Quotes about the past (4316 quotes, page 14)

“But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 88

Life , Age , Art , Feeling

“A word — a name —
Conjures the past before me, till it grows
More actual than the present : that — I see
But with the common eyes of daily life,
Imperfect and impatient; but the past
Out of imagination works its truth,
And grows distinct with poetry.”

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

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Subjects for Pictures
The Monthly Magazine

Life , Truth , Imagination

“What an existential approach is about is positing that our bad feelings, our dysphoria, our despair, our anxiety emanates not only from our own life history and all the traumas we may have had in the past, and not only from the figures that we have introjected — many of these figures being unloving, or uncaring, or neurotic on their own parts — and emanates not only from our current life crises, but it emanates also, also, from our confrontation with the existential facts of life, with our confrontation with the human condition.”

Irvin D. Yalom (1931) American psychotherapist and writer

Live Case Consultation, Psychotherapy.net

Life , Feeling , History , Parting

“A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Nature , Universe , Sun , Falseness

“So, Brussels have come up with a little thing called a European Constitution, which will unite all of the European Union into a single superstate, governed by a single government. There may be a problem with everyone speaking different languages and hating each other, but seemingly insurmountable problems have been solved in the past. Like Mount Everest, or making a film based on the Lord of the Rings.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

14 May 2003
Fully Ramblomatic

Hate , Problem

“The classical legacies of political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche, and the immediate tasks of running the world, at home and abroad, have been of most concern to the Right. Normative philosophical constructions have become a specialty of the Centre. Economic, social and cultural investigations – of past and present – dominate the output of the Left. Any attempt to come to grips with all three outlooks is thus obliged to traverse quite variegated ground.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xiii

World , Home

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill", in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1984) Vol. 2, pp. 194-5.
Criticism

Literature , Mood , Heart

“Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

People , History

“We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

As quoted in: Norbert Wolf, ‎Uta Grosenick (2004) Expressionism, p. 74
undated quotes

Art , Thinking , Personality

“Prophets tend to be impatient with detailed analyses of particular choices made in the past—choices that determined how, month by month, we got to where we are from where we were. They tend to be equally impatient with how we can practically get from where we are today to some modest increments of improvement a month from now. To the prophet such preoccupation seems to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 50

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode their rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which those changes can be reversed.”

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

Fake quote, according to snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/hitler-control-quote/ (11 Jan 2016)
Misattributed

People , Way , Freedom , Change

“I've prayed every night for the past 10 years. There's a lot more to thank God for now. My philosophy is 'live life to the fullest,' [and] I was saved for a reason. Maybe I'm going to help someone else. I don't question it. All I know is, I'm thankful I'm still here.”

Adam Goldstein (1973–2009) American DJ

James Montgomery DJ AM Says He Was 'Saved For A Reason' In First Post-Crash Interview http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1597103/20081015/dj_am.jhtml October. 15 2008. Retrieved August 30, 2009. (October 2008).

Life , God , Question , Help

“From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Before the US House of Representatives, introducing the The Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act, H.R. 833. http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul504.html (9 February 2009)
2000s, 2006-2009

Money , Suffering , Housing , Country

“I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.
The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this…”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 320-321
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Age , Knowledge , Silence , Loneliness

“There is a dance of death in the West and actual death in the Middle East, courtesy of the Islamofascists. … The radical Muslims are on the warpath and they are against everyone else. They are against Muslims who are not as fanatical. They are against the members of all other religions. They think they are going to take us back to some pristine religious period in human history that never actually occurred. It's all complete rubbish. These "faith warriors" live lower than the pigs they despise. They kidnap and rape 8-year-old girls and say the Quran authorizes it. They're not purists. They're killers. They're Nazis in head scarfs. They aren't leading a religious revival. They're trying to take us back to a state of barbarism that has been extinct for 1,200 years. This is a barbaric revolution… Why would any government bring in unvetted Muslim immigrants at a time like this? It would seem that only an insane prince would do this to his country. But Obama is not insane. He's stoned. He's stoned on the orthodoxy of the progressive left. Obama and his supporters are drunk on their ideology. They think they're going to create a progressive utopia by continuing their attack on all Western values. This is precisely how great civilizations of the past declined and eventually fell. They rejected the values that made them great and degenerated into narcissism and selfishness. They kept on partying until they were too weak to defend themselves. Then, the unthinkable happened. They fell.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

A dance of death in the West http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/a-dance-of-death-in-the-west/, excerpt from Government Zero.
Government Zero: No Borders, No Language, No Culture (2015)

Death , Faith , Religion , History

“The purpose of my work: to introduce, or, rather, to re-introduce the original ways of human development. Once viewed as personal responsibility, personal growth, education, and social doctrine were highly effective. Now that they have begun to be approached as an "acceptance," our ideals have begun to rely on the willingness of others to go along with our philosophies. It is now time for us to return to the selfish ideals of the past.”

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

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)

Education , Way , Time , Personality

“Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

People , Truth , History , Time

“With Christian faith I pray that those who are today our adversaries may understand their error in time and may deeply reflect before persisting in a stance which is rejected by all the free peoples in the world and by all those who had their territory mutiliated and endured colonialism and exploitation. With Christian faith I pray for our men deployed to the southern seas, for your children, husbands, fathers, soldiers, NCOs and officers, who make up the front lines of an Argentine effort that will not stop until final victory is achieved. Invoking the protection of God and His Holy Mother, let us all commit ourselves to complying with our duty, as did the generations of the past century, who did not mind harsh weather, long distances, disease or poverty when it came to defending freedom.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

President Galtieri’s address to the nation https://teachwar.wordpress.com/resources/war-justifications-archive/falklandsmalvinas-war-1982/#arg1, 2 April 1982

Men , God , Children , People

“Fellow citizens, we may now say that the past, with all its wealth of glorious associations, is secure. The air is filled with brightness; the horizon is aglow with hope. The future is full of magnificent possibilities. But God has committed to us a trust which we must not, we dare not overlook. By the dispensation of his Providence, the chains have been stricken from four millions of the inhabitants of this Republic, and he has shown us the truth of that early utterance of Abraham Lincoln's, 'This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

God , Truth , World , Hope

“People never stop to think about these basic facts when they watch wars and cop shows on the television. People take too much for granted. Each time a gun is fired the whole history of engineering comes into play. Of politics, too: war, assassination, revolution, terror. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of the past.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.

War , People , History , Thinking

“Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind of epic purpose. They set out to exalt a triumphant hero, a conqueror like Marcus Aurelius... In the past fifty years, this ancient relation between man and beast has been entirely transformed. The horse has been replaced, in its economic and its military functions, by the machine, by the tractor, the automobile or the tank.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 86

Horse

“The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

13
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)

People , Books , Distant

“Now was the quiet, fierce solitude of the primeval forest broken by new, strange cries. No longer was there safety for bird or beast. Man had come.
Other animals passed up and down the jungle by day and by night — fierce, cruel beasts — but their weaker neighbors only fled from their immediate vicinity to return again when the danger was past.
With man it is different. When he comes many of the larger animals instinctively leave the district entirely, seldom if ever to return; and thus it has always been with the great anthropoids. They flee man as man flees a pestilence.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Bird , Solitude , Animals , Night

“The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 62.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Memory , Time

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

Truth , World , Beauty , Art

“Old age doth in sharp pains abound;
We are belabored by the gout,
Our blindness is a dark profound,
Our deafness each one laughs about.
Then reason's light with falling ray
Doth but a trembling flicker cast.
Honor to age, ye children pay!
Alas! my fifty years are past!”

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) French poet and chansonnier

Cinquante Ans, C. L. Betts' translation; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 13.

Pain , Children , Age , Light

“Now I know what love is worth
In a broken world
But I can't get past the hurt
Till I give up on these
Stupid little things.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Stupid Little Things
Resurrection (2014)

Love , Stupidity , World , Hurt

“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”

Ralph Ellison book Shadow and Act

Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.

Time

“He was optimistic about the future of India "Though never too optimistic about its governments - whether central or state, whether past, present or future.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

Affirmative action, not quotas for education': Nariman

Future

“Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing—finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 3

God , Religion , Soul , Future

“We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.. [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.”

H. G. Wells book World Brain

World Brain (1938)

Age , Education , Way , Idea

“This reconnection…has given me great satisfaction. I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally. The Nobel, he says, is not just an affirmation of his past work; it’s an encouragement to keep working on interesting problems.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

People , Hope , Problem , Universe

“I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures - and the heart is heavy. The tears take one's breath away and the past rises up again. Home.... in Peter's office [Marianne's brother, governor of Kovno Province, Lithuania], my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes - doesn't get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor's] heart, begging one's pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1906 - 1911
Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Love , Life , Home , Soul

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Love , Life , Death , Hate

“Triteness of content has not necessarily hurt ideologies in the past. There are very few original or profound ideologies on the political scene.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2014)

Hurt

“When people all around us are slaughtered in the name of a temple (and masjid) I hear echoes from those times long past.”

Girish Raghunath Karnad (1938–2019) Indian playwright

Said while producing a picture called Tale danda on the subject of relationship of religion to politics.[Natesan Sharda Iyer, Musings on Indian Writing in English: Drama, http://books.google.com/books?id=e2_aFo5sAroC&pg=PA137, 1 January 2007, Sarup & Sons, 978-81-7625-801-2, 135]

People , Time

“Last year, the President promised he would use his pen and phone to ignore the legislative branch and push through his agenda by executive fiat. We have witnessed one executive power grab after another, setting a dangerous precedent and eroding the constitutional balance set forward by our Founders. As the President himself once said, elections have consequences. The most recent one being he must work with the Republican-controlled Congress, rather than spout recycled, failed ideas from past speeches. Americans are looking for leadership. They want solutions.”

Trey Gowdy (1964) American politician

Gowdy Statement on State of the Union Address https://gowdy.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/gowdy-statement-state-union-address (January 20, 2015)

Idea

“Let it be remarked … that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 121.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Way , Nature , Success

“The key institutions of Soviet power - though weakened, demoralized, and corrupted - were still there. Symbolic of that reality and of the lingering hold of the Communist past was the historic centerpiece of Moscow: the continued presence of the Lenin mausoleum.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 4, The Black Hole, p. 104.

Reality

“For perennialists, too, the nation is immemorial. National forms may change and particular nations may dissolve, but the identity of a nation is unchanging. Yet the nation is not part of any natural order, so one can choose one's nation, and later generations can build something new on their ancient ethnic foundations. The task of nationalism is to rediscover and appropriate a submerged past in order the better to build on it.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

As cited by Eric G.E. Zuelow " Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm" on nationalismproject.org. 1999-2007.
Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994)

Nature , Change , Parting

“Ironically, or so it seemed to Tristam, the day was perfect and the green countryside rolled past in ordered tranquillity, the death of a single man having shockingly little impact on the larger world.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 5 (p. 67)

Death , World , Perfection

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)

Love , Feeling , Light , Reading

“Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the “past” has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68

Age , Reality , Nostalgia

“If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

Understanding , Future , Parting

“Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Love , Fear , Gratitude

“In the beginning was the Word.
In the end…past honor, past life, past caring…
In the end will be the Word.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 233)

Life

“On the first movement of Claude Debussy's La Mer, From Dawn to Noon: " Ah, my dear friend, there's one particular moment between half past ten and a quarter to eleven that I found stunning!" (with slight variations in phrasing and translation)”

Erik Satie (1866–1925) French composer and pianist

Mary McAuliffe: Twilight of the Belle Epoque (2014), p. 111.
General quotes

“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the paradox of thrift, in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known paradox of flexibility, in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy – balanced budgets, a firm commitment to price stability – helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are – and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

“Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.

Money , World , Understanding , Time

“To some extent my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good. There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history. In recent years it has assailed the optimistic view of history. The black armbands were quietly worn in official circles in 1988. The multicultural folk busily preached their message that until they arrived much of Australian history was a disgrace. The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. … The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Balance Sheet On Our History," Quadrant (July 1993)

Women , History , Success

“That Being, who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favors upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me; can I doubt that he loves me? And, if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me, not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope; hope of the future built on experience of the past.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to George Whitefield (19 June 1764), published in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1856).
Epistles

Love , Hope , Appearance , Future

“Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past.”

Joe Haldeman book Forever Peace

Source: Forever Peace (1997), p. 14

War , Way

“There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

Preface. p. xi.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Truth , Knowledge , Future , Falseness

“I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it’s been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it’s voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)
Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.”

David Gerrold book The Man Who Folded Himself

Source: The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), p. 73

Communication

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 10, line 13
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Death , Sleep

“We're in a bubble. We have artificially low interest rates. We have a stock market that, frankly, has been good to me, but I still hate to see what's happening. We have a stock market that is so bloated. Be careful of a bubble because what you've seen in the past might be small potatoes compared to what happens. So be very, very careful.”

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

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

Hate

“I thought, ‘This is just too terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ I hadn’t been allowed to watch horror movies before that. I was so traumatized I literally could not sleep for weeks, and it changed my physical appearance; I lost like 10 pounds. My teachers got so concerned they called my mother, ‘Is there something going on – is she being abused at home?’ My mother found a picture of Robert Englund the actor, and Robert Englund in the Freddy Krueger make-up, and pasted them up near my bedside table. So, every night when I’d go to sleep, literally for like a year, I’d have to look at it and think, ‘It’s just a movie, it’s just a movie, it’s not real.’ I remember thinking that I was going to grow up one day, and be an actress and never make a movie that scares little kids.”

Monica Keena (1979) American actress

Discussing A Nightmare on Elm Street in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)

Home , Thinking , Sleep , Teachers

“Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Love , People , Change

“It may be noted that some of the Christian correspondents objected to Ram Swarup’s article being published in The Times of India. The plea sounds strange, to say the least. The Christians in this country own and control a large-sized press which includes several daily newspapers and many periodicals. The language which is used in this media vis-a-vis Hinduism is not always decorous; quite often, it is intemperate. Besides, the Christians get ample space in the press which is supposed to be owned and controlled by the Hindus. It is only once in a while that an article critical, of Christian dogmas and/or missions, gets through. That, too, when the editor concerned finds that the facts cited and the conclusions drawn deserve the attention of his countrymen. The Christians who object to such articles being published at all have to think calmly and coolly whether their attitude reflects tolerance or otherwise. They have been telling us for many years now that they want and are prepared for a dialogue. We hope that the word “dialogue” in their current dictionary does not mean a monologue, as it did in past.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Hope , Thinking , Time , Country

““For remember,” he said, “that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”
His voice rang out over the mountain, more impassioned than any of them had ever heard a voice before, and they stood quiet as standing stones, listening.
“For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.””

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 20 “One Goes Alone” (p. 272)

Men , Children , Lie , World

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

People , Law , Way , Idea

“The existence of the Zionist regime is tantamount to imposition of an unending and unrestrained threat so that none of the nations and Islamic countries of the region and beyond can feel secure from its threat. The closer these nations are to the epicenter of this threat, the more threatened they feel. The people of Palestine are at the very core of such a threat. They have not been able to spend a day with peace of mind for the past sixty years. Three generations of sons and daughters of Palestinians have lived and are presently living under these circumstances. The peoples of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the entire Middle East are essentially under similar situation.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

People , Peace , Feeling , Daughters

“People who had, in the past, suffered from technophobia suffered even more. Others took other positions. Things were not so bad. Things could be worse. Worse things could be imagined. Worse things had been endured and triumphed over, in the past. This was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.”

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

“A Nation of Wheels”, p. 131.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

People , Imagination , Suffering

“One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.”

Andy Goldsworthy (1956) British sculptor and photographer

He's got the whole world in his hands, The Telegraph (24 March 2007)

Life , Beauty , Hope , Art

“In this way I can speak of an American Hinduism and call myself an American and a Hindu – an American connected with the land and a Hindu connected with the spirit and soul of that land. Hinduism has helped me discover the forces of nature in which I live, their past and their future, their unique formations and their connections with the greater universe and the cosmic mind.”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery Of Vedic Dharma

Way , Soul , Nature , Universe

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

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

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

People , Behavior , Motivation , Thinking

“Prehistoric images speak to us more evocatively than any other element of the archeological record: colorful, vibrant paintings of horses, of bison, of a panoply of animals and humans that often seem alive and in motion. And yet there is a dimension of unreality about them… The images seem plucked from life… often arranged chaotically to our eye, frequently superimposed… sometimes apparently incomplete. …There is an enigma in these images, a profound challenge to our understanding of the past.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Life , Color , Understanding , Animals

“So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!' … The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment— it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability— I have not feared to give: it is— to use words I used two years and a half ago— that 'the people of England will not endure it'.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Carshalton and Banstead Young Conservatives at Carshalton Hall (15 February 1971), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 202-203.
1970s

People , Truth , Fear , Feeling

“The series of events leading up to the formation of the biblical community and its religion apparently began unexpectedly. Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating one of the slaves. It is difficult to imagine this being a fictional invention, especially since the biblical writers never chose to comment on this noteworthy aspect of the protagonist’s dark past. When Moses later tried to intervene between two quarreling slaves, one of them responded, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:11-15). Is the monopoly of force — the ability to coerce other human beings — truly the ultimate basis of social authority? If it seems undesirable to ground social authority on something that essentially boils down to the superior ability to commit murder, then what is the alternative?”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Ancient Israel’s Faith and History: An Introduction the Bible in Context (2001)

Religion , Imagination , Communication

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

Communication , Understanding , Sense , Time

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death , Health , Youth , Art

“Once I was in solitary confinement, it provided me with the isolated moments to reflect on my past and to dwell upon something greater, something better than involving myself in thuggery and criminality. It had to be more to life than that. It had to be more than the madness that was disseminating throughout this entire prison.”

Stanley Tookie Williams (1953–2005) American criminal

Democracy Now! interview (2005)

Life , Madness

“The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. … We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium.”

Vijay Prashad (1967) Indian historian and journalist

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2002), p. 38

Justice , Color , Behavior , Problem

“Jack Reacher stayed alive, because he got cautious. He got cautious because he heard an echo from his past. He had a lot of past, and the echo was from the worst part of it.”

Lee Child book Die Trying

Die Trying, Ch. 1.

Parting

“Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

Love , Reality

“If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

Future

“The individual contribution, the work of any single generation, is infinitesimal; the power and glory belong to human society at large, and are the long result of selection, conservation, sacrifice, creation, and renewal — the outcome of endless brave efforts to conserve values and ideas, and to hand them on to posterity, along with physical life itself. Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back into an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Faith for Living (1940)

Life , Idea , Effort , Future

“I have to come to think myself in the last lap of life that one should always look back upon the history of the past, study it and meditate upon it. Thus one learns the main line of advance…it is wrong to be bound by the events and commitments of the last few years, unless these are sound and compatible with the main historic line. I am sure the right course is to know as much as possible about all that has happened in the world, and then to act entirely upon the merits from day to day. Of course, my ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Linlithgow (3 November 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 886
The 1930s

Life , World , History , Thinking

“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Science , Time , Future

“The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 20 (p. 179)

Life , Dead

“A flock of sheep was moving slowly down a country lane which was bounded by high banks. A motorist in a hurry came up behind the flock and urged the shepherd to move his sheep to the side so that the car could drive through. The shepherd refused since he could not be sure of keeping all the sheep out of the way of the car in such a narrow lane. Instead he reversed the situation. He told the car to stop and then he quietly turned the flock round and drove it back past the stationary car.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 100; Cited in Virginia K. Baillie et al. (1989) Effective Nursing Leadership: A Practical Guide. p. 244.

Cars , Way , Country

“Look at the sea and remember the past. Look at the sky and imagine the future. Look at the land and think of the present. And in the most profound place where land, sea and sky are one - there ye shall play volleyball.”

Simon Munnery (1967) British comedian

Attention Scum! (2001), How To Live (2005)

Imagination , Thinking , Future , Sea

“One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964) quoting an unknown psychiatric text, reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995) Lawrence Sutin, ed.

Youth , Way , Thinking , Reality

“Even when Muslims do something intolerable, Europeans have to tolerate it in atonement of past colonial and imperialist misdeeds. Victimhood is an inexhaustible capital that Muslims in Europe could dig into for generations. The fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo staff had never even visited Algeria did not deprive them of their ancestral capital of victimhood because of French colonial presence there decades before the two killers were born in Paris. Even acts that are clearly not worthy of respect, such as female genital mutilation, must be respected in the name of “cultural otherness.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

What happens to Western values if no one stands up against Islam? http://nypost.com/2015/01/11/what-happens-to-western-values-if-no-one-stands-up-against-islam/, New York Post (January 11, 2015).
New York Post

“The Dalits are a powerful secular force. Then, the backward forces can provide an effective bulwark along with the minorities against the forces of coramunalism. Because what has been established in the past half a century is the upper caste Hindu raj, depriving the backwards and the minorities.”

V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician

We are ruled by an upper caste Hindu raj

“Why should inspiration be limited to one past age? If Truth came to Paul 1900 years ago it can come to you today. After all, Heaven is as near to-day, God is as loving and as kind to-day, and truth as abundant to-day, as in the ages when men are said to have possessed inspiration.”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

Love , Men , God , Truth

“By suns unsettling kist.
Out through the utmost gates of space,
Past where the gray stars drift,
To the widening Infinite, my soul
Glides on, a vessel swift,
Yet loses not her anchorage
In yonder azure rift.”

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) American teacher, poet, author

Poems (1869), A Strip of Blue (1870)

Soul , Star , Sun

“If a veteran political operative like Barack Obama is considered beyond reproach, incapable of abusing power—all the more so is it irrational, irresponsible and in Third-World style to hound an administration not yet fully assembled or ensconced, for a political past it lacks. Sane people must walk away from Fake News' Russia Ruse.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Donald Vs. The Deep State" http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/09/the-donald-vs-the-deep-state/ The Daily Caller, March 9, 2017
2010s, 2017

People , World

“Over the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money ((Bristol-Myers Squibb). Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right-sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

John P. Kotter, "Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail." in: Harvard Business Review. March-April 1995. p. 59.

Money , Communication , Business , Effort

“These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. … Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 26
The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Beauty , Personality

“How deep must be the feeling of the bereaved parent who cannot look on the fair face of his child without recalling a face, once the fairest and the dearest in the world: the shadow of the grave hangs around the infant playfulness of the orphan, and even the hopes of the present must come tinged with something of sadness from the past.”

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

Literary Remains

World , Sadness , Hope , Feeling

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

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

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

Death , Health , Behavior , Motivation

“Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief.”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 385)

Time

“In reactive problem solving we walk into the future facing the past — we move away from, rather than toward, something. This often results in unforseen consequences that are more distasteful than the deficiencies removed.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

1970s, The Art of Problem Solving, 1978

Problem , Future

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

Hostility , Communication , Literature , Question

“At the first stages of negotiations, we will not release prisoners with blood on their hands. However, as part of a final agreement, I do not rule out this option. Offering hope for a better future is more important than grieving the past.”

Amir Peretz (1952) Israeli politician

Source: TV interview by Menashe Raz, Oded Shachar and Maya Bengal, on Channel 1, October 16, 2005.

Hope , Future , Parting

“The ports of death are sins; of life, good deeds:
Through which our merit leads us to our meeds.
How willful blind is he then, that would stray,
And hath it in his powers, to make his way!
This world death's region is, the other life's:
And here, it should be one of our first strifes,
So to front death, as men might judge us past it.
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

LXXX, Of Life and Death, lines 1-8
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), Epigrams

Life , Death , Men , World

“…the importance of recovering the customs and the institutions of the past thus inaugurating the archaeological approach to art”

Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) Indian painter

Varma spoke on the occasion of the exhibition of his painting of the Sabine Woman who were supposed to have inspired him .[Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations, http://books.google.com/books?id=9mRTtkri8E0C&pg=PA406, 1994, Cambridge University Press, 978-0-521-44354-8, 411]

Art