion".
Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The First Address of Taliesin

“This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe… has not been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially in no Western religions.”

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

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

World, Religion

“This is Bruno's fundamental idea. He says: ”To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum” It is in these very extremes that they are intelligible, and become united in the Notion; and this union of them is infinite Nature. “To find the point of union is not the greatest matter; but to develop from, the same its very opposite, this is the real and the deepest secret of the art” It is saying much if we speak of knowing the development of the Idea as a necessity of determinations; we shall see later how Bruno proceeded to do this. He represents the original principle, which is elsewhere known as the form, under the Notion of the minimum, which is at the same time the maximum One, which at the same time is All; the universe is this One in All.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 128
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 3

Secret, Art, Search, Intelligence

““I see what Gene is driving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!… Oh, it’s ridiculous!”
“A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. “By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.””

John Brunner book The Tides of Time

Source: The Tides of Time (1984), Chapter 12 (p. 220)

Dreams, Change, Personality

“All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.”

David Zindell (1952) American writer

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 81

Life, Men, War

“The fundamental tenet of the Védántí school, to which in a more modern age the incomparable Sancara was a firm and illustrious adherent, consisted, not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but, in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending, that it has no essence independent of mental perception, that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms, that external appearances and sensations are illusory, and would vanish into nothing if the divine energy, which alone sustains them, were suspended but for a moment; an opinion which Epicharmus and Plato seem to have adopted, and which has been maintained in the present century with great elegance, but with little publick applause; partly because it has been misunderstood, and partly because it has been misapplied by the false reasoning of some unpopular writers, who are said to have disbelieved in the moral attributes of God, whose omnipresence, wisdom, and goodness are the basis of the Indian philosophy… [N]othing can be farther removed from impiety than a system wholly built on the purest devotion; and the inexpressible difficulty, which any man, who shall make the attempt, will assuredly find in giving a satisfactory definition of material substance, must induce us to deliberate with coolness, before we censure the learned and pious restorer of the ancient Véda; though we cannot but admit, that, if the common opinions of mankind be the criterion of philosophical truth, we must adhere to the system of Gotama, which the Bráhmens of this province almost universally follow.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

II. pp. 238-239
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, God, Truth, Age

“Let me make it clear: this grammar school boy will take no lessons from that public school boy on the importance of children from less privileged backgrounds gaining access to university.”

Michael Howard (1941) British politician

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo031203/debtext/31203-03.htm#31203-03_wqn4, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 415 col. 498 At Prime Minister's Question Time in the House of Commons, December 3, 2003

Children, School, Boy

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“And lo! the universal air
Seemed lit with ghastly flame;
Ten thousand thousand dreadful eyes
Were looking down in blame.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

1840s, The Dream of Eugene Aram

“Overall, the universe's apostrophe store stays in balance. It seems our linguistic world was intelligently designed -- for every gratuitous apostrophe there's an instance where it's omitted.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

A.Word.A.Day (Sep 3, 2012) http://wordsmith.org/words/crows_feet.html

World, Intelligence

“The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

R. N. Shepard, (1994). "Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world." Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1, 2–28.

Color, Way, Optimism, Support

“Reporter: Would a reasonable observer say that you are potentially vulnerable to blackmail by Russia or by its intelligence agencies?
Trump: Lemme just tell you what I do. When I leave our country, I’m a very high-profile person, would you say? I am extremely careful. I’m surrounded by bodyguards. I’m surrounded by people. And I always tell them — anywhere, but I always tell them if I’m leaving this country, “Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras.” I’m not referring just to Russia, but I would certainly put them in that category. And number one, “I hope you’re gonna be good anyway. But in those rooms, you have cameras in the strangest places. Cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know. You better be careful, or you’ll be watching yourself on nightly television.” I tell this to people all the time. I was in Russia years ago, with the Miss Universe contest, which did very well — Moscow, the Moscow area did very, very well. And I told many people, “Be careful, because you don’t wanna see yourself on television. Cameras all over the place.”
And again, not just Russia, all over. Does anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.”

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

Trump Press Conference at Trump Tower https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-press-conference-transcript.html,Donald (11 January 2017) 2010s, 2017, January

People, Hope, Way, Intelligence

“The manner in which time and space are bound up with each other in the four-dimensional continuum is variable. It is difficult to express this variability of the cross-connections between space and time in simple language, and different interpretations of it are possible, corresponding to different mathematical transformations of the fundamental line-element, e. g. a different choice of the variable which we interpret as "time." Perhaps the best way we can express it is by saying that the solution of the field-equations of the theory of relativity shows that there is in the universe a tendency to change its scale, which at the present time results in an expansion, but may perhaps at other times become, or have been, a shrinking. This is true of the grand scale model of the universe.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Way, Mathematics, Change, Time

“Just what instrumentalities of either a state or the federal government are exempt from taxation by the other cannot be stated in terms of universal application.”

Harlan F. Stone (1872–1946) United States federal judge

Metcalf & Eddy v. Mitchell, 269 U.S. 514., 522 (1926).

“He's this sort of harborer of good and fun and madness, and he's the cleverest man in the universe — and the silliest man in the universe.”

Matt Smith (actor) (1982) English actor

On the Doctor in Doctor Who Rewind (2011) by BBC America

Madness

“As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time." To which adds Guth: "Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts."”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

On the Big Bang
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

Question, Time

“A man on a park bench has a lonely final look, as if to say: “Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go.” But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that orginal composite entity—half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book”, p. 3; opening
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Life, Death, Men, Family

“An examination of the characteristics required by the employees and heads of undertakings of every kind leads to the same conclusions as the foregoing study, which was confined largely to industrial concerns. In the home and in affairs of State, the need for administrative ability is proportional to the importance of the undertaking. Like every other undertaking, the home requires administration, that is to say planning, organization, command, coordination and control. Nothing but a theory of administration, which can be taught and then discussed by everybody, can put an end to the general uncertainty as to proper methods, which exists in the isolation of our households. There is therefore a universal need for a knowledge of administration.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 80; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 7

Home, Knowledge, Study

“A vehement eros runs through the Universe. It is like the ether: harder than steel, softer than air.
It cuts through and passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

“While in the ﬁrst quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “ﬁrst revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions.”

Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) Austrian American scientist and cybernetician

Source: 1980s, Notes on an epistemology for living things, 1981, p.258

World, Nature, Science

“Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

La Système de la nature; quoted by Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment p. 220 (paperback edition)

Sun, Parting

“The Japanese people, since the war, have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history. With a commendable will, eagerness to learn, and marked capacity to understand, they have, from the ashes left in war's wake, erected in Japan an edifice dedicated to the supremacy of individual liberty and personal dignity; and in the ensuing process there has been created a truly representative government committed to the advance of political morality, freedom of economic enterprise, and social justice. Politically, economically, and socially Japan is now abreast of many free nations of the earth and will not again fail the universal trust… I sent all four of our occupation divisions to the Korean battlefront without the slightest qualms as to the effect of the resulting power vacuum upon Japan. The results fully justified my faith. I know of no nation more serene, orderly, and industrious, nor in which higher hopes can be entertained for future constructive service in the advance of the human race.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)

War, People, Faith, Justice

“She waited for him to explain a universe in which there was so much injustice.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 51 “After the Ball Is Over” (p. 486)

Waiting

“What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 20. 1960s–1970s

Pleasure, Truth, Feeling, Fashion

“If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates. (He will confirm this statement after his visit next year—but also add a footnote that one species from the ape bush has enjoyed an unusual and unexpected flowering, thus demanding closer monitoring.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

World, Flowers

“The administration, through senior Air Force officials, wants the U. S. to achieve military supremacy in outer space. Dominating all earth from outer space will have an out-of-world price tag, perhaps more than $1 trillion.A question: Why reach for the stars with guns in our hands? Are there weapons of mass destruction on Mars?Yesterday 28 Members of Congress signed on to H. R. 2420, a bill to stop the weaponization of space, urging the President to sign an international treaty to ban such weapons. If we work together towards creating peace on earth, we would not bring war to the high heavens.While some fantasize about being "masters of the universe," there are 45 million Americans without health insurance. Corporations are reneging on pension obligations. Social Security is under attack. We are headed towards a $400 billion annual budget deficit, a $600 billion trade deficit, an $8 trillion national debt. The cost of the war in Iraq is over $200 billion. While we build new bases in Iraq, we close them in the United States.Earth to Washington, D. C. Earth to Washington, D. C. D. C., call home.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (19 May 2005) http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=239723145903+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

War, Health, World, Peace

“It's all for him.
The ultimate goal of the universe is to show the glory of God. It is the reason for everything that exists, including you. God made it all for his glory. Without God's glory, there would be nothing.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

The Purpose of Life, p. 53
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002)

God

“I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life… Of course, secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions! The search for extraterrestrial life is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution!… And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel. You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth. God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind. Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian”! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word). To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong. An understanding of the gospel makes it clear that salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race—human beings who are all descendants of Adam.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"We'll find a new Earth within 20 years" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/20/well-find-a-new-earth-within-20-years/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 20, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Life, God, History, Search

“There is no God!
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

God

“In 1963, when I completed my PhD, it was mostly on the steady-state theory using mathematical formulations to describe creation of matter. People always argued that you cannot have matter coming out of nothing, what would happen to the law of conservation of matter. It is a normal criticism of the steady-state theory. One could answer it either in one sentence by saying what is the big-bang theory where the entire universe came out of nothing, so you are violating the law of conservation of matter and energy in a big way. But that would be to point out the weakness of the other theories and not answering your own theory.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, Law, Way, Mathematics

“Early in 1954 I was appointed Lecturer in Economics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Then, in 1956, I was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, enabling me and Anne to spend two years at Stanford University, where I got a Ph. D. in economics, whereas Anne got an M. A. in psychology. I had the good fortune of having Ken Arrow as advisor and as dissertation supervisor. I benefitted very much from discussing many finer points of economic theory with him. But I also benefitted substantially by following his advice to spend a sizable part of my Stanford time studying mathematics and statistics. These studies proved very useful in my later work in game theory.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

"John C. Harsanyi - Biographical," 1994

Game, Mathematics, Study, Time

“Charles Darwin's evolution theory states that the strong eat the weak. According to Darwin's evolution theory we are the worst people. But it is actually not so. It is a natural universal law. If we take Darwin's evolution theory literally then God is the worst kind of being. Because God planned creation in a certain way. When love is involved there is no evil. Even mother birds sacrifice their own lives for the sake of their babies.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

TRUE DAY OF ALL THINGS AND THE INITIATOR OF HARMONY http://www.unification.net/1997/970605.html, June 5, 1997

Love, God, People, Law

“Cubism is not a formula, it is not a school. Cubism is a philosophy, a point of view in the universe. It is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.”

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) American and French sculptor

Source: Jacques Lipchitz: The Artist at Work, 1966, p. 199

School, Mountain

“There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe. And how, perhaps, that mysterious equation might tie in with the spiritual force that was idealistic brother to time and space and all those other elemental factors that held the universe together.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 30

Intelligence, Time, Personality

“The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 168.

Age, Peace

“[Recalling Bill Clinton, a Yale University classmate:] I remember him as very gregarious, never in class, always talking to someone out in the hallway or in the dining room or something like that. I remember her (Hillary Rodham Clinton) as very rigid, unfriendly, hard-core left-winger.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

“.. that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].... to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in The painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells Carrà, in 'Lacerba' vol. 1. no. 17, 1,Florence, 1 September 1913, pp. 186-187
1910's

Way, Mood, Sense, Light

“Instead of inquiring after the nature of the cause of the condensation of nebulous matter, it would indeed be sufficient for the present purpose to call it merely a condensing principle; but since we are already acquainted with the centripetal force of attraction which gives a globular figure to planets, keeps them from flying out of their orbits in tangents, and makes one star revolve around another, why should we not look up to the universal gravitation of matter as the cause of every condensation, accumulation, compression, and concentration of the nebulous matter?”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

p, 125
Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)

Star, Nature, Flying

“Universal was like a family. When I was having a terrible time during my pregnancy, they came to my home and built sets right in my bedroom so I could finish the few scenes I had left in ‘That’s the Spirit’. But Columbia—that was work! I did a lot of crime pictures and another horror called ‘The Creeper’. When it was time for those cats to be all over my dead body, I yelled for a stand in. I couldn’t stand having dozens of cats walking all over me. It gave me the shivers!”

June Vincent (1920–2008) actress

An Interview with June Vincent (1996)

Family, Home, Cats, Time

“We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

January 6, 1842
Journals (1838-1859)

Religion, Imagination, Literature, Sleep

“I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. … But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people.”

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

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), The Human Rights Movement (1969-1979)

People, Books, Communication, Personality

“At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought: this does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying itself.”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 9

Life, Idea, Understanding, Time

“The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance!
For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth.
In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.
We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 7 (pp. 229-230)

War, Truth, Lie, Age

“Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.
Blessed be God's name?
Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death, God, Children, Tree

“From experience it has been observed that a newly converted Communist frequently acquires a feeling of omniscient superiority over his unconverted fellow men. He feels that at last the universe is laid out before him in a simple, comprehensible manner. If he has never wrestled with philosophical problems before he is likely to be overwhelmed by the infatuating possibility that through Dialectical Materialism man has finally solved all of the basic problems necessary to understand the universe. In this state of mind the student will often drop his attitude of critical inquiry. He will invite indoctrination in heavy doses because of his complete assurance that he has at last discovered Truth in its ultimate form.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, Truth, Feeling, Understanding

“I believe the most important decision taken anywhere by anyone in the 20th century was the decision about where to locate the Princeton Graduate College. President of the University Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted it down on the campus, integrated with the undergraduate college. His nemesis, Dean Andrew Fleming West, wanted it where it now is, up on a little hill overlooking the Princeton golf course. President Woodrow Wilson had one of his characteristic snits, resigned as president, went into politics and ruined the 20th century.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Remarks at the Disinvitation Dinner http://www.buckleyprogram.com/#!Transcript-of-George-Wills-Remarks-at-the-Disinvitation-Dinner/c18lp/i8sxengw20, William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale (15 April 2015). Of his quip, Will remarked, "I simplify a bit and exaggerate somewhat." 2010s

Decision

“For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universally beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things. It is for me a clear truth that one does not want to say something 'specific', it is then that one says what is most specific: the truth (which is of great universality).”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Truth, Beauty, Nature

“Al-Tabari: The History of the Prophets and Kings (The History of Tabari), Translated by Huge Kennedy, State University of New York (1990), Vol. 29”

Al-Mahdi (744–785) the third Abbasid Caliph

Quotes about space page 35

Quotes about space
page 35