Quotes about the trip
page 72

“If the establishment of the thesis 'mathematics is ontology' is the basis of this book, it is in no way its goal.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

“But the problem of a Chief of Staff in Washington is not that simple. In the military service, an officer is not hailed before an outside authority and therefore required to indicate the advice which he had originally given his commanding general and to explain his reasons therefore. This is the position of the Chief of Staff before a Congressional committee. No sooner has he read his prepared statement supporting the position of the Defense Department than he must face a battery of interrogators bent on bringing forth his original views and contrasting them with the ultimate position of the Secretary of Defense and of the President. Very shortly a Chief of Staff will find himself in the position either of appearing to oppose his civilian superiors or of withholding facts from the Congress. Personally, I have found no way of coping with the situation other than by replying frankly to questions and letting the chips fall where they may.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 112-113

Question, Support, Problem, Appearance

“[I]t turns out to be the case that torture's not very effective. And so if you're dealing with someone who has no moral qualms whatsoever, like Donald Rumsfeld, it might be worth pointing out that its not in his interests to continue a policy that's simply feeding us false information. I mean, somebody where you know that the moral - whatever part of the brain that deals with moral reactions, they're defunct at some point - but … it’s a good thing that we found that out. It’s a bit or argument that we can use to make abolishing torture more appealing to people. But supposing it did… I mean the whole point is… I mean you're talking about two very very different levels of objection, right? Supposing it were true that every time you tortured someone, they actually revealed what you couldn't get revealed in some other way. Would you then continue torturing? One of the problems with those arguments is that someone like Rumsfeld or whomever will be able to come up with a case - somebody who was tortured and did reveal information that intelligence wanted to know (there'll be 70 other cases where it didn't). But they'll be able to come up with one. And then what do you say? Well it's alright??”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)

People, Intelligence, Problem, Time

“The Cold War ideology and the international communist conspiracy function in an important way as essentially a propaganda device to mobilize support at a particular historical moment for this long-time imperial enterprise. In fact, I believe that this is probably the main function of the Cold War: it serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Source: Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s, Government in the Future, 1970, p. 143.

War, Support, Time

“Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).
General sources

Love, Music, Fraud, Painting

“Dream that you died
It takes you out of your mind
The black walls of space
Take me all the way”

John Frusciante (1970) American guitarist, singer, songwriter and record producer

Wind Up Space
Lyrics, To Record Only Water for Ten Days (2000)

Dreams

“B. Hussein Obama said he was for slavery reparations in many forms, but the only one that got applause was for more "investment" in schools. In Obama's defense, the precise question was: "But is African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?" So a switch to the subject of education was only natural.
Moreover, a question on reparations has got to be confusing when you're half-white and half-black. What do you do? Demand an apology for slavery and money from yourself? I guess biracial reparations would involve sending yourself money, then sending back a portion of that money to yourself, minus 50 percent in processing fees — which is the same way federal aid works.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Did I Miss The ‘Hip’ Part?" (1 August 2007) http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2007/08/01/did_i_miss_the_‘hip’_part/page/full/. 2007

Money, Education, School, Question

“Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves. Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Thai navy seals escorted us in — total opposite of wanting us to leave. Water level was actually very low & still (not flowing) — you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear, which is obv how the kids got in. If not true, then I challenge this dude to show final rescue video. You know what, don’t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Refering to British diver Vern Unsworth, who participated in the Tham Luang cave rescue. As quoted in Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-cave-rescue-elon-musk-british-diver-vern-unsworth-twitter-pedo-a8448366.html (15 July 2018) by Eleanor Busby, The Independent.

People, Guy, Water

“When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)

Life, Learning

“We grow up thinking that the beautiful and the talented have been born that way, because they are born rich. The boys in the college gym with fine, muscular bodies—I thought they were athletes because of their bodies, not that their bodies were muscular because they were athletes. I thought I was the only one in the world who had to try so hard to become.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

World, Beauty, Boy, Thinking

“There comes a moment in your life when, no matter what you do, you bore everybody else. There is only one way to get back the lost prestige. Dying.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"Llega un momento en la vida en que, haga uno lo que haga, solamente aburre. Queda entonces una manera de recuperar el prestigio: morir."
Source: Diario de la Guerra del Cerdo, 1969.

Life

“Verily Allah has enjoined goodness to everything; so when you kill, kill in a good way and when you slaughter, slaughter in a good way. So every one of you should sharpen his knife, and let the slaughtered animal die comfortably.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated in Saheeh Muslim, Book 021, Number 4810
Sunni Hadith

Animals

“We shall approach practical objectives through a series of approximations. Keeping the maximization of the rate of return as the central theoretical objective, we shall develop a number of subsidiary objectives (which the economists call proxy variables) which contribute in different ways to improvement in the return and which are also measurable in business practice. A firm which meets high performance in most of its subsidiary objectives will substantially enhance its long-term rate of return. (The defect in our approach is that we cannot prove that the result will be a ‘‘maximum’’ possible overall return.) As will be seen, this road has its own obstacles: the difficulties of long term maximization are replaced by the problem of reconciling claims of conflicting objectives.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Source: Corporate Strategy, 1965, p. 47; cited in: Graham Kenny, (2012),"From the stakeholder viewpoint: designing measurable objectives", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 33 Iss: 6 pp. 40-46

Business, Problem

“As in his public affairs, so in his private life the American rarely prepares himself for the future. He is wholly unwilling to have anything transmitted to him by water that he can get by rail. It irks him to wait the slow process of freighting when there is an express car coming to his town, and if somebody will soon discover how to deliver by aeroplane, that is the way he will obtain what he wants. He never wants it until he wants it, and when he wants it, he wants it at once. The farmer does not look over his machinery in the winter time to ascertain what it needs in the way of repair; but waits until a week or ten days before he needs it and then telegraphs for the repair parts to be sent by express.”

Thomas R. Marshall (1854–1925) American politician who served as the 28th Vice President of the United States

Recollections of Thomas R. Marshall: A Hoosier Salad (1925), Chapter XXI

Life, Cars, Water, Winter

“I'm not sure what this means and if it can be replicated, but we did something very unique and none of it was planned. There wasn't a $20 million marketing budget designed to make this; it just happened. The audience took the movie for its own and decided to make it an event, and that's pretty awesome. And by the way, there were people who liked the movie so much they were defending the film against people who were thrashing it. Completely mind-blowing. I've never had that happen, either.”

Anthony C. Ferrante American film director

'Sharknado' Director on Secrets, Sequels and Success of the Social Media Sensation http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/sharknado-director-secrets-sequels-success-social-media-sensation-584636 (July 12, 2013)

People

“I saw him going the way of all flesh.”

John Webster (1578–1634) English dramatist

Westward Hoe, Act II, scene ii.

“I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Osnos, Evan. “ It’s Not Beautiful: An Artist Takes On the System http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all.” New Yorker, May 24, 2010, 54–63. 2010-, 2010

Life, Art, Thinking

“Just how much abuse will you be able to take? Well, there's no way to tell by the first kiss.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Infidels (1983), Sweetheart Like You

Kiss

“A few moments ago, the body was treated to a report from the senator from Iowa about his recent trip to Cuba. Sounded like he had a wonderful trip visiting, what he described as, a real paradise. He bragged about a number of things that he learned on his trip to Cuba that I'd like to address briefly. He bragged about their health care system, medical school is free, doctors are free, clinics are free, their infant mortality rate may be even lower than ours. I wonder if the senator, however, was informed, number one, that the infant mortality rate of Cuba is completely calculated on figures provided by the Cuban government. And, by the way, totalitarian communist regimes don't have the best history of accurately reporting things. I wonder if he was informed that before Castro, Cuba, by the way, was 13th in the whole world in infant mortality. I wonder if the government officials who hosted him informed him that in Cuba there are instances reported, including by defectors, that if a child only lives a few hours after birth, they're not counted as a person who ever lived and therefore don't count against the mortality rate.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

Speech to the United States Senate http://friesian.com/antiam.htm (24 February 2014). 2010s, 2014

Health, World, School, History

“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Dedication

Children, Books, World, Reading

“My own mother is always telling us how well behaved our children are, but little does she know how we got them that way! She would turn grey if she knew, I cane her perfect grandson, but she loves the result.”

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

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Love, Children, Perfection

“Reason has never really directed social reality, but now reason has been so thoroughly purged of any specific trend or preference that it has finally renounced even the task of passing judgment on man’s actions and way of life. Reason has turned them over for ultimate sanction to the conflicting interests to which our world actually seems abandoned.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 9.

Life, World, Reality

“… I believe I have come to adopt a cybernetic way of thinking… I became aware of this in the many conversations with students who were worrying about their future and asked for advice. I heard myself telling them that it was far more important to know what one did not want to do, than to have detailed plans of what one did want to do. One day it dawned on me that this was plain cybernetic advice; It is more useful to specify constraints rather than goals. - And then I explained it by adding that in one’s teens or twenties one usually has already discovered a number of things that one cannot stand, whereas it is quite impossible to foresee what, ten or twenty years later, will provide the satisfactions needed to maintain one’s equilibrium.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Glasersfeld (1992, p. 25) cited in: Stuart Umpleby (2007) "Cybernetics: Definitions and Descriptions". In: A Larry Richards Reader 1997–2007. http://polyproject.wikispaces.com/file/view/Larry+Richards+Reader+6+08.pdf. Larry Richards eds.

Thinking, Future

“The idea that reason requires an impartial treatment of individuals corresponds to well-known principles. To resolve the questions of distributive justice, Leibniz proposes the following maxim: “Put your self in the place of everyone.” In recent theories, this amounts to saying that the choice of a just organization of society must take place behind a “veil of ignorance,” an idea that can be interpreted in several ways. For utilitarianism, each individual must count as one, and none as more than one. For John Rawls, we have to choose the form of society that favors the least advantaged, whoever they might be. Another impartial idea is that of universal rights, embodied in the two declarations of 1776 and 1789.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Justice, Idea, Question, Universe

“Fortune, the great commandress of the world,
Hath divers ways to advance her followers:
To some she gives honour without deserving,
To other some, deserving without honour.”

George Chapman All Fools

Act V, scene i.
All Fools (1605)

World

“Rufus because my diaphragm gets a workout while trying to utilize the 18 vocal sounds a mole makes. Chuckie because […] he's an asthmatic with five personalities rolled into one—plus I have to do the voice the way [Christine Cavanaugh] did it for 10 years.”

Nancy Cartwright (1957) American actress

Quoted in [Voice behind Bart Simpson also lends her animated talents to other TV shows, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Knutzen, Eirik, (2002-08-18)]
In reference to voicing characters in Rugrats, whom she considers the most difficult.

Personality

“LeDuff’s argument (in Shock Art #37) that an image, once floated on the international art-sea, is a fish that anyone may grab with impunity, and make it his own, would not persuade an oyster. Questions of primacy are not to be scumbled in this way, which, had he been writing from a European perspective, he would understand, and be ashamed. The brutality of the American rape of the world’s exhibition spaces and organs of art-information has distanciated his senses. The historical aspects have been adequately trodden by others, but there is one category yet to be entertained—that of the psychological. The fact that LeDuff is replicated in every museum, in every journal, that one cannot turn one’s gaze without bumping into this raw plethora, LeDuff, LeDuff, LeDuff (whereas poor Bruno, the true progenitor, is eating the tops of bunches of carrots)—what has this done to LeDuff himself? It has turned him into a dead artist, but the corpse yet bounces in its grave, calling attention toward itself in the most unseemly manner. But truth cannot be swallowed forever. When the real story of low optical stimulus is indited, Bruno will be rectified.”

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

“Letters to the Editore”, Guilty Pleasures (1974).

Truth, World, Art, Understanding

“You know what is good about these Dixie Chicks burnings or bashings? It's a wonderful, wonderful way for really stupid people to hook up. They meet, they throw some things on the fire, they talk about Vin Diesel, they tell stories about who their favorite Fox anchor is, they exchange phone numbers and in some cases has led to marriages.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

standup performance, 2003[citation needed]
Standup routines

Marriage, People, Stupidity

“We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government. It's getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

Wealth

“Every one is in a small way the image of God.”
Exemplumque dei quisque est in imagine parva.

Marcus Manilius Astronomica

Book IV, line 895.
Astronomica

God

“I shall present a theory - which I call "the theory of the managerial revolution." During the past century, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of "theories of history" have been elaborated. All of the theories, with the exception of those few which approximate to the theory of the managerial revolution, boil down to two and only two. The first of these predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite, but long, time, if not forever:' that is, that the major institutions of capitalist society, or at least most of them, will not be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by "managerial society," that, in fact, the transition from capitalist society to managerial society is already well under way.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 7, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 12-13

History, Change, Time, Past

“Generally speaking Scottish women are pretty good. Look at Sharleen Spiteri and Lulu — you've got two fabulously well-dressed women in different ways.”

Susannah Constantine (1962) British fashion designer and journalist

Scots Are So Stylish... (2007)

Women

“My feelings were reaffirmed during the summer of 1968 as a result of the lingering stench of racism in Savannah and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. No matter what the reasons were, I closed out the sixties as one angry young man waiting on the revolution that I was certain would soon come. I saw no way out. I, like many others, felt the deep chronic agony of anomie and alienation. All seemed to be defined by race. We became a reaction to the 'man', his ominous reflection.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Feeling, Waiting, Summer

“But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco. Decorators. They got to do something. But we don't have to glorify it. You know one of the reasons fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddamned designers hate women. Designers taking it out on the women. Now they're trying to get some more sexy things coming on again.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Tapes from 1971 as presented in "All the Philosopher King's Men" by James Warren in Harper's Magazine (February 2000)
1970s, Tape transcripts (1971)

Women, Hate, Imagination, Fashion

“My work is independent of my will. My best works are created when driven by an inner strength. This has nothing to do with my will. It is that immediate spontaneity of my intense way of living that makes the difference between my work and a lot of other artists who make art works with their mind.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Letter to H. E. Kramer, 14-11-1927, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 46 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1920's

Art

“Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

June 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Women, Beauty, Shoe, Thinking

“Scientific achievements seem evanescent, because the very progress of science causes their supersedure; yet some of them are of so fundamental a nature that they are immortal in a deeper way.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952)

Nature, Science

“The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

“A Collect of Philosophy”
Opus Posthumous (1955)

Life, God, Idea

“The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Feeling, Soul, Idea, Personality

“On Al Gore: "The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi comparisons: "what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin." That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

, March 4 2007

World, Light

“The fact that previous generations have handed down to us a substantial public heritage by way of roads, port, etc. almost completely free of debt, seems to me to impose some limitation on the validity of the theory that by borrowing we should, or could, pass on the burden of development to the next generation.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 28, 1962, page 55.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

“I really love seeing things go sour, because that’s the way dread creeps into life. A lot of horror films start with a great shock scene. I grew up on that model and it’s great fun, but very perversely, I’m interested in setting up something else, where you’re really engaged with the humanity of the characters — you could be in a normal drama with its own set of problems — and then something else develops. I like this philosophical question: what comes first, reality or your interpretation of it? However interesting that is, and whether it fits in with the horror genre, I don’t know, but I think it makes perfect sense.”

Larry Fessenden (1963) American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer

Larry Fessenden’s Arty Horror Picture Show Continues with “Wendigo” http://www.indiewire.com/2002/02/interview-larry-fessendens-arty-horror-picture-show-continues-with-wendigo-80532/ (February 14, 2002)

Love, Life, Question, Problem

“The three most important things to look for when searching for a church home are doctrine, doctrine, and doctrine. If your main criteria are 'programs' and 'outreach' to this or that niche group, then in my opinion you are starting your search the wrong way.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

The Memsahib’s Quote of the Day https://survivalblog.com/the_memsahibs_quote_of_the_day_1/, Survivalblog, 5 May 2006

Home, Search

“What is now called ‘knowledge organisation’ in this context has a long history. The simplest forms of a knowledge organisation system (KOS) are, after all, the contents list and the index of a textbook. The knowledge is in the text; the KOS is a supplementary tool that helps the reader to find his way around the text. But as such finding aids have become more complex, and taken on wider functions, they have acquired grander names, such as retrieval languages, taxonomies, categorisations, lexicons, thesauri, or ontologies. They are now seen as schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

B.C. Vickery (2008) " On ‘knowledge organisation’ http://web.archive.org/web/20100125050134/http://www.lucis.me.uk/knowlorg.htm" published on lucis.me.uk, 2008.

History, Knowledge, Help

“Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 1 (p. 10)

People

“The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him -- because the mails talk about him -- even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

[Re: Real men don't attack straw men, MARC, openbsd-misc (Mailing list), http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119761726816776, 2007-12-14, 2017-04-20]

Lying, Future, Cheating

“England collapses, turns Chinese with English and American thoughts. Thousands of Chinese characters are turning and twisting; every door is a shop. The rickshaws jostle the vendors, their backs hung with incredible loads. The narrow streets are alive in a way that Broadway isn't alive. Here all is human, even the beasts of burden. The human energy spills itself in multiple forms, writhes, sweats and strains every muscle towards the day’s bowl of rice. The din is terrific.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Reminiscence and Reverie, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, (October 1951) pp. 230
1950's

“At first we were of necessity slow in putting out those motors, but after we had gotten under way we delivered them so rapidly that Mr. Olds said we must have a motor incubator at our place.”

Henry M. Leland (1843–1932) American businessman

Source: Master of Precision: Henry M. Leland, 1966, p. 62; About the first motors Leland build for Ransom E. Olds in 1901

“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. The past is closed and limited; the future is open and free.”

Deepak Chopra (1946) Indian-American physician, public speaker and writer

The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing, p. 170

Time, Past, Future

“For a language is really alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to. When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people’s spoken linguistic past. If the language has never been written down, or recorded on tape—and there are still many which have not—it is all there is. But, unlike the normal idea of an archive, which continues to exist long after the archivist is dead, the moment the last speaker of an unwritten or unrecorded language dies, the archive disappears for ever. When a language dies which has never been recorded in some way, it is as if it has never been.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 2

People, Idea, Knowledge, Past

“Your body must become familiar with its death — in all its possible forms and degrees — as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Life, Death

“Look, when I did the Free Trade Agreement, I didn't know how it was going to turn out. I thought it was the right thing to do. I believed it was the way of the future. If you looked at it in the new millenium, you would say this was so obvious that it had to be done. Without it, Canada would be small and atrophied. The Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA will be regarded one hundred years from now as a major defining moment in the evolution of Canada. The New York Times did a big article in the financial section on NAFTA and they basically said, the United States and Mexico might have a little trouble with this, but, boy, Canada sure doesn't. Canada has emerged the true winner on everything.”

Brian Mulroney (1939) 18th Prime Minister of Canada

[Newman, Peter, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, 2005, Random House Canada, Toronto, 0-679-31351-6], p. 195.

Boy, Time, Future

“Ludwig’s penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

Booknotes (C-SPAN) review of King of the Mountain (2002) http://www.booknotes.org/Program/?ProgramID=1693

War, Peace, History

“The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance.”

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

1950s, Three Ways of Meeting Oppression (1958)
Context: The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites, acquiescence and violence, while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. The nonviolent resister agrees with the person who acquiesces that one should not be physically aggressive toward his opponent; but he balances the equation by agreeing with the person of violence that evil must be resisted. He avoids the nonresistance of the former and the violent resistance of the latter. With nonviolent resistance, no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence in order to right a wrong.

People, Freedom

“It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

On the U.S. Apollo program, press conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (November 1968) as quoted in The Reality of Monarchy (1970) by Andrew Duncan
1960s

Money, Thinking

“We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough." Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of humman discourse."”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

Clifford Geertz. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Culture. (1973) pp. 3-4.

Sense, Universe

“Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

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

“When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Geek Noise (2004)

“We're doing really well with the evangelicals, and, by the way: And again, I do like Ted Cruz”

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

2010s, 2015

“Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)

Books, Travel, Time, Waiting

“Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 10

Men, Error, Reading

“A singer who is able to sing even sixteen measures of good music in a natural and engaging way, effortlessly and in tune, without distending the phrase, without exaggerating accents to the point of caricature, without platitude, affectation, or coyness, without making grammatical mistakes, without illicit slurs, without hiatus or hiccup, without making insolent changes in the text, without barks or bleats, without sour notes, without crippling the rhythm, without absurd ornaments and nauseating appoggiaturas – in short, a singer able to sing these measures simply and exactly as the composer wrote them – is a rare, very rare, exceedingly rare bird.”

Hector Berlioz book À travers chants

Un chanteur ou une cantatrice capable de chanter seize mesures seulement de bonne musique avec une voix naturelle, bien posée, sympathique, et de les chanter sans efforts, sans écarteler la phrase, sans exagérer jusqu'à la charge les accents, sans platitude, sans afféterie, sans mièvreries, sans fautes de français, sans liaisons dangereuses, sans hiatus, sans insolentes modifications du texte, sans transposition, sans hoquets, sans aboiements, sans chevrotements, sans intonations fausses, sans faire boiter le rhythme, sans ridicules ornements, sans nauséabondes appogiatures, de manière enfin que la période écrite par le compositeur devienne compréhensible, et reste tout simplement ce qu'il l'a faite, est un oiseau rare, très-rare, excessivement rare. À travers chants, ch. 8 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/ATC08.htm; Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (trans.) The Art of Music and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) p. 69.

Music, Nature, Bird, Change

“The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after.”

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

56 min 20 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Episode 1]

Life, History, Universe, Appearance

“I think blacks are definitely moving together. This is good, because in order to have any movement, you've got to have togetherness. But I also feel that because of the way society is now, we cannot get along without the white man. And the way it is now, he cannot get along without us…We've got to go to the roots of it and just change the whole society - that's why I don't believe in what some people say about having a black state and a separate black nation.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

1970s

People, Feeling, Thinking, Change

“We say, 'We think you are a talented, functioning person, and we are hiring you because of your abilities, and whatever you come up with, we're going to take.' If we make a mistake, it will be in picking the wrong person. What we're striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released and be completely free to express ourselves. That's very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free. So the danger is — in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We're going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall. But if we fail, it's another saga in the history of man…”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

On how American Zoetrope functions
1970s, Interview with Judy Stone (1971)

Money, People, World, Guy

“The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 54-55

Love, World, Feeling, Confidence

“But two miles more, and then we rest!
Well, there is still an hour of day,
And long the brightness of the West
Will light us on our devious way;
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood—
So total is the solitude,
We safely may delay.”

Charlotte Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), The Wood (1846)

Solitude, Light

“There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it; You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

Source: The Last Lecture (2008), Chapter 7: I Never Made it in the NFL, pp. 36 - 37

Children

“That which distinguishes the Christian narrow way from the common human narrow way is the voluntary. Christ was not someone who coveted earthly things but had to be satisfied with poverty – no, he chose poverty.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 67
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

Christ

“Religion is very easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. So you should not be extremists, but try to be near to perfection and receive the good tidings that you will be rewarded.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Sunni Hadith

Religion, Perfection

“As open systems, organizations faced an environment that might be placid and benevolent, or turbulent and harsh. Economic, social, political, and technological changes could come rapidly or slowly, and some organizational arrangements might be better able to cope with the changing environment than others. Could it be that there was no one way to structure an organization that design was influenced by environmental factors and could vary, depending on technology?
Joan Woodward (1916–1971) took this contingency view, classified organizations by the complexity of the technology used in producing goods, and found that it influenced an organization’s structure. Her classification, ranging from less complex (1) to more advanced (3), consisted of (1) unit and small-batch production systems that produced made-to-order and customized products to meet consumers’ needs; (2) large-batch and mass production, which involved a fairly standardized or uniform product with but few variations in its final appearance; and (3) long-run continuous-process production, which involved a standard product manufactured by moving through a predictable series of steps.”

Daniel A. Wren (1932) American business theorist

Source: The evolution of management thought, 1972, p. 462-3 (in 2009 edition)

Appearance, Change, Dependency

“Information practice… consists of two activities that we may call diagnosis and prevention. Diagnosis is identifying what is the most probable information need of a user in a particular state of information want. Provision is deciding what action is most likely to meet that need. Information science seeks to understand the potential range of user situations giving rise to information want and needs; to develop methods of identifying the actual information needed; to understand and expand the range of possible ways of satisfying information need; and to develop methods of deciding what way is most likely to be effective in a particular case.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxii-xxiii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Understanding, Science

“God's very service is wages; His ways are strewed with roses, and paved with joy that is unspeakable and full of glory, and with peace that passeth understanding.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Source: Quotes from secondary sources, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, 1895, P. 127.

God, Peace, Understanding, Joy

“[A]nybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Dan Webster interview, originally published June 19, 2005, by the Spokesman Review,

War, Books, Understanding

“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. (2009), p. 10

World, Wealth

“With the way that the times are, we're all looking for a little fantasy… Fantasy is such an important part of my fashion…”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

via Now Smell This. Anna Sui Secret Wish, Summer by Kenzo, Z Zegna & more new fragrances. Pennsylvania (March 29, 2005). http://www.nstperfume.com/2005/03/29/anna-sui-secret-wish-summer-by-kenzo-z-zegna-more-new-fragrances/

Fashion, Time, Parting

“I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too.
Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

As quoted in R.v.R. : Being an Account of the Last Years and the Death of One Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn (1930) by Hendrik Willem van Loon
undated quotes

Secret, Painting

“Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways. … Using origami anyone can become a scientific experimenter with no fuss.”

Martin David Kruskal (1925–2006) American mathematician

at the AAAS meeting: Mathematics and Science of Origami: Visualize the Possibilities, February 15, 2002, as quoted by Science Daily Origami Helps Scientists Solve Problems http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/02/020219080203.htm, February 21, 2002.

Mathematics, Study, Science, Help

““If these experiences [of union with the Absolute] are rare, nonetheless they lend their fundamental tonality to the Plotinian way of life, for that way of life appears to us now as a waiting for the unforseeable surging-forth of these privileged moments which give their full sense to life”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

Si ces expériences sont rares, elles n’en donnent pas moins sa tonalité fondamentale au mode de vie plotinien, puisque celui-ci nous apparaît maintenant comme l’attente du surgissement imprévisible de ces moments privilégiés qui donnent tout leur sens à la vie.
Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? (1995)

Life, Sense, Appearance, Waiting

“But during all the long years this matter has been discussed, advocated, refuted, the people themselves—poor people especially—were blindly, desperately practicing family limitation, just as they are practicing it today. To them birth control does not mean what it does to us. To them it has meant the most barbaric methods. It has meant the killing of babies—infanticide,—abortions,—in one crude way or another.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

My Fight for Birth Control, 1931, page 133.

People, Family, Birth, Baby

“I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 48: quoted in the interview 'Paul Gauguin Discussing His Paintings', Jules Huret, printed in L'Écho de Paris, (23 February 1891)

Life, Peace, Art, Nature

“Something is beautiful if it is honest. If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth. So no illusive harmony. I try to reach people who strive for truth, for identity. Although these conceptions are incredibly warn out, one must try to find the way back to these simple conceptions.”

Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007) German artist

Heidrun Reshöft & Joachim Pente (Transl.) " Art : Interview; Jörg Immendorff http://bombmagazine.org/article/322/j-rg-immendorff" at BOMB Magazine, (7) Fall 1983.

People, Truth, Beauty, Sincerity

“And so, in calm expectation of a blessed future and a finished work which will explain the past, in honest submission of out way to God, in supreme delight in Him who is the gladness of our joy, the secret of tranquillity will be ours.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 448.

God, Secret, Past, Future

“One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is, that is, I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, "Well, that's OK, I mean y'know, contraception is OK." It's not OK. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage. They're supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal … but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Marriage, Faith, Idea, Thinking

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Memory, Heart, Night

“I said to the bankers, "Listen, fellows, if I have a problem, then you have a problem. We have to find a way out or it's going to be a difficult time for both of us."”

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

Fortune (13 August 1990), as quoted in The World According to Trump (2005) by Ken Lawrence, p. 44
Cf. J. Paul Getty: "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
1990s

Problem, Time

“You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.”

Marissa Mayer (1975) American business executive and engineer, former ceo of Yahoo!

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234222.

Art, Moms, Fashion

“I have not seen Thee, yet I tell Thy praise,
Nor known Thee, yet I image forth Thy ways.
For by Thy seers' and servants' mystic speech
Thou didst Thy sov'ran splendour darkly teach,
And from the grandeur of Thy work they drew
The measure of Thy inner greatness, too.
They told of Thee, but not as Thou must be,
Since from Thy work they tried to body Thee.
To countless visions did their pictures run,
Behold through all the visions Thou art one.”

Yehuda he-Hasid (1140–1217) German philosopher

Shir Hakovod, trans. from the Hebrew by Israel Zangwill

Art

“Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

"Information Sharing, Patriot Act Vital to Homeland Security" http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html speech at Kleinshans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York, 20 April 2004; whitehouse.gov (accessed 2006-05-18) 2000s, 2004

Understanding, Thinking, Change, Time

“Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Source: The Naked Manager (1972), p. 12

Home, Business, Cooking

“There is perhaps no question that occupies, comparatively, a larger space in the history of Greek geometry than the problem of the Doubling of the Cube. The tradition concerning its origin is given in a letter from Eratosthenes of Cyrene to King Ptolemy Euergetes quoted by Eutocius…
"Eratosthenes to King Ptolemy greeting.
"There is a story that one of the old tragedians represented Minos as wishing to erect a tomb for Glaucus and as saying, when he heard that it was a hundred feet every way,Too small thy plan to bound a royal tomb.
Let it be double; yet of its fair form
Fail not, but haste to double every side.But he was clearly in error; for when the aides are doubled, the area becomes four times as great, and the solid content eight times as great. Geometers also continued to investigate the question in what manner one might double a given solid while it remained in the same form.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Apollonius of Perga (1896)

Error, Quotes, History, Question

“Bullying behaviour can be communicated via text, mobile phones, internet, social networking sites, forums. But we can't limit it because these messages are then reinforced by television which glamorises yelling, swearing and vulgar behaviour as the way to walk the red carpet of acceptance.”

Louise Burfitt-Dons (1953) Activist, writer, blogger

Speech, Tackling Bullying Conference, London (2008-02-27)

Communication

“We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 9

Age, Knowledge, Sense

“If there are any other holy writings beside the Bible, then Christianity is reduced to simply another philosophy like Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. To me, Christ and His Word are the only way, the only truth and the only life.”

Kip McKean (1954) minister

In response to his professor stating that the Bible is not the only inspired Word of God, 1957.

Life, Truth, Christ

“The Lennon-McCartney comparison was frequently made and that was an image that critics could relate to. But it wasn't something people in the street could pick up on the way they'll pick up on someone who's really good-looking.”

Glenn Tilbrook (1957) British musician

September 1983 interview with NME, reprinted in "NME Rock 'N' Roll Years 3" [John, Tobler, 1992, NME Rock 'N' Roll Years, 1st, Reed International Books Ltd, London, 384, CN 5585]

People

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World, Nature, Fish, Appearance

“Living in a very dense area, you're conscious of how the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling toward them – so much so that you'd rather live among them than with the business classes. In a historical sense, it might be related to an idea, but you write out of – well, I wouldn't call it indignation, but a kind of irritability that these people on top should be so contented, so absolutely unaware of these other people, and so sure that their values are the right ones. I mean, there's a certain satisfaction in recording the people underneath, whose values are as sound as theirs, and a lot funnier, and a lot truer in a way. There's a certain overall satisfaction in kind of scooping up a shovelful of these people and dumping them in somebody's parlor.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)

People, Feeling, Idea, Business

“a) The definition of history? Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of research or inquiry. What kind of inquiry it is I do not yet ask. The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences: that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. Playing patience with things we already know may be a useful means towards this end, but it is not the end itself. It is at best only the means. It is scientifically valuable only in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask. That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing-the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is a science.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 9

History, Question, Knowledge, Thinking

“I, who am dead, have ways of knowing
Of the crop of death that the quick are sowing.
I, who was Pompey, cry it aloud
From the dark of death, from the wind blowing.

I, who was Pompey, once was proud,
Now I lie in the sand without a shroud;
I cry to Caesar out of my pain,
"Caesar beware, your death is vowed."”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

King Cole and Other Poems (1926), " The Rider at the Gate http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1251.html"

Death, Pain, Lie, Cry

“Critique in its many manifestations puts up a common opposition to instrumental rationality, because such a rationality can be linked to control in the human condition in a similar way to the idea of power in the control of the natural world.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1990) Liberating Systems Theory p. 204; as cited in: Trudi Cooper (2003) Critical Management, Critical Systems Theory And System Dynamics http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/orsystems/Cooper.pdf.

World, Idea, Nature

Quotes about the trip page 72

Quotes about the trip
page 72