Quotes about the trip
page 76

“Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends,
An incarnation of fat dividends.”

Charles Sprague (1791–1875) Boston businessman and poet

Curiosity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life

“The only way you're going to have a good relationship with anyone is to have a good relationship with yourself.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Solved:The Mystery of Life

“What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)

Love, Life, Thinking, Change

“Rational discourse is only one way of presenting and examining an issue and by no means the best. Our new intellectuals are not aware of its limitations and of the nature of the things outside.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Source: Science in a Free Society (1978), p. 184.

Nature

“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Life, Understanding

“There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.”

Karl Kraus Sprüche und Widersprüche

Sprüche und Widersprüche (Dicta and Contradictions) (1909); as translated by Richard Hanser

Women, Beauty

“Are you proud o' yourself, Jeff? I could have been seriously injured last week. And you got a lot of nerve faking an eye injury and leaving me to fend for myself, especially considering you're the one who injured my eye in the first place. As far as what you said earlier about me making the whole thing up, coming out here with your cute eye patch mocking me: I wanna show you something, Jeff." (takes out a little plastic jar of some sort of liquid eye medicine)
"This, is polymoxin bisulfate. I have to apply this to my eye three times a day. The only way you obtain this is with a prescription, from a doctor. Now, I know, you know a thing or two about prescription medication, but I don't think you realize is that you have to go to a doctor to legally obtain some. Unlike you, Jeff, this is the only foreign substance I will allow in my body. So if you wanna imitate me, why don't you try living a clean lifestyle? Why don't you try living, a straightedge lifestyle? "Jeff… you've got two strikes. You know how many I have? Zero. Jeff, you know how many times I've been suspended? Zero. You know how many times I've been to a rehab facility? That's right- zero. And do you know what your chances are of beating me at Night of Champions?”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

(long pause)
"Zero."
Addressing Jeff Hardy before his match with the Great Khali, both to prove that his eye injury is real (in storyline) and to drive home a point about the drug-related mistakes of Jeff's past as recently as 16 months ago. July 10, 2009.
Friday Night SmackDown

Thinking, Chance, Time, Night

“In the preface to the reissue of Risk, Uncertainty and Proﬁt, Frank Knight makes the penetrating observation that under the conditions envisaged above the velocity of circulation would become inﬁnite and so would the price level. This is perhaps an over-dramatic way of saying that nobody would hold money, and it would become a free good to go into the category of shell and other things which once served as money. We should expect too that it would not only pass out of circulation, but it would cease to be used as a conventional numeraire in terms of which prices are expressed. Interest bearing money would emerge. Of course, the above does not happen in real life, precisely because uncertainty, contingency needs, non-synchronization of revenues and outlay, transaction frictions, etc., etc., all are with us. But the abstract special case analyzed above should warn us against the facile assumption that the average levels of the structure of interest rates are determined solely or primarily by these differential factors. At times they are primary, and at other times, such as the twenties in this country, they may not be. As a generalization I should hazard the hypothesis that they are likely to be of great importance in an economy in which there is a “quasi-zero" rate of interest. I think by this hypothesis one can explain many of the anomalies of the United States money market in the thirties.”

Paul A. Samuelson book Foundations of Economic Analysis

Source: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 5 : Theory of Consumer’s Behavior

Life, Money, Thinking, Time

“Group-think is a substitute for God-think. The belief is that God is found only by our group. The next step is to establish that identification with our group as the only way to serve God.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (1999), p. 82

God, Thinking

“The way to “find” the perfect career is to give up the notion that you will ever find it, stumble across it, or that it will somehow magically find you, and to get to work designing it.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

University of Texas Law Alumni site

Perfection

“A happy childhood means - or ought to mean - that one's first experience of the world is a true experience - not yet comprehensive, of course, yet comprehending the prime reality, so that it becomes an experience of an essential order which thenceforward will serve as a basis of comparison, in whose light all future falsification, all disorder, will be recognised as wrong and invalid. A happy childhood means above all a loved child. Because Thérèse was a happy child, her beginnings could contain perfection. Because she was a loved child, she received from the beginning the knowledge that others must struggle towards so consciously, with such difficulty, by painfully strenuous detours: the simple truth that to so many of us seems the most incredible and amazing lesson of religion: that we can be loved without having deserved it: that grace comes first.. It is bliss simply to be someone's child, a child of a father, of a mother, living, moving and having its being in a love which is unmerited, unmeritable, anticipatory, unconditional and immutable. On this basic mystery and reality Thérèse's childhood was built. This was the source of her subsequent doctrine of the way of spiritual childhood.”

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

The Hidden Face p. 48-49.

Love, Truth, World, Religion

“It is easy to consider advice when it is brought forth with care, and consideration, and gentleness. Sometimes people are offended or feel manipulated if you are so blustering, you see. And it's an opportunity to be kind — you know — usually if you're giving advice, it's because you care about people and you love them. So you ought to act that way.
…
If you find yourself to be a — sort of an abrasive type of person, perhaps you might try to be gentle, because the truth is that gentleness and kindness are a lot more powerful than we are led to believe. And if you are like this, and people are telling you it doesn't work, don't listen to them — do what you know is right.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Being Gentle(& the haunted ice tray)" (28 October 2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT5fXvbVNFc

Love, People, Truth, Feeling

“Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002)

People, Travel, History, Drink

“He knew that he had screwed up but he was the kind of guy who, after he shoots his mouth off, cannot back down or admit any failing. The world is full of those people. All of us would be better off if their fathers would strangle them as soon as they showed signs of being that way. This particular fool was willing to sacrifice an army rather than admit his error.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 30 (p. 368)

People, World, Fools, Guy

“What I did [his artistic work in the 1940's] also served as a way to spit in the face of the well-meaning bourgeoisie…”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

In 'Tapies, or the Materiality of Painting', by Klaus Dirscherl; as quoted in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 184
1981 - 1990

“Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.”

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

1860s, A Liberal Education and Where to Find It (1868)

Love, Men, Education, Law

“I'm empowered to stand here thanks to the ensemble of actors, men and women, who I shared the screen with and who in ways they will never understand made me a better actor.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

67th Academy Award Speech (1995)

Women, Men, Understanding

“To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 153-154.

People, Soul, Sense

“When I resided at Bath I had long been acquainted with the theory of optics and mechanics, and wanted only that experience so necessary in the practical part of these sciences. This I acquired by degrees at that place where in my leisure hours, by way of amusement, I made several two-foot, five-foot, seven-foot, ten-foot and twenty-foot Newtonian telescopes, beside others, of the Gregorian form, of eight, twelve, and eighteen inches, and two, three, five, and ten feet focal length. In this way I made not less than two hundred seven-foot, one hundred and fifty ten-foot, and about eighty twenty-foot mirrors, not to mention the Gregorian telescopes.”

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

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" Footnote: At least one of these telescopes had the principal mirror made of glass instead of metal. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1803).

Science, Parting

“As for the piano, I was left to my own devices practically from the age of twelve. As is frequently the case in teachers' families, our parents were so busy with their pupils (literally from morning until late at night) that they hardly had any time for their own children. And that, in spite of the fact that with the favourable prejudice common to all parents, they had a very high opinion of my gifts. (I myself had a much more sober attitude. I was always aware of a great many faults although at times I felt that I had in me something "not quite usual".) But I won't speak of this. As a pianist, I am known. My good and bad points are known and nobody can be interested in my "prehistoric period". I will only say that because of this early "independence" I did a lot of silly things which I could have easily avoided if I had been under the vigilant eye of an experienced and intelligent teacher for another three or four years. I lacked what is known as a "school". I lacked discipline. But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good; my enforced independence compelled me, though sometimes by very devious ways, to achieve a great deal on my own and even my failures and errors subsequently proved more than once to be useful and educational, and in an occupation such as learning to master an art, where if not all, then almost all depends on individuality, the only sound foundation will always be the knowledge gained as the result of personal effort and personal experience.”

Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) Soviet musician

The Art of Piano Playing (1958), Ch. 1. The Artistic Image of a Musical Composition

Children, Age, Education, School

“People spend unnecessarily high amounts of money on drugs or supplements that support immunity (for example, fashionable Japanese ginkgo – there is no evidence that it works), meanwhile they do more harm to themselves by their way of life, for example by inadequate diet.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Life, Money, People, Fashion

“There isn't one specific way of teaching. It varies with each student and his/her ability to grasp what is being imparted. Every student has a different purpose for learning. Some think they will get a chance to perform if they learn from a senior musician. Some even ask me to recommend them to sabhas. But I don't. I firmly believe that opportunities should come on their own. But rarely do we get students who are only interested in learning and expect nothing else. One should be passionate about the art if one is to scale heights.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Interview by Prince Rama Varma "There's no one way to teach".

Art, Thinking, Learning, Passion

“Legislations are just a way to reach a certain social goal, the problem is that people focus on the words and forget the spirit of the text”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

People, Problem, Forgetting

“A certain area within a channel may function as a “gate”; the constellation of the forces before and after the gate region is decisively different in such a way that the passing or not passing of the unit through the whole channel depends to a high degree upon what happens in the gate region. This holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 145.

Food, Travel, Communication, Decision

“To will a new form is inacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. This 'thing' is recognized only as it comes into existence. It resists analysis - and probably this is as it should be. Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

Art

“…I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 255.

“Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Sense, Universe

“He thinks he can use the jail for networking to be somebody. In that way, he's always operating.”

John Leguizamo (1964) Colombian and American actor, film producer, voice artist, and comedian

John Leguizamo Talks About "Assault on Precinct 13", January 16, 2005.

Thinking

“I don't think that animal rights is a political issue, as far as I'm concerned it's a humanist issue, it's an anticruelty issue… In every way, the older I get, I try to conduct my life in a way that inflicts as little pain, as little cruelty and as much kindness on anyone, and when I say anyone that means humans and nonhumans as possible.”

John Norris (reporter) (1959) American reporter

“John Norris' PSA,” video for Peta2TV at Home Nightclub in NYC (20 May 2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qto9f5-pr7o.

Life, Pain, Thinking, Animals

“That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with "in" and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "In July" and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me for saying so. It's just stupid… "In July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize "In" in "In July."”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Impossible! Meaningless!
The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

Love, Stupidity, Forgiveness, Sense

“The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are — terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 162
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Nature, Thinking

“and for the falling stars the broken hearts mansions in your mind
and all the roads that were lost the signs you missed
turns that passed you by maybe it’s not too late to find your way it’s not your place to say
what if you can you can go home again”

Alicia Witt (1975) American actress

Theme from Pasadena (You Can Go Home) http://aliciawittmusic.com/lyrics/theme-from-pasadena-you-can-go-home-again/, (lyrics by Witt, music by Ben Folds) · Video performance with Ben Folds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAVUzEOX1E Lyrics, Revisionary History (2015)

Home, Star, Heart

“The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

“I compared meat to tobacco as a killer, but to be fair, in one way alone tobacco outshines meat as an evil: it is physically addictive. As we all know, tobacco companies have a history of trying to target their ads to teenagers in the frequently fulfilled hope that these young people will be in their thrall for the rest of their lives. Meat, by contrast, is in no way physically addictive. Eating it is merely a habit, one that people are socially conditioned to believe is normal, even healthy. Whether you choose to phase meat out of your diet slowly, over time, or to stop on a dime and become a vegetarian overnight, you won't suffer any real symptoms of “withdrawal.””

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

But you probably will feel more energy, and enjoy a longer and healthier life.
Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 2: The Simple Facts, pp. 40-41

Life, People, Hope, Feeling

“In going directly to Investment Heaven, you build your portfolio as you would build a wonderful company through a merger and acquisition program. You specify the way you want your portfolio to look, and then you assemble the profile piece by piece by bringing together companies that make their own individual contributions to the desired character.”

Robert Haugen (1942–2013) American economist

Source: The Inefficient Stock Market - What Pays Off And Why (1999), Chapter 14, The Roads to Heaven and Hell, p. 139

“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Karl Barth Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

Life, God, Truth, History

“What people "want" is a function of what they learn is available. If you wish to sell something, you'd better understand that you can't give people what they want in the market today, because what they want today is what they can already get. You have to discover what they really want, and find some way to give that physical shape.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: creation of lisp machine/lispOS http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/c2fd86a7e43ac7aa (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Understanding, Learning

“I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there's no other way to play.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture (2007)

“I've always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn't play in Soundgarden I'd have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y'know, 'Poor kid, he can't come out because he gets hassled a lot.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Team Rock Magazine, Summer 1996 http://teamrock.com/feature/2018-02-06/archive-the-real-chris-cornell, On being anti-social

Hate, Family, Feeling

“It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 12.

Love, Death, Lie, World

“I've got to say the soldiers in Vietnam that I was associated with in my three tours, who were pretty much front-line troops, were the best I'd ever seen on any battlefield. The soldiers were up against some incredibly difficult rules of engagement. I'll tell you a story. It's a real good story. We had some villages to run civic action and medical help in. My engineer company built a school. We were in the village of Binh My, and we got some lumber to rebuild a schoolhouse. We were about two thirds of the way completed. We had a teacher hired who was a cripple. My engineer company was bringing in the supplies in an armored personnel carrier along the little road up to the schoolhouse and they hit a mine. Luckily nobody was seriously injured. Well, the engineers went out there and fixed the armored personnel carrier, and then continued right on building the school. I went up to them and said, "You all are pretty complacent about this." And they said, "Sir, that's our job."”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

There's no way of telling who laid that mine. But it was someone who didn't want us to build that school. They knew we used that little trail. But we just went right on.
As quoted in The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1987), p. 78

School, Teachers, Help

“Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how it push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical.”

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist

as quoted in Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism

People, Dreams, Thinking, Personality

“Health and well being are a way of life. Not a certain diet or set of exercises or any other single area, but a combination of all the aspects of your life. Accept full responsibility for yourself, your health and your choices. The western civilization culture is anti health in that it is designed to produce profit not health. Read up on epigenetics. You control more of the genes which differentiate you from other humans than you realize. You are your own creator and creation.”

Jim Morris (bodybuilder) (1935–2016) American bodybuilder

"Jim Morris, vegan bodybuilder" https://web.archive.org/web/20140616020714/http://www.greatveganathletes.com/jim-morris-vegan-bodybuilder, interview with Great Vegan Athletes (2014).

Life, Health, Exercises, Reading

“As control engineers and scientists, we have greatly altered the way people and nations live and interact with one another. We have helped to create a world in which people live longer, enjoy better health, are better educated, and can travel and communicate over greater distances. But the systems that provide these better lives are fragile systems subject to unpredictable failures and possible destruction. We have also helped to create a world in which international relations are such that the very civilizations we have helped to build over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of hours.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1986) " Applications of Control Principles to International Relations http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1986/dec1986/w13-14.pdf" In: IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol.6, No. 6, Dec. 1986. pp. 13-14

People, Health, World, Education

“Jerry had been about to protest when Janza opened his mouth. "It's okay with me. I can beat this kid any way you want." And Jerry saw, to his dismay, that Archie had counted on Janza's reaction. He had known that Jerry couldn't back away now- he had come too far. Archie had bestowed one of his sickly sweet smiles on Jerry. "What do you say, Renault? Do you accept the rules?" What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they did to the world when they left Trinity.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 235-236

World, School, Smile, Guy

“What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Idea, Past, Future

“In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Life, Understanding, Knowledge

“Wasting one's time is one way of occupying it, not wasting time is also another way of occupying it, and not to mind going on wasting time even knowing that it is a waste of time is also another way of occupying it. … I have well understood life, and therefore I can do what I naturally want to do. To do what I naturally want to do is also a way of occupying time.”

Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) Chinese writer

"What Can I Do About It?"

Life, Nature, Time

“We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. Attributed, In the Media

People, Idea, Thinking

“I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and…. well… it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess. When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to make something much, much better. I wanted to write something that was pretty much the opposite of that first novel.
Also, I read Cyrano De Bergerac, right before I started writing the book. Cyrano's character reminded me of some important things, namely, what it really means to be a tragic hero. You don't need a lot of the cliché fantasy trappings to have that cool character.
I also read Giacomo Casanova's memoirs soon after starting this project. That opened my eyes to how interesting an autobiography could be, provided the person telling it has a way with words and has lived a sufficiently adventurous life….”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

Interview with Fantasy Book Critic (25 May 2007) http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2007/03/interview-with-patrick-rothfuss.html

Life, Books, School, Reading

“The later decades of a life become the time for our capabliites to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentraled worth.”

Sherwin B. Nuland (1930–2014) American surgeon

[The art of aging: a doctor's prescription for well-being, 2008, Random House, 10, https://books.google.com/books?id=7JR_1wsxvz8C&pg=PA10]
The Art of Aging (2007)

Life, Time

“There should be no general election until 2020. There should be a normal Autumn Statement, held in the normal way at the normal time, and no emergency Budget.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

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

Autumn, Time

“Sorry my life is so much more bitchin' than yours. I planned it this way.”

Charlie Sheen (1965) American film and television actor

On TMZ, February 28 2011

Life

“People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to ﬁve without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless. But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding”

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

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8

People, Guy, Understanding, Question

“Mattei pushed hard for a line of detachment, of critical participation in NATO and even of getting out of NATO and into a neutralist position. Mattei therefore not only annoyed the United States with his oil deals in the Middle East, which broke up the balance of the international oil cartel, and broke up the price equilibrium, but it was Mattei who pushed even harder for Italy's entire policy to take its distance from the United States and to open up toward the Third World countries, which were traveling in a certain way along a road similar to the painful and laborious road which Italy had had to travel. Mattei was very sensitive to these problems, because he had been a witness to this difficult road of Italy's and had had great difficulties at the beginning of his career. So he knew what it meant for a country to free itself from the colonial yoke and find its own way, its own balance, and a way of arranging its own economy which would not be an economy of pure exploitation by the great powers”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The Strategic Stakes in Mattei's Flight, p. 23

Pain, World, Travel, Problem

“No doubt there is much immature talking and hasty writing and will always be where liberty of speech and press prevails. The political, religious, and social views of any age and even of the most radical members of society, were born, long before their time. Those who invented the alphabet and the printing press are indirectly responsible for much of the violence of a changing social state; but in the same way, they are responsible for the progress of the world, for the enlightenment, for the civilization, and for all that makes the present better than the past.”

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

Voltaire (1916)

Age, World, Change, Time

“The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized — and it may explode into violence.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 17

Nature

“In business you wind up trying a lot of things, most of which won’t work. The way you become a good business person is to fail, fail, fail and fail.”

Bob Parsons (1950) United States Marine

Forbes: GoDaddy Billionaire Bob Parsons' 7 Tips for Entrepreneurs https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2015/10/18/godaddy-billionaire-bob-parsons-7-tips-for-entrepreneurs/ (18 October 2015)

Business, Personality

““Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5, Mucho Maas

Time, Personality

“Women have two orgasms, the real ones and the ones they make up on their own. And I can give you the male point of view on this, which is: we're fine with it. You do whatever you have to do, and we'll do whatever we have to…. To a man, sex is like a car accident anyway, and trying to determine a female orgasm is like asking, "What did you see after the car went out of control?" "Well, there were a lot of screeching noises, I was facing the wrong way at one point, and in the end, my body was thrown clear."”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

Women, Sex, Cars

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "The Rise and Fall of Ion Storm" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25551&cid=2775698 Slashdot (2002-01-02)

Success

“Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 3

“Believe in Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Redeemer, the Son of God, who came to earth and walked the dusty roads of Palestine-the Son of God-to teach us the way of truth and light and salvation, and who, in one great and glorious act offered an atonement for each of us. He opened the way of salvation and exaltation for each of us, under which we may go forward in the Church and kingdom of God. Be not faithless, but believe in the great and wonderful and marvelous blessings of the Atonement.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Selections from Addresses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, Ensign, Mar. 2001, 64.

God, Truth, Light, Christ

“The Libyans said they'll buy their way out of these three [terrorism] black lists. We'll pay so much, to hell with $2 billion or more. It's not compensation. It's a price. The Americans said it was Libya who did it. It is known that the president was madman Reagan who's got Alzheimer's and has lost his mind. He now crawls on all fours.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

SBS Dateline (8 October 2003) "The New Libya"

Hell

“Edmund Gettier convinced most philosophers that the received wisdom of millennia about the concept of knowledge was mistaken: “knowledge” was not simply a matter of having a justified, true belief … A justified true belief isn’t “knowledge” when the justification for the true belief isn’t the cause of why the agent holds the belief. As Philip Kitcher put the point, in explaining the stimulus Gettier provided to the “naturalistic” turn in epistemology: “the epistemic status of a belief state depends on the etiology of the state.” … We can understand, now, the logic of the hermeneutics of suspicion as exploiting precisely this point about the epistemic status of belief: we should be suspicious of the epistemic status of beliefs that have the wrong causal etiology. That’s the lesson of the Gettier counter-examples, and it is the lesson which underwrites the suspicion that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud recommend by way of providing alternative causal trajectories to explain our beliefs. To be sure, beliefs with the wrong causal etiology might be true; but since they are no longer cases of knowledge, we have no reason to presume that to be the case.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Dependency

“Maurice Joly: In “Caesar” I bluntly accused our emperor of evil offenses…in ‘’’this’’’ book I expose the nature of the man’s mind, how he thinks, y’see!
Alphonse: But, Maurice, this Napoleon has seduced the public with social gifts…libraries and wars to give them national patriotic pride.
Maurice Joly: BAH! That is the kind of pallitative all dictators give their masses! But at what price? I ask you!
Alphonse: So…you show his plan by the dialogue of Machiavelli who is known as a cunning manipulator of political power, eh?
Maurice Joly: Yes, this is the clearest way to show the similarity of Napoleon’s mind to Machiavelli’s!
Alphonse: Hmmm! A clever device I must admit!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.13

War, Books, Nature, Thinking

“Gentlemen do not behave in such a way.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

On the Hoare-Laval Pact (1935). Quoted in Harold Macmillan Winds of Change (Macmillan, 1966), pp. 411-12.
1930s

“Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 2. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html (1804)

Star

“In the progress of mankind, the few have been the nearest right. There have been centuries in which the light seemed to emanate only from a handful of men, while the rest of the world was enveloped in darkness. Some great man leads the way—he becomes the morning star, the prophet of a coming day. Afterward, many millions accept his views. But there are still heights above and beyond; there are other pioneers, and the old day, in comparison with the new, becomes a night. So, we cannot say that success demonstrates either divine origin or supernatural aid.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)

Men, World, Star, Light

“Even though no one else discovers the nonconformity or enforces the rules against it, the individual who has committed the impropriety may himself act as the enforcer. He may brand himself as deviant because of what he has done and punish himself in one way or another for his behavior.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 31.

Behavior

“Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly—hurt, bitterness, grief and, most of all, fear.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

As quoted in Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes (1997), p. 87

Fear, Feeling, Hurt, Anger

“"Stakeholder Management" as a concept, refers to the necessity for an organization to manage the relationships with its specific stakeholder groups in an action-oriented way.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

Source: A stakeholder approach to strategic management, 1984, p. 52

“The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.”

Ayn Rand book Philosophy: Who Needs It

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982), p. 84.

Secret, Knowledge

“I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

Democracy

“The act of segmenting the organization into departments would influence the behavior of organizational members in several ways. The members of each unit would become specialists in dealing with the particular tasks. Both because of their prior education and experience and because of the nature of their task, they would develop specialized working styles and mental processes.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 9

Education, Behavior, Nature

“In a world where nobody understood the viewpoint of the victim, we would all be right to side with the victim. But we live in a world where almost nobody 'comes out' as a Pharisee or a hypocrite, and it seems to me that the way to moral learning proceeds in that direction.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " The man blind from birth and the Creator's subversion of sin http://girardianlectionary.net/res/fbr_ch-1_john9.htm", p. 19.

World, Learning

“Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. … Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. … As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. … The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton … I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Nature

“One end begins another
The countdown to infinity
A better life
A better way”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky, verse 2, lines 1-4
A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky (2016)

Life

“Have you ever fall'n into one of those Cometary Dazes, with the way the Object grows brighter and brighter each night? These Apparitions in the Sky, we never observe them but in Motion, — gone in seconds, and if they return, we do not see them. Once safely a part of the Night Sky, they may hang there at their Pleasure, performing whatever their Work corresponds to shifting jibs and stay-sails, keeping perfectly upon Station, mimicking any faint, unnam'd Star you please. Do they watch us? Are they visits from the past, from an Age of Faith, when Miracles still literally happen'd?”

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

Pleasure, Age, Faith, Star

“Look at Jared Kushner. The poor man looks low T—like he might one day go the way of Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner. (I love LGBTQ, so long as they come in peace.) Jared's not wearing the pants in the Kushner castle. The beguilingly beautiful Ivanka is.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Ivanka wants, Ivanka gets." http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/what_ivanka_wants_ivanka_gets.html American Thinker, April 13, 2017 2010s, 2017

Love, Peace, Beauty

“It's not necessary to be born again. You have your way to God, I have mine. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine … I've been to Shinto shrines and God is everywhere. … Christ is one of the ways! God is everywhere.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

On a Phil Donahue Show in 1984, as quoted in The Sword of the Lord (14 December 1984)

God, Peace, Christ

“The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 95

Youth, Imagination, Passion, Future

“Some of the biggest changes have been in the process of generating business strategies—what I call “strategy work.” Around 1980, the received wisdom was to decentralize into business units, which would each generate a strategic plan. These plans were then amalgamated up the hierarchy, in some portfolio way, for senior management. That approach has all but disappeared, and we’ve seen a dramatic recentralization of strategy work.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Response to the question: "You’ve been teaching about, researching, and consulting on business and corporate strategy for 35 years. What changes have you seen in that time?"
"McKinsey Quarterly interview," 2007

Wisdom, Business, Change

“And also there’s a little star
So white a virgin’s it must be
Perhaps the lamp my love in heaven
Hangs out to light the way for me.”

Theo Marzials (1850–1920) Anglo-French poet and eccentric

Song (1883).

Love, Star, Light

“He’s always known the real way to money is not through production but through control; “The hotel owner gets rich owning the keys, the maids stay poor keeping the toilets clean,” as one of his biz profs back at Madison used to say.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 462

Money

“One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.”

Jacob M. Appel book The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

Page 5
The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (2012)

Children, Boy, Sport

“At one point we got some German sausages for dinner, and my girl Anna was working the communal tomato sauce pump and she whacked it and it all squirted over my pants, and suddenly there was silence, and I realised that Muse had stopped playing, and the entire 20 odd thousand punters were looking at me, and suddenly I just threw my hands up and said ‘anyone for sauce?’ and everyone just burst into laughter and suddenly Peaches was there and she said ‘you’re alright kid’ and we high fived and then I crowd surfed all the way onto stage and Muse let me play the guitar solo for one of their songs and even though I’d never heard it I just winged it and it was awesome.”

Justin Heazlewood (1980) Australian musician and comedian

online Laptopping http://www.bedroomphilosopher.com/2007/02/20/laptopping-things-oclock/, Bedroom Philosopher (February 20, 2007).

Girl, Communication, Laughter, Silence

“The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government – one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Concurring opinion, Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957).

People

“.. In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

In the last lines of his lecture at the Congress of the Jewish Scientific Institute Vilnius, in 1935, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 58
after 1930

People, Art

“Two hundred years ago there were two distinct and separate streams of human life running through this country. They stood at opposite extremes of ethnological classification: all black on the one side, all white on the other. Now, between these two extremes, an intermediate race has arisen, which is neither white nor black, neither Caucasian nor Ethiopian, and this intermediate race is constantly increasing. I know it is said that marital alliance between these races is unnatural, abhorrent and impossible; but exclamations of this kind only shake the air. They prove nothing against a stubborn fact like that which confronts us daily and which is open to the observation of all. If this blending of the two races were impossible we should not have at least one-fourth of our colored population composed of persons of mixed blood, ranging all the way from a dark-brown color to the point where there is no visible admixture. Besides, it is obvious to common sense that there is no need of the passage of laws, or the adoption of other devices, to prevent what is in itself impossible.”

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

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Life, Law, Color, Sense

“Now what I desire to know is this: If we want to shoot a man and he badly wants to shoot us, why should we not take his property (if we can) as well as his life? Isn't that the way men win a 'fatherland' first? Don't they fight and conquer the original owners and then take the land? Very well then, what is the good of being a soldier, of risking your life, and being a brave man in battle, if you cannot sieze from your beaten enemy, what your greater valor wins and what you stand badly in need of?”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

Life, Men, Fight

“I was always really determined to look the way I wanted to look, and I wanted to cut my hair. I wanted to look different because I was used to looking different. Because of my religious background I'd always been encouraged to look different.”

Grace Jones (1948) Jamaican singer, actress and model

As quoted in NME (June 1983); later in NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1992) by John Tobler, p. 381

“Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. Captain, that is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Speaking to Captain John D. Imboden (24 July 1861), as quoted in Stonewall Jackson As Military Commander (2000) by John Selby, p. 25; sometimes quoted as "My religious beliefs teach me..."

Death, Men, God, Feeling