Quotes about the world
page 69

“Mathematics because of its nature and structure is peculiarly fitted for high school instruction [Gymnasiallehrfach]. Especially the higher mathematics, even if presented only in its elements, combines within itself all those qualities which are demanded of a secondary subject. It engages, it fructifies, it quickens, compels attention, is as circumspect as inventive, induces courage and self-confidence as well as modesty and submission to truth. It yields the essence and kernel of all things, is brief in form and overflows with its wealth of content. It discloses the depth and breadth of the law and spiritual element behind the surface of phenomena; it impels from point to point and carries within itself the incentive toward progress; it stimulates the artistic perception, good taste in judgment and execution, as well as the scientific comprehension of things. Mathematics, therefore, above all other subjects, makes the student lust after knowledge, fills him, as it were, with a longing to fathom the cause of things and to employ his own powers independently; it collects his mental forces and concentrates them on a single point and thus awakens the spirit of individual inquiry, self-confidence and the joy of doing; it fascinates because of the view-points which it offers and creates certainty and assurance, owing to the universal validity of its methods. Thus, both what he receives and what he himself contributes toward the proper conception and solution of a problem, combine to mature the student and to make him skillful, to lead him away from the surface of things and to exercise him in the perception of their essence. A student thus prepared thirsts after knowledge and is ready for the university and its sciences. Thus it appears, that higher mathematics is the best guide to philosophy and to the philosophic conception of the world (considered as a self-contained whole) and of one’s own being.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.

Truth, School, Law, Exercises

“The World War II generation faced threats head-on. Now, by inactivity or through liberal self-loathing, we help those who are trying to kill us.”

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

Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country after Obama (2016)

War, Help

“Now let the judging reader mark what rex
The idol gold (which all the world adoreth)
Plays both in poor and rich: by money's thurst
All laws and ties (divine, and human) burst.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Veja agora o juízo curioso
Quanto no rico, assim como no pobre,
Pode o vil interesse e sede inimiga
Do dinheiro, que a tudo nos obriga.
Stanza 96, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Fanshawe)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto VIII

Money, Law

“Across the world, new roles are embraced … new alliances forged. After far too long a time, the gods have chosen to work with mankind towards a common good.
Only one works alone.”

Mark Waid (1962) American comics writer

Kingdom Come (1996)

God, Time

“The now famous slogan 'keep calm and carry on' poster from 1939 was designed as a motivational poster for people living in cities expecting to be bombed by the Nazis. But the UK wasn't just 'keeping calm': we had taken a stand like no other country in the world and declared war on a barbaric regime which was a global threat to peace and security. Today, as we wait to hear news from Manchester following the slaughter and maiming of innocent children, we have people calling for us to do nothing. But it's not the same 'carry on' as in 1939: they want us to accept terror attacks as a part of life we should now accept. Well, I don't accept it. How many people are we going to sacrifice on the alter (sic) of political correctness before we build up the courage to confront what most people will happily admit to their friends and family: that we are facing a continuing threat from radical Islam which hashtags and tea lights will not stop?”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Jane Collins MEP responds to terror attacks in Manchester http://jane-collins.org/news.php?id=79. Item on official website (May 23, 2017).

Life, War, Children, People

“Well, it [ (Pop Art ] is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Paul Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art; it is utopian. It has had less and less to do with the world, it looks inward – neo Zen and all that. This is not so much a criticism as an obvious observation. Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different – another state of mind.”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

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

Hate, Art, Thinking, Appearance

“With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

From The Declaration upon taking up Arms, before Congress, July 6th, 1775: as cited in A Conspectus of American Biography, Volume 1, ed. George Derby, J. T. White (1906), p. 239

God, Heart, Animals, Perseverance

“It is a curious thing that relatively little attention has been directed toward working out methods for keeping the peace in a disarmed world. The technological The technological developments of the last twenty years have made disarmament a major concern of most nations, for it has become apparent that war is no longer an effective means for settling disputes between the great powers.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Alexander Rich and John R. Platt (1966) "How to Keep the Peace" in: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. April 1966. p. 14

War, Peace

“We were clear that we had to be internationally competitive and were passionate about building competencies that were the best in the world even when the tariffs were very high. It was an obsession with me to beat the Taiwanese and the Koreans who dominated the polyester business in the '70s.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Business, Passion

“Your great demonstration which marks this day in the City of Washington is only representative of many like observances extending over our own country and into other lands, so that it makes a truly world-wide appeal. It is a manifestation of the good in human nature which is of tremendous significance. More than six centuries ago, when in spite of much learning and much piety there was much ignorance, much wickedness and much warfare, when there seemed to be too little light in the world, when the condition of the common people appeared to be sunk in hopelessness, when most of life was rude, harsh and cruel, when the speech of men was too often profane and vulgar, until the earth rang with the tumult of those who took the name of the Lord in vain, the foundation of this day was laid in the formation of the Holy Name Society. It had an inspired purpose. It sought to rededicate the minds of the people to a true conception of the sacredness of the name of the Supreme Being. It was an effort to save all reference to the Deity from curses and blasphemy, and restore the lips of men to reverence and praise. Out of weakness there began to be strength; out of frenzy there began to be self-control; out of confusion there began to be order. This demonstration is a manifestation of the wide extent to which an effort to do the right thing will reach when it is once begun. It is a purpose which makes a universal appeal, an effort in which all may unite.”

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

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, Men, People, Nature

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

Fate, People, Fight, Dependency

“The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God's world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine energy.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 259.

God, Law, Feeling, Learning

“Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. … An opposite conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 72.

History, Knowledge, Learning, Indifference

“If the study of history is the study of language in one form or another, and if we really fabricate our past, not merely—weakly—live it; then we can begin to see how the world was Greek once, or was Roman, since every page of consciousness was written in these tongues then. All the central documents—laws, plays, poems, reports, abiding wisdoms, letters, scientific learning, news—were couched in Greek or Latin phrases, and the chief historians consulted them, composed their chronicles from the same speech, in the same words. Don't you see that when a man writes the history of your country in another mother-language, he is bent on conquest?”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 271

Wisdom, Law, History, Study

“In most of the old colonial world, the struggle for independence is coming to an end. Even in areas behind the Curtain, that which Jefferson called "the disease of liberty" still appears to be infectious. With the passing of ancient empires, today less than 2 percent of the world's population lives in territories officially termed "dependent." As this effort for independence, inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, now approaches a successful close, a great new effort — for interdependence — is transforming the world about us. And the spirit of that new effort is the same spirit which gave birth to the American Constitution. That spirit is today most clearly seen across the Atlantic Ocean. The nations of Western Europe, long divided by feuds far more bitter than any which existed among the 13 colonies, are today joining together, seeking, as our forefathers sought, to find freedom in diversity and in unity, strength.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Address at Independence Hall

Disease, Birth, Effort, Freedom

“You must not look at things casually. Your eyes must be like a microscope. Look carefully… Your eyes must conduct a dialogue with the world. There is beauty all around. And the great motivation is to design and discover this beauty, to communicate this beauty… Great pictures are not taken, they are made.”

T S Satyan (1923–2009) Indian photojournalist

As written at on his blog http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/ts-satyan/.

Beauty, Communication, Motivation

“He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Dead

“The world still needs
Its champion as of old, and finds him still.”

Lewis Morris (poet) (1833–1907) Welsh poet in the English language

The Epic of Hades (1877), "Herakles".

“I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

People, Thinking, Envy

“He who fears and doubts cannot make any progress either in the spiritual or worldly sphere. The mind is cramped. He alone is a hero, he alone attains greatness, who moves forward to realise the truth without caring whether the world is real or not.”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

The Apostles of Sri Ramakrishna

Truth, Fear

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Thinking

“You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.”

Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) American biologist

From "Eat This!", an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit!; Quoted in: Gary Beene (2011) The Seeds We Sow: Kindness that Fed a Hungry World. p. 9

Peace

“Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Complete Works, vol. 26, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, section 4.

Business

“Not Nero, but God, rules the world.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Quo Vadis

Lygia to Marcus Vinicius, in Ch. 2
Quo Vadis (1895)

God

“The real world is made from open, interacting systems, behaving chaotically.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

D.K. Hitchins (2000) World Class Systems Engineering - the five layer Model; cited in: Neville A. Stanton, Chris Baber, Don Harris (2012) Modelling Command and Control. p. 8

“We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

War, People

“So many people are throwing up their hands because the world has gotten so dark, but I went against the current and I actually found more light and positive energy. That was a great feeling.”

Sophie B. Hawkins (1967) American musician

Quotations from SophieBHawkins.com

People, Feeling, Light

“I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=3gtoAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA80&dq=%22come+across+men+of+letters+who+have+written+history+without+taking+part+in+public+affairs%22 1850s and later

Men, Imagination, History, Thinking

“The Leader of the Future 2 is divided into five parts. In Part One, our book begins where it should, with Peter Drucker’s vision of leadership… Part Two, "Leading in a Diverse World," begins with the recognized world authority on building a learning organization. "Systems Citizenship" presents MIT’s Peter Senge at his best, as he challenges us to understand systems, implement systems intelligence, and build partnerships that are a mandate for the new millennium… Part Three, "Leading in a Time of Crisis and Complexity," begins with Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Ron describes new approaches to solving leadership dilemmas as he challenges leaders in "Anchoring Leadership in the Work of Adaptive Progress"… Part Four, "Leading Organizations of the Future," shows how changing context has an impact leadership needs, demanding changes in leadership styles. Charles Handy is one of the great social philosophers of our time… Part Five, "The Quality and Character of the Leader of the Future," begins with one of the most influential thought leaders in history, Stephen Covey. In "Leading in the Knowledge Worker Age."”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xiv-xvii; preview

Books, Age, School, History

“Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 8, Holy Dread, p. 197-198

Wealth

“This light is for the world
send it out with sword of fire,
with cymbal, drum and angel choir,
music in the heart of it
proclaiming that the lamp is lit
this light is for the world.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

"This Light Is for the World"
Universal Hall (2003)

Music, Angels, Light, Heart

“We have a God-given commission, but it is not a commission to be self-righteous know-it-alls- quite the contrary. Our work in God's world begins with the acknowledgment that we are not God, and that our most bitter rivals are made in God's image.”

John Danforth (1936) American politician

Page 166
Faith and Politics (2006)

God

“We live in a three-dimensional world, and our brains are organized in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions. …Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“We fancy frequently that we have no grudge but against the men, when indeed our malignity is owing to their places : persons in great posts never yet enjoyed them with the good liking of the world, which only begins to do them justice when they are out of place.”

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) writer from France

Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Son, 1726, p. 148

Men, Justice, Personality

“The professors of zoology gather in the meadows
With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows
the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead
Again thou hauntest castle and grounds
The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds
(And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153

Books

“You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

1995, p. 229; As cited in: Jay W. Rojews (2004) International Perspectives on Workforce Education and Development. p. xi
1980s - 1990s, High Output Management (1983)

“Now I've been crying lately,
Thinking about the world as it is.
Why must we go on hating?
Why can't we live in bliss?”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Peace Train
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

Hate, Thinking, Cry

“All over the world with thee, my love!
All over the world with thee;
I care not what sky may low'r above,
Or how dark our path may be.”

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

(29th March 1823) Song - All over the world with thee, my love !
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love

“I was a bookish kid. I spent long hours in the library reading everything I could find, histories, biographies, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries. I was curious about the world and there’s no better way to find things out than through the pages of a book. Even today if some kid asks me what’s the first step to take to become a doctor, I answer, “Read, read, read.””

Sanjay Gupta (1969) journalist, medical correspondent, neurosurgeon

Finding My Path in Life (2011)

Books, Way, History, Science

“These are areas of unparalleled natural beauty to be handed to our children undisturbed. We are merely custodians. You would not build a toll plaza and an administration block in the Grand Canyon or next to the Victoria Falls or within any other World Heritage Site.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

24 February 2012, Cape Argus (p5), in response to the building of a toll plaza on Chapman’s Peak, South Africa.
Speaking & Features

Children, Beauty, Nature

“Music moves us, and we know not why;
We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.
Is it the language of some other state,
Born of its memory? For what can wake
The soul's strong instinct of another world,
Like music?”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

Music, Feeling, Soul, Tear

“No, no. Bill should play two or three more years. Talk to him. Tell him he can get in shape. I know he can play better second base than anybody. He is two years younger than I am. He is the greatest second baseman of all time, a real super star. But people forget too fast what he has done for the Pirates. Nobody I ever saw could field with him. He won the World Series with his home run against the Yankees. I don't like to see him retire.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sidelights on Sports: Monday Morning's Sports Wash" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XOANAAAAIBAJ&sjid=u2wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7387%2C128274 by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Monday, October 2, 1972), p. 24 Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

People, Home, Star, Time

“Freemasonry… has no pretension to assume a place among the religions of the world as a sectarian "system of faith and worship," in the sense in which we distinguish Christianity from Judaism, or Judaism from Mohammedanism. In this meaning of the word we do not and can not speak of the Masonic religion, nor say of a man that he is not a Christian, but a Freemason. Here it is that the opponents of Freemasonry have assumed mistaken ground in confounding the idea of a religious Institution with that of the Christian religion as a peculiar form of worship, and in supposing, because Freemasonry teaches religious truth, that it is offered as a substitute for Christian truth and Christian obligation.”

Albert Mackey (1807–1881) U.S. writer on freemasonry

91912), p. 618.
An encyclopedia of freemasonry and its kindred sciences, (1912)

Truth, Faith, Religion, Idea

“This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 312–313

Color, Feeling, Mathematics, Sense

“And the world on a string doesn't mean a thing.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

World On A String
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

“The world's best swordsman doesn't fear the second best; he fears the worst swordsman, because he can't predict what the idiot will do.”

David Weber (1952) author

quote from Honor Harrington (Take on Mark Twain's original quote)
"Honorverse", The Honor of the Queen (1993)

Fear

“The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Food

“I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

Life, God, Happiness, Dreams

“A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

Cheating, Personality

“With just the sweep of a pen, Thomas, you can change the world, all of it.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Prologue, p. 3; spoken by an unknown woman

Change

“In retrospect… it is interesting to note that the original problem that started my research is still outstanding -- namely the problem of planning or scheduling dynamically over time, particularly planning dynamically under uncertainty. If such a problem could be successfully solved it could eventually through better planning contribute to the well-being and stability of the world.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1991) as cited in: " Professor George Dantzig: Linear Programming Founder Turns 80 http://www.stanford.edu/group/SOL/dantzig.html", in: SIAM News, November 1994.

Problem, Time

“And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

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

Full Transcript of the Sixth Republican Debate in Charleston http://time.com/4182096/republican-debate-charleston-transcript-full-text/, Time (14 January 2016). 2010s, 2016, January

Love, Death, People, History

““Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man’s mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry.”
He rattled his glass.
Nathan refilled it.
Faust drank. “But to ask why,” he continued, “implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaningless, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event.”
He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.
He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (pp. 327-328)

People, Alcohol, Secret, Hope

“A vision without a task is but a dream.
A task without vision is but drudgery.
A vision and a task are the hope of the world.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Misattributed

Dreams, Hope

“The solution of (1), which represents a homogeneous manifold, may be written in the form:ds^2 = \frac{d\rho^2}{1 - \kappa^2\rho^2} - \rho^2 (d\theta^2 + sin^2 \theta \; d\phi^2) + (1 - \kappa^2 \rho^2)\; c^2 d\tau^2, \qquad (2)where \kappa = \sqrt \frac{\lambda}{3}. If we consider \rho as determining distance from the origin… and \tau as measuring the proper-time of a clock at the origin, we are led to the de Sitter spherical world…”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

"On Relativistic Cosmology" (1928)

Time

“There was no city, no town, no village, no wood, where the temples of the gods were unbroken. When Sureshavari, varaha and others were broken, the world trembled, but not so the mind of the wicked king. He forgot his kingly duties and took delight day and night in breaking images.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Jonraj: Rajtarangini

God, Night

“Ownership in the world I have none, but I have an infinite interest in it; for if not my own it is my God's; and so it is mine in a higher than a legal sense. Yes, this is the beauty, this is the whole sublimity, this is the tender delight of life — that it is of God's governing.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 620.

Life, God, Beauty, Sense

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3.

Love, Life, Death, Pain

“There is a revealing sardonic comment by Leopold Godowsky on a well-known statement of Paderewski, who once boasted, "When I don't practice for one day, my fingers know it; for two days, and my friends know it; for three days and the whole world knows it." Godowsky added: "On the fourth day, the critics hear about it." In any case, poets and novelists are generally better reporters of the general state of musical opinion than music journalists, who most often have an ax to grind, or, quite reasonably and justifiably, a more limited set of prejudices to broadcast.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Music

“To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." Observe that circles, ellipses, and parabolas are very smooth shapes and that a triangle has a small number of points of irregularity. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, "merely" because most of the world is of infinitely great roughness and complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Mathematics, Nature, Science, Sea

“A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

newspaper article, 1960.
1960s

“The vanguard of industrial investment in the world capitalist system is in the lowest paid segment of those countries paying the lowest wages. Young women in developing countries are the labor force on this frontier just as women and children were in the industrialization of England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Escaping the patriarchal restrictions of domestic production, young women workers are segregated in the new industrial compounds where they are subject to the patriarchal control of managers.”

June Nash (1927–2019) American anthropologist

Source: Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, 1983, p. x

Women, Children, Country

“So I've learnt that the world is 4,500 million years old. If you're very religious, then it's not 4,500 million years old, it's 6,000 years old. One of these is not correct.”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Stripped (2009)

“Your mission, Roman, is to rule the world.
These will be your arts: to establish peace,
To spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book VI, lines 1016–1018; Anchises to Aeneas.
Translations, Aeneid (2005)

Peace, Art

“Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

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

Letter to the Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, 1 June 1988
Source: [Russell, Robert J., Stoeger, William R., Pope John Paul II, Coyne, George V., 1990, John Paul II on science and religion: reflections on the new view from Rome, Vatican Observatory Publications]

Religion, Error, Knowledge, Science

“Geographically, the global economy is now multi-polar, as new centres of production have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery of the world economy. The world is now more accurately described as a 'mosaic of unevenness in a continual state of flux.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 15, Winners and Losers, p. 509

Parting

“Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.”

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

Letter to The Times after Thatcher claimed that British people were afraid of being "swamped" by people of a different culture. (11 February 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s

War, People, Family, Courage

“I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Cconversation with W.C. Seitz, in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 94
after 1970

Color, Feeling, Effort, Painting

“Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open!”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

“I'm personally convinced that computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference, of course, is that while in physics you're supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you create the world. Within the confines of the computer, you're the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If you're good enough, you can be God. On a small scale.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

2000s, (2001)

God, Science, Personality

“Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

As quoted by Eric Hobsbawn, in “A Question of Faith,” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (Sept. 14, 2002)

Passion, Time, Future

“Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.”

Thomas Kyd book The Spanish Tragedy

Act III, sc. ii
The Spanish Tragedy (1592)

Life, Death, Tear

“It is true that your world is only a mirror of you.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

“The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 17-18

Reality, Suffering

“Here in the UK, we've now got an evangelical television channel — it's the kind of thing that will be very familiar to everyone in the United States, especially if you've ever turned on your TV set on a Sunday morning, and seen one holy man after another, urging you to send money so that Jesus can buy a new Cadillac. Apparently, Jesus can't save the world until he's been properly kitted out with a million-dollar mansion, and a private jet — some small print in the Gospels that we must have missed.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"In Jesus' name" (25 April 2007) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qZO2u-jDNpQ 2007

Money

“Deep down, everything boils down ("au fond tout se ramène", Fr.) to the following simple question; Do we really want justice and the realization in this world of higher principles, or else do we want to serve selfish, short-sighted (à courte vue", Fr.) interests, which, when all is said and done, are also prejudicial (or detrimental, or harmful) to those very same that pursue them?”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 55.

Justice, Question, Selfishness

“What if this present were the world's last night?”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 13, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Night

“By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. …I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. …We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, pp. 257, 260 & 271

Truth, Law, Imagination, Nature

“Christians and Muslims, we have many things in common, as believers and as human beings. We live in the same world, marked by many signs of hope, but also by multiple signs of anguish. For us, Abraham is a very model of faith in God, of submission to his will and of confidence in his goodness. We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection.”

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

Address to young Muslims in Casablanca on 19 August 1985, during the pope's apostolic journey to Morocco Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1985/august/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19850819_giovani-stadio-casablanca_en.html

God, Faith, Hope, Confidence

“And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Unsourced

War

“Sorry, I’m not at home. I have gone out to my world Fancy, and I cannot be reached. Call back in a week, unless your business is urgent, in which case call back in a month.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Section 6 (p. 184)
Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973)

Home, Business

“One of the most wonderful and engaging things I've learned is that we are the culmination and extension of each other's histories and there is more that binds us together than separates us, and in discovering this, perhaps our needs are timeless and universal.
I have a very deep interest in religion and spirituality. I like the Sufi perspective, which suggests that it is better to participate in the world than to become detached from the world.”

Loreena McKennitt (1957) Canadian musician and composer

Celtic Women in Music interview (1999)

Religion, History, Learning, Universe

“Wally George: Tell me what is your band all about? I mean what is The Mentors all about?
El Duce: Well, I'll tell you son. It's like this, boy. We're heterosexuals. We wanna create more heterosexual music for the rest of the world. We're tired of sissie groups like Mötley Crüe and all this sissy stuff. We want rape rock!”

Eldon Hoke (1958–1997) Singer, musician

The Mentors on Hot seat, 1992.

Music, Boy

“Many who have visited me in Washington in the past few months may have been surprised when I have told them that personally and because of my own daily contacts with all manner of difficult situations I am more concerned and less cheerful about international world conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects.
I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among Nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Address at Chautauqua, New York (1936)

Peace, Hope, Past, Envy

“(…) no spectator is needed, because your consciousness basically is your reality model. I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. Since the different parts of your brain interact with each other, different parts of your reality model can interact with each other, so the model of you can interact with your model of the outside world, giving rise to the subjective sensation of the former perceiving the latter.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Reality

“From infinite probable acts, comma, only one can be physically experienced as a rule, period. The dream world operates as a creative situation in which probable acts are instantly materialized, laid out in actual or symbolic form. From these you then choose the most appropriate for physical expression.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 669, p. 387
The Nature of Personal Reality (1974)

Dreams

“We believe in a democratic society by governments freely and periodically elected by the people… We believe, in the virtue of hard work and that those who work harder in society should be given greater rewards… We believe that the world does not owe us a living and that we have to earn our keep." Adapted from speech by S Rajaratnam, Minister for Foreign Affairs, at a dinner in honour of His Excellency Mr. Hans Dietrich Genscher, Minister for Foreign Affairs.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

20 April 1977.

People

“Every day, we hear Western leaders repeat the sickening mantra that Islam is a religion of peace. Whenever an atrocity is committed in the name of Islam, whenever somebody is beheaded in Syria or Iraq, Barack Obama, David Cameron, my own Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and many of their colleagues rush to television cameras to tell the world that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. How stupid can you be?”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Speech http://www.pvv.nl/index.php/36-fj-related/geert-wilders/7981-geert-wilders-speech-danish-free-press-society-copenhagen-2-11-2014.html at the 10 years memorial conference for Theo Van Gogh arranged by the Danish Free Press Society (Copenhagen, 2 November 2014). 2010s

Stupidity, Peace, Religion