Quotes about the world
page 71

“I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Merchant Gúðmúnsen
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Fish, Singing, Dead

“As we did before in 1994, I feel we have a capacity to do so again. We succeeded in resolving our problems by peaceful means when everybody expected war and violence… We have one of the best constitutions in the world. We should be proud of this constitution, which provides the framework for a functioning multiparty democracy, independent courts and other institutions that stand for [the] advancement of human rights… He said the country had already held three elections and that two presidents had relinquished their power through constitutional means. Although former president Thabo Mbeki had left under difficult conditions, even that had been done constitutionally… These are all signs of growing constitutional maturity. Our democracy is growing up and there are open debates which will take us to robust contestations.”

F. W. de Klerk (1936) South African politician

Speech in Durban https://web.archive.org/web/20150919172235/http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/de-klerk-sanguine-about-sa-1.427715#.WhPN0EpKvqY (2008) 2000s, 2008

War, Peace, Feeling, Democracy

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Age

“It's a depressingly masculine world we live in, Delores.”

Stephen King book Dolores Claiborne

Dolores Claiborne (1992)

“I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser…”

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

“Now you think about this, too: you’re not charming, dashing, or debonair. You’re funny looking, as a matter of fact. You’re too busy to spare much time for me, and even if you did take me out night-clubbing somewhere, you’d be so out of place that I couldn’t enjoy it. But you do one thing: you let me feel that my rules are as worthwhile to me as yours are to you. When you ask me to do something, I know you won’t be hurt if I refuse. And if I do it, you don’t feel that you’ve scored a point in some kind of complex game. You don’t try to use me, cozen me, or change me. I take up as much room in the world, the way you see it, as you do. Do you have any idea of how rare a thing that is?”

Algis Budrys book Rogue Moon

Source: Rogue Moon (1960), Chapter 6 (pp. 127-128)

Way, Feeling, Game, Idea

“Obliged to find an apartment of their own, my parents searched the neighbourhood and chose one within walking distance of the park. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: "And you'll be glad to know I don't take Jews." Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn baby would have a label proclaiming his race to the world. He would be called "The Jew"”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Yehudi Source: Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999), Issue 372 http://newint.org/features/2004/10/01/yehudi-menuhin/, New Internationalist Magazine

Search, Parent, Baby

“I do know that there are some things that exist in this world that you just can't prove. That could be the case with God or whoever might be up there, but I don't follow any one religion.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[Portia Colwell, Not just anybody: Katie Melua, http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article566962.ece, The Times, 2005-09-17]

God, Religion

“I understand the world through music and I believe that music shapes the universe. Mankind has always had a sense of wonder about space, has always been curious. It's something that's implanted in us. It's natural to want to travel and discover. It is, always has been, and is always going to be like this. We are space.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2001

Music, Travel, Understanding, Nature

“To strengthen the work of Congress I strongly urge an amendment to provide a four-year term for Members of the House of Representatives—which should not begin before 1972. The present two-year term requires most members of Congress to divert enormous energies to an almost constant process of campaigning—depriving this nation of the fullest measure of both their skill and their wisdom. Today, too, the work of government is far more complex than in our early years, requiring more time to learn and more time to master the technical tasks of legislating. And a longer term will serve to attract more men of the highest quality to political life. The nation, the principle of democracy, and, I think, each congressional district, will all be better served by a four-year term for members of the House. And I urge your swift action. Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam. That conflict is not an isolated episode, but another great event in the policy that we have followed with strong consistency since World War II. The touchstone of that policy is the interest of the United States—the welfare and the freedom of the people of the United States. But nations sink when they see that interest only through a narrow glass. In a world that has grown small and dangerous, pursuit of narrow aims could bring decay and even disaster. An America that is mighty beyond description—yet living in a hostile or despairing world—would be neither safe nor free to build a civilization to liberate the spirit of man. In this pursuit we helped rebuild Western Europe. We gave our aid to Greece and Turkey, and we defended the freedom of Berlin. In this pursuit we have helped new nations toward independence. We have extended the helping hand of the Peace Corps and carried forward the largest program of economic assistance in the world. And in this pursuit we work to build a hemisphere of democracy and of social justice. In this pursuit we have defended against Communist aggression—in Korea under President Truman—in the Formosa Straits under President Eisenhower—in Cuba under President Kennedy—and again in Vietnam.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Wisdom, Men, Hostility

“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 10

Feeling, Dependency

“Objectively speaking, the history of North Korean state has been one of an ambitious social if brutal experiment that ended in a very ugly disaster. Essentially, the 70 years of the Kim Family's rule have been the wasted years. The Kim family did not merely build one of the world’s most “perfect” Stalinist dictatorships, but also managed to transform into a basket case what once, in the 1940s, was the most advanced industrial economy of East Asia outside Japan. However, one should not expect that such a pessimistic, if honest, view of North Korea’s past, is going to be enthusiastically embraced by those North Koreans who bother to care about such matters.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

Get Ready For Selective Amnesia (November 2015)

Family, History, Past, Perfection

“Many of our fellow citizens do not share the blind faith in the simple beneficence of all technological innovation. And because they do not share the corporealist, morally neutral, and in some cases atheistic world-view that they attribute (fairly or not) to science and scientists, they are reluctant to surrender the power of decision to the very people who they think are creating the problem.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Forbidding Science: Some Beginning Reflections (2006)

People, Faith, Problem, Thinking

“I owe my view of the world to the Bible. To my mind, the Bible's approach is the only valid one. Most philosophies usually go out of date within 20 years.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

The world we live in p. 131
Jesus Our Destiny

“The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford.”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) American poet

1492 http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/1492/

Hate, Children, People, Sea

“A world view which supports than they are by Jews (the liberals, the Wall Street people, journalists from the East Coast, lovers of black people, Hillary Clinton’s friends), we have struck quite a good deal. Trump and his friends see Israel as a forefront against the barbarians, and they are not exactly very observant.”

Yaron London (1940) Israeli journalist, actor and songwriter

Why Israel isn’t shocked by anti-Semites in White House (November 21, 2016)

People, Lovers, Support

“The worker is no longer the slave to his reproductive urge. He is a free bargaining agent who enters the market to dispose of the one commodity he commands — labor power — and if he gets a rise in wages he will not be so foolish as to squander it in a self-defeating proliferation of his numbers.
The capitalist faces him in the arena. His greed and lust for wealth are caustically described in those chapters that leave the abstract world for a look into 1860 England. But it is worth noting that he is not money hungry from mere motives of rapacity; he is an owner-entrepreneur engaged in an endless race against his fellow owner-entrepreneurs; he must strive for accumulation, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or one gets accumulated.
The stage is set and the characters take their places. But now the first difficulty appears. How, asks Marx, can profits exist in such a situation? If everything sells for its exact value, then who gets an unearned increment?”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 148

Money, Motivation, Appearance, Wealth

“Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section I, Chap. III.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Men, Happiness, Home, Sense

“Now it is not our purpose here to condemn this world, from the standpoint of some "holiday-world" of philosophy. No words need be wasted on saying that this work-a-day world is very much with us, that in it the foundations of our physical existence are secured, without which no one can philosophize at all! Nevertheless, let us also recall, that among the voices which fill the workplace and the markets ("How do you get this or that item of daily existence?" "Where do you get that?" etc.) — in the midst of all these voices suddenly one calls above the rest: "Why is there anything at all, and not nothing?" — asking that age-old question, which Heidegger called the basic question of all metaphysics! Must we explicitly state how unfathomable this philosopher's question is, in comparison with that everyday world of needs and purposefulness? If such a question as this were asked, without introduction or interpretation, in the company of those people of efficiency and success, wouldn't the questioner be considered rather … mad?”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 66—67

People, Age, Question, Success

“Any church that imprisons a man because he has used an argument against its creed, will simply convince the world that it cannot answer the argument.”

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

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

People, Feeling

“Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable.”

Eli Siegel (1902–1978) Latvian-American poet, philosopher

Self and World (1957)

Beauty, Personality

“Three sacraments that contribute to life, baptism, confession, communion, have been used at Easter time. (Eucharist connects completely faith and baptism, God and man incompletely) Triumph: As expected of pious Christians, the joy of victory is heard in the midst of an unjust world; victory and not disparagement, insult, persecution. With the day of the victory of Christ, the Easter, the bonds are broken, the death and sin laid (?), and the Redeemer of mankind rises strongly the human race from night time and fetters, in blessed heights, heavenly gates!).”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

Excerpt from a sermon on Easter delivered by Mendel, found in Folia Mendeliana (1966), Volume 6, Moravian Museum in Brünn.
Original: Drei Sakramente, die das Leben spenden: Taufe, Beichte, Kommunion sind zur Osterzeit eingesetzt worden. (Eucharistie verbindet vollkommen, Glaube und Taufe unvollkommen dem Gottmenschen). Sieg: Wie mutet es einen frommen Christen an, mitten in der ungerechten Welt von Sieg zu hören, und nicht wieder Hintansetzung, Beschimpfung, Verfolgung; auch Siegesfreude. Mit dem Siegestag Christi, mit dem Ostertag, sind die Bande zerrissen, die der Tod und die Sünde aufgelegt ( ? ), und stark erhebt sich das Menschengeschlecht mit seinem Erlöser aus Nachtzeit und Fesseln in weite selige Höhen, himmlische Gefilde!).
Sermon on Easter

Life, Death, God, Faith

“In retrospect, the reason for the assassination is hardly a mystery. It is now abundantly clear … why the C. I. A.'s covert operations element wanted John Kennedy out of the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson in it. The new President elevated by rifle fire to control of our foreign policy had been one of the most enthusiastic American cold warriors…. Johnson had originally risen to power on the crest of the fulminating anti-communist crusade which marked American politics after World War II. Shortly after the end of that war, he declaimed that atomic power had become 'ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it' -- a Christian benediction if ever there was one. Johnson's demonstrated enthusiasm for American military intervention abroad … earned him the sobriquet 'the senator from the Pentagon….”

Jim Garrison (1921–1992) American judge

[On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988)]

War

“Asia, in cooperation with Europe, is about to take simultaneous action towards realization of a New World Order.”

Shunroku Hata (1879–1962) Japanese general

Quoted in "The Secret History of the War" - Page 342 - 1945

“concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

Art, Freedom, Fight, Country

“A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell must renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan's self must now confess,
That Christ has earned a Right to bless”

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

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Music on Christmas Morning

Men, God, Hell, Suffering

“Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Prelude. The Egoist http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/egost11.txt (1879)

Life, Women, Men, Game

“My psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents. In their eyes lurk all of mankind's questions and answers. If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young, he wouldn't need a road map. I wanted other people to know about those eyes, too. I want my paintings to clobber you in the heart and make you yell, "[DO SOMETHING]!"”

Walter Keane (1915–2000) American plagiarist

Page 42.
1965, Cited by Jane Howard

War, People, Art, Soul

“Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Source: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001), Chapter 1

“In the twenty-four years since its birth in 1921, the Communist Party of China has gone through three great struggles--the Northern Expedition, the Agrarian Revolutionary War and the War of Resistance Against Japan which is still going on. From its very beginning our Party has based itself on the theory of Marxism-Leninism, for Marxism-Leninism is the crystallization of the most correct and most revolutionary scientific thought of the world proletariat. When the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism began to be integrated with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, the Chinese revolution took on an entirely new complexion and the entire historical stage of New Democracy emerged. Armed with Marxist-Leninist theory, the Communist Party of China has brought a new style of work to the Chinese people, a style of work which essentially entails integrating theory with practice, forging close links with the masses and practicing self-criticism.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Coalition Government (1945)

War, People, Truth, Democracy

“The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Money.
Notes from Life (1853)

Men, Money

“My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in my heart as long as that joy — save one, and I thank you for that, too.”

Peter S. Beagle book The Last Unicorn

The Last Unicorn (1968)

People, Heart, Joy

“Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical — I believe it.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Life

“.. I need to immerse my gaze in your eyes, it is in their mirror that I see myself as I would like to be, and it is only in seeing myself as I feel I should be. I think, therefore I am, my Beautiful One, to both of us, every day we recreate the world, every day a paradise falls in our hands, to darken in the dust of many paradises... The paradises will fall in our hands, will sink in the dust and will be born again according to our will.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Beauty, Feeling, Thinking

“The old world is engaged in a struggle to find a way by which each race living on its own soil, separated by definite national boundaries, can be assured freedom and peace in the full development of its national life and in the realization of international opportunities. The task of America is different. It is for her to find the way by which these races, living on one soil, under one form of government, with no territorial lines, can be assimilated and become a part of her integral national life.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Peace, Way, Freedom

“I feel convinced that every man has given him of God much more than he has any idea of, and that he can help on the world's work more than he knows of. What we want is the single eye that will see what our work is, the humility to accept it, however lowly, the faith to do it for God, the perseverance to go on till death.”

Norman MacLeod (1812–1872) (1812–1872) Scottish clergyman and author (1812–1872)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.

Death, God, Faith, Feeling

“If I were the type of artist that didn't care whether or not my works communicated with viewers then I wouldn't bother exhibiting them, I might as well stock them in a warehouse. But I do exhibit and I do care because I want to communicate back to the viewer what I've viewed. My paintings are inspired by my homeland's traditional spaces. My colors are the colors of monasteries and mosques, the color of ruins of Sassanid and Seljuq era, colors of Bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz, and colors of northern-Iran's ceramics. I have sensed all these colors, forms and everything within my painting's frame from the viewer's own world.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

Color, Communication, Sense, Painting

“Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

2.9
The Moviegoer (1961)

Life, People, Dead

“Third World elections provide an excellent testing ground for a propaganda model. Some elections are held in friendly client states to legitimize their rulers and regimes, whereas others are held in disfavored or enemy countries to legitimize their political systems. […] the United States organized what have been called “demonstration elections” in its client states, defined as those whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention is well intentioned, that the populace of the invaded and occupied country welcomes the intrusion, and that they are being given democratic choice. The elections in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 were true demonstration elections, and those held in Guatemala in 1984-85 were strongly supported by the United States for image-enhancing purposes. The elections held in Nicaragua in 1984, by contrast, was intended to legitimize a government that the Reagan administration was striving to destabilize and overthrow. The U. S. government therefore went to great pains to cast the Nicaraguan election in an unfavorable light.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, pp. 87-88.

Pain, Home, Support, Light

“For the Spanish Armada to have conquered England in 1588 would not have been easy. King Philip's fleet would have needed several pieces of good fortune it did not get: a friendlier wind at Calais, perhaps, one that might have kept the English from launching their fireships against the Armada; and a falling-out between the Dutch and English that could have let the Duke of Parma put to sea from Dunkirk and join his army to the Duke of Medina Sidonia's fleet for the invasion of England. Getting Spanish soldiers across the Channel would have been the hard part. Had it been accomplished, the Spanish infantry, the best in the world at the time and commanded by a most able officer, very probably could have beaten Elizabeth's forces on land.”

Harry Turtledove book Ruled Britannia

Historical Note, p. 457
Ruled Britannia (2002)

Time, Parting, Sea

“It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 163)

God, Age, Flowers, Light

“Translated: There is another and a better world.”

August von Kotzebue book Menschenhass und Reue

Es gibt noch ein anderes, besseres Leben.
Menschenhass und Reue (1798), Act I, scene 1; repeated by another character in Act III, scene 1. This title translates as Misanthropy and Repentance, but is known in English as The Stranger; translated by N. Schink, London, 1799.

“Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the ‘knowledge worker’ and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world’s people to dream, to imagine, and to create.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

People, Dreams, Imagination, Communication

“O Egyptians, In January 25, 2011, when you wanted to change the world, you did. When you want something, you always do it.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E. 2014

Change

“In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, … it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 179.

Men, Truth, Thinking, Personality

“The economic difficulty of the modern world is not shortage of materials but the organization of their exchange and distribution; distress arises, not from scarcity but from dislocation and maladjustment.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

“Job learned the wisdom of silence before God, but it appears many Christians have abandoned this value in our wordy world.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Wisdom, God, Silence, Learning

“All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

March 14, 1824. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 360

Truth, Science

“A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are…”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Books, Light, Wine, Night

“This time during the Second World War is part of my history, part of my memory, but it is the latest part of my memory, so the memories of each human being goes much more back, it goes to the dinosaurs, even later [Kiefer means: earlier].... I think we even remember geological times. So this is one little part of our / of mine memory”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

the Second World War
n.p.
Tim Marlow joins Anselm Kiefer to discuss his work' - 2005

War, History, Thinking, Memory

“Compare Holland with Russia; you see only marshy and sterile islands in the former, which rise from the center of the ocean: a small republic which is only 48 miles length by 40 wide. But this small body is the very nerve-center of the region: immense people live in it, and these industrious people are both powerful and rich. They shook the yoke of the Spanish domination, which was then the most formidable monarchy of Europe. The trade of this republic extends to the ends of the world; and new trade appears almost immediately; it can maintain in times of war an army fifty thousand men, without counting a many and well maintained fleet.”

Frederick II of Prussia book Anti-Machiavel

Source: Anti-Machiavel, Ch. 5 : How It Is Necessary To Control The Cities, Or The Principalities, Which Are Controlled By Their Own Laws Before They Were Conquered

Men, War, People, Appearance

“It is a good lesson — though it may often be a hard one — for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Introduction: The Custom-House
The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Dreams

“Even when heavy enemy battle losses are substantiated, one must be careful not to judge their psychological effect on the bassis of occidental values. Indeed, American military professionals who fought in the Pacific during World War II or in Korea became acutely aware of differing oriental values with respect to human life, and knew the pitfalls of putting too much store in the impact of heavy casualties on the morale of a determined foe or on the will of a ruthless totalitarian government.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 165

Life, War, Loss

“Thank you for many kind comments on the USA games coverage with Taylor Twellman. Very much appreciated. But stay tuned; World Cup goes on.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Twitter https://twitter.com/IanDarke/status/484276578189574144 (2 July 2014). 2010s, 2014, 2014 FIFA World Cup

Game

“Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.”

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

Quote in: Ken Johnsonoct. " Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/arts/design/lucy-r-lippard-and-conceptual-art-at-brooklyn-museum.html." in New York Times, Oct. 18, 2012.

Friendship, Art, Way, History

“I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Change, Future

“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no [Virginias]. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Faith, Sense, Light, Childhood

“The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world-mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

Secret, Feeling, Imagination, Personality

“I'd take over World of Warcraft and I'd close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries. Er, I would get to do this anonymously, wouldn't I?”

Richard Bartle (1960) British writer

From an interview http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2007/07/17/id_close_world_of_warcraft_mud_creator_richard_bartle_on_the_state_of_virtual_worlds.html with Keith Stuart on Guardian Unlimited's http://www.guardian.co.uk Gamesblog The question that prompted this was "If you could take over control of one major MMORPG - which would you choose and what would you do with it?"

Way, Game, Chance

“Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background… Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value… On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 220

War

“Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Theologians

The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

God, Bird, Cry

“Culture has become a system of defense against technics. This defense appears as a defense of man based on the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that there is a human reality in technical reality and that, if it is to fully play its role, culture must come to incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge and its sense of values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects should be the result of philosophical thought, which in this respect has to achieve what is analogous to the role it played in the abolition of slavery and in the affirmation of the value of the human person. The opposition established between culture and technology, between man and machine, is false and is not well-founded; what underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. Behind the mask of a facile humanism it hides a reality that is rich in human efforts and natural forces, a reality that constitutes the world of technical objects, mediators between nature and man.”

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) 20th century French philosopher

Source: Du mode d'existence des object technique (1958), p. 1 (http://www.academia.edu/4184556)

Nature, Knowledge, Reality, Sense

“There’s only two types of people in the world, Ye, weird and boring.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 28 “Glass Slippers or the Glass Slip?” (p. 161)

People

“In a perfect world an idea could be born, nourished, developed and made known to everyone, criticized and perfected, and put to good use without the crude fact of financial support ever entering in to the process. Seldom, if ever, in the practical world in which we live does this occur.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Imagination: Selected Papers, 1967, p. 82

Idea, Support, Perfection

“A reading test measures one's ability to read reading tests, and reading tests are in themselves… somewhat akin to the world of crossword puzzles or Scrabble or the game of twenty questions. Some people play these games well, and all praise is due them for their skill. But if we ask, What aspect of the world do they comprehend in doing these games well? the answer is, Only the world within the games themselves.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

People, Game, Question, Reading

“There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis for. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

On the effect of British colonialism on India's economy, as quoted in "Address by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at Oxford University" https://web.archive.org/web/20070213050232/http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/nic/0046/pmspeech.htm, The Hindu (8 July 2005) 2001-2005

Time, Country

“You should make the world understand that Israel is the oppressor and that Israel must be destroyed.”

Ali Meshkini (1922–2007) Iranian ayatollah

Nuclear Weapons - Iranian Statements http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/nuke2.htm 14 December 2001. 2001

Understanding

“The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.”

Jasper Fforde (1961) British novelist

Lost In A Good Book (2002), ch. 4a, p. 67

Life, Happiness, Failure, Success

“The Amir al-Mu'minin, Abu Hafs 'Umar ibn al-Khattab said, "I heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say, "Actions only go by intentions. Everyone gets what they intend. Anyone, therefore, who emigrates to Allah and His Messenger, his emigration is indeed to Allah and His Messenger. But anyone who emigrates to gain something of this world or to marry a woman, his emigration is to that to which he emigrated."”

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

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 1, hadith number 1
Sunni Hadith

Peace

“If one thinks that ideological conceptions are an important feature of modern societies, and that the analysis of ideologies will therefore have to be an integral component of any contemporary political philosophy, Rawls’s view is seriously deficient, because it does not thematise power. The idea that seems to be presupposed by the doctrine of the veil of ignorance—namely, that one can in some way get a better grasp or understanding of the power relations in society and how they work by covering them up, ignoring them, or simply wishing them away—seems very naïve. To the extent, then, to which Rawls draws attention away from the phenomenon of power and the way in which it influences our lives and the way we see the world, his theory is itself ideological. To think that an appropriate point of departure for understanding the political world is our intuitions of what is “just,” without reflecting on where those intuitions come from, how they are maintained, and what interests they might serve, seems to exclude from the beginning the very possibility that these intuitions might themselves be “ideological.””

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 90.

Way, Idea, Departure, Understanding

“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

God, Sense, Silence, Parting

“I am grateful that they have worked together to make it safer and stronger to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I'm grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed. And the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have a -- have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2012-09-05 Democratic National Convention Speech in Charlotte, North Carolina http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/05/transcript-bill-clinton-speech-at-dnc/ 2010s

Democracy, Sport, Partnership

“A great proponent of much of what I have just been saying is Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the world humanitarian, who today receives the Nobel Peace Award for 1952. I feel it is a vast compliment to be associated with him in these awards this year. His life has been utterly different from mine, and we should all be happy that his example among the poor and benighted of the earth should have been recognized by the Peace Award of the Nobel Committee.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

Essentials to Peace (1953)

Life, Happiness, Peace, Feeling

“Imagine if World War II had ended with a European Nazi Empire, from the Urals to the Channel, soon armed with nuclear weapons, in mortal contest with the United States, in a peace kept only by deterrence. Imagine an evolution from a Hitler to an Albert Speer Nazi. Would the children of the Left have led songs of "All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance" beneath symbols of unilateral disarmament? Would American opposition to Nazi influence anywhere, let alone to Nazi securing of bases in the western hemisphere, have led to domestic charges of our being the imperialist world policeman? Would our intellectuals have mocked or cheered a president who used the phrase "The evil empire"? But what were the differences between that totalitarianism and the other? Deaths? Camps? The desolation of the flesh and spirit? The bodies will not be buried without an answer to that.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Death, War, Children, Peace

“[E]ven if we disagree about the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the consequent moves made by Bush 43 Administration, the decision of Obama Administration to retreat, especially announcing it, this is the worst you can do. At noon, at that day, that month, we are out. By sending the signal to the radical Islamists, to the forces that were about just to recover and prepare again for attacks against the free world, that was a recipe for disaster. It created a vacuum. It’s not a surprise that we live in a world today that is a much more dangerous place than in 2008. It helped Vladimir Putin to regain his confidence and because after his attack against the Republic of Georgia in 2008 in August, he was basically rewarded by Obama/Clinton “reset” policy instead of paying a price for taking territory of neighboring country.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Confidence, Decision, Help, Country

“As I understand it, the Holy Church teaches that there are two worlds: the world of everything we can see and hear and touch, and another world, the spiritual world of heaven and hell. Barnard and Stokes were two — how shall I put it — renegade theologians who postulated the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful. They are there, close by, but invisible and unreachable.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

The Master of Jordan College to the Librarian, in Ch. 2 : The Idea of North
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

Hell, Understanding

“An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren’t much in the world, how do you know you are “out of this world?””

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 183.

“The basis of science is the empirical method, which uses the senses to build up a picture of the world; but science tells us that our senses have evolved to help us get by, not to show us the world as it is. Science is only a systematic examination of our impressions, and in the end all each of us has left are our own sensations … The end-result of the empirical method, then, is that each individual is left alone with their own experiences. We can escape this solitude, Balfour suggested, only if we accept that there is a divine mind.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Sense, Solitude, Science, Help

“I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

The King’s Message, Dec. 12, 1826.

“Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies:
Not goods, but trade-marks; and still more and more
In every branch becomes the sale of money.”

John Davidson (1857–1909) Scottish poet

Smith (Glasgow: Wilson, 1888) p. 26

Money, Business

“The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party… loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin http://web.archive.org/web/20130421061108/http://my.opera.com/PRC/blog/?startidx=560

Life, People, Literature, Nature

“The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before.”

Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 47

“[D]isequilibrium will dominate the twenty-first century, as will efforts to contain the United States. It will be a dangerous century, particularly for the rest of the world.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 47

Effort

“If we agree to return to the 1967 borders, we relinquish the Land of Palestine…. We may be able to return to the 1967 borders through politics, but to the 1948 borders, we will never return through politics. As for the 1948 borders – no-one in the world recognizes our right to them…. Because all the international laws deny the Palestinians their true borders. We may accept the [1967 borders], but the blood of our forefathers calls upon us to return to”

Ibrahim Mudeiris

the 1948 borders Sermons on Palestinian TV http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=563 February 2005

Law

“You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

As quoted in Wisdom & Inspiration for the Spirit and Soul (2004) by Nancy Toussaint, p. 85
Attributed from posthumous publications

Men, Thinking

“Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter II, SOURCES AND TRADITIONS, p. 36.

Color, Country

“The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs... May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work – in spite of everything”

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

a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings
letter to de:Stephan Lackner, Amsterdam, 27 August 1945, as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, pp. 80 + 86
1940s

Hunger, War, Time, Painting

“As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, Europe at the Edge of the Abyss (2016)

“A really critical mind will not be content to remark the patent absurdity of the tales about supernatural beings and events in the "New Testament," but will go on to examine the purposes those tales were devised to serve. It requires no great critical acumen to perceive the appalling malice shown in Bolshevik promises that "the last shall be first"; the proletarian rancor of almost continual harping on the threat that rich men will be fried forever hereafter if they do not give all that they have to the poor and become paupers themselves; the frantic hatred of reason evinced by hostility to "the Greeks" who "seek after wisdom" and try to understand nature and the real world instead of drugging themselves with narcotic fantasies; the frightful malevolence of a god "who has made foolish the wisdom of this world" to profit a squalid and mindless rabble; and the hatred of all culture and civilization implicit in the election of illiterate boors as apostles and the insistence in the Drivel on the Mount on the need for bird-brains that "take no thought for the morrow" and, indeed, emulate the intellectual processes of vegetables.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Wisdom, Men, God, Hostility

“As soon as one of the anti-American presidents is elected, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations Mr. President. Now that you are president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. It’s several million dollars in this pocket, if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I’ve got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap, or vote with us at the next UN vote, or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq”, and in that way, we have managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we have done this.”

John Perkins (1945) American author

Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

People, Family, Way, Game

“My plays are not didactic… they simply express my attitude to my world.”

Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) Austrian dramatic, painter and writer

“But my present point is a much wider one. What we need, in order to feel at home in the world, is certainly not a belief that it was made for us. We are at home in this world because we were made for it. we have develped here, on this planet, and are adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaptation. We are not fit to live anywhere else (the possibility, such as it is, of surviving briefly, and at ruinous expense in space-craft and the like is just parasitical; it depends on extending the conditions we are used to into a few bizairre corners, not on our being able to live in other conditions.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

Feeling, Home, Parting, Dependency

“This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.”
Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.”

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

“The Other Frost”, pp. 30–31
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Wisdom, Fear, Home, Imagination

“Life is but the spirit's prison,
Where its wings are furl'd,
Stretching to their flight in vain, —
Seeking that eternal home
Which is in a world to come.”

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

(1837 2) (Vol 50) Subjects for Pictures. Alexander on The Banks of the Hyphasis
The Monthly Magazine

Life, Home

“Think'st thou there are no serpents in the world
But those who slide along the grassy sod,
And sting the luckless foot that presses them?
There are who in the path of social life
Do bask their spotted skins in Fortune's sun,
And sting the soul.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

De Montfort (1798), Act I, scene 2; in A Series of Plays.

Life, Soul, Sun

“I was never as cocksure again after that first LSD inspiration. Especially with fame and reputation. You become very uncertain, you have to follow your own act. I never did get that kind of spontaneous cocksureness back again. It’s like going from being the observer to the observed. I had been used to being invisible when I was young. After I became well-known, it was very hard to be anonymous in the world. Of course, at first I liked all the attention. Suddenly, good-looking girls were interested in me! Wow! I couldn’t believe it.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

"R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1" http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb, The Paris Review, Summer 2010, No. 193.

Girl

“And at our feet unbroken lay
The glass that had whirled us thither away:
And in the grass, among the flowers
We sat and wished all sorts of things:
O, we were wealthier than kings!
We ruled the world for several hours!

And then, it seemed, we knew not why,
All the daisies began to die.
We wished them alive again; but soon
The trees all fled up towards the moon
Like peacocks through the sunlit air:
And the butterflies flapped into silver fish;
And each wish spoiled another wish;
Till we threw the glass down in despair;
For, getting whatever you want to get,
Is like drinking tea from a fishing net.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Flowers, Drink, Fish, Tree

“War breeds war. That is all it can do. War does nothing but devour valuable resources and destroy precious lives for the sole purpose of perpetuating itself. As Randolph Bourne wrote, “War is the health of the State.” War is a mechanism used by the ruling elites of the State to coerce and control the people, so it becomes essential that whenever one war is complete, another is instigated elsewhere so that the mechanism keeps running.
On the other hand, peace breeds prosperity. If War is indeed the “health of the State,” then Peace can be nothing less than the “health of the People.” Being at peace means valuable natural resources can be preserved and used at home where we need them most. Being at peace means young fathers and mothers can live and enjoy free trade, not only among themselves but with the world, instead of dying capriciously and unnecessarily, for political gain or to line the pockets of those who profit from their sacrifice.
History teaches us that the key elements to prosperity are freedom and peace. You don’t go to war with people you like, or with people you know, or with people with whom you are trading and doing business. Even after our fledgling republic was nearly torn asunder in civil war which literally pitted brother against brother and nearly destroyed the South, our reunited nation and all its people advanced and prospered after peace was restored.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

" Why Peace? Why Not? http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7277," Liberty For All (11 February 2012, retrieved 25 February 2012). Republished http://original.antiwar.com/lee-wrights/2012/02/15/why-peace-why-not/ by Antiwar.com (16 February 2012). 2012

War, People, Health, Peace

“I will maintain it before the whole world.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Je le soutiendrai devant tout le monde.
Act IV, sc. iii
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)

Quotes about the world page 71

Quotes about the world
page 71