Quotes about the world
page 74

“Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. […] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense […] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined […].”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "Why do some societies make disastrous decisions", section "Disastrous values" (Penguin Books, 2011, pages 432-433, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.

Life, Sense, Appearance

“My deepest human longing is/ Not to control the world and people/ But to control and realise myself!”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Freedom: Foster It! p. 18.
Freedom: Foster it! (2004)

People

“Even as the nation monitors the Muslim world within its borders more closely for signs of Islamism, it must continue, of course, to protect the civil rights of law-abiding American Muslims. Political leaders should regularly and publicly distinguish between Islam, the religion of Muslims, and Islamism, the totalitarian ideology. In addition, they should do everything in their power to make sure that individual Muslims, mosques, and other legal institutions continue to enjoy the full protection of the law. A time of crisis doesn’t change the presumption of innocence at the core of our legal system. Police should provide extra protection for Muslims to prevent acts of vandalism against their property or their persons.”

Daniel Pipes (1949) U.S. neoconservative columnist, author, counter-terrorism analyst, and scholar of Middle Eastern history

Fighting Militant Islam, Without Bias, City Journal http://www.danielpipes.org/articles/79, Autumn 2002.

Religion, Law, Change, Time

“You ask if I mean to publish anything on the subject of a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson? Certainly not. I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Mathew Carey (11 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, p. 42 1810s

Religion, Fight

“I have just two hands
and the feeling of the world,
but I'm teeming with slaves,
my memories are streaming
and my body yields
at the crossroads of love.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade book Sentimento do mundo

Tenho apenas duas mãos
e o sentimento do mundo,
mas estou cheio de escravos,
minhas lembranças escorrem
e o corpo transige
na confluência do amor.
"Sentimento do mundo" ["Feeling of the World"]
Sentimento do mundo [Feeling of the World] (1940)

Love, Feeling, Memory

“What justice also demands, inspired by the same feeling, is the punishment of the guilty and effective guaranties against an active return of the spirit by which they were tempted; and it is logical to demand that these guaranties should be given, above all, to the nations that have been, and might again be most exposed to aggressions or threats, to those who have many times stood in danger of being submerged by the periodic tide of the same invasions. What justice banishes is the dream of conquest and imperialism, contempt for national will, the arbitrary exchange of provinces between states as though peoples were but articles of furniture or pawns in a game. The time is no more when diplomatists could meet to redraw with authority the map of the empires on the corner of a table. If you are to remake the map of the world it is in the name of the peoples, and on condition that you shall faithfully interpret their thoughts, and respect the right of nations, small and great, to dispose of themselves, and to reconcile it with the right, equally sacred, of ethnical and religious minorities - a formidable task, which science and history, your two advisers, will contribute to illumine and facilitate.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Welcoming Address http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/parispeaceconf_poincare.htm at the Paris Peace Conference (18 January 1919).

People, Justice, Dreams, Feeling

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men, Age, Faith, Boy

“As hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well — a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”

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

2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Men, Hope, Feeling, Effort

“To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a “fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat” is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 7, pp. 92–103.
Collected Works

Family, Idea, Fight

“There were no sounds of men, here; only the whisperings of the world of nature, which men often called silence.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 39 (pp. 562-563)

Men, Nature, Silence

“All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same... Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

in 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Hope, Art

“It’s pretty amazing to be a part of the Star Trek family. It’s definitely a highlight of my career. I never imagined it’d lead to so many great opportunities to appear in other films, travel the world to make appearances, be featured in a comic strip, trading cards and even action figures. The fans are the most loyal, more than any franchise or brand. It’s pretty amazing how Star Trek continues to be relevant with so many TV series and films.”

Menina Fortunato (1980) Canadian actress

Enterprise's Orion Slave Girls https://www.startrek.com/article/enterprises-orion-slave-girls-part-2 (March 17, 2016)

Family, Travel, Imagination, Star

“He will reprove the world of sin" —not because men swear and lie and steal and get drunk and murder— "of sin because they believe not on me.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 607.

Men, Lie

“Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Love, Hate, Thinking

“If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that attracts to yourself events that - again - will confirm your beliefs.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 833, Page 163
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)

Way, Search, Sense

“Fame is like a giant X-Ray. Once you are exposed beneath it, the very beatings of your heart are shown to a gaping world.”

Natacha Rambova (1897–1966) American film personality and fashion designer

On celebrity, p. 117
Photoplay: "Wedded and Parted" (December 1922)

Heart

“The Tibetan state is located between two of the world's great powers, India and China. Good relations between these powers are crucial for world peace. Tibet has an important role to play.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Dalai Lama honours Tintin and Tutu, BBC (Friday, 2 June 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5040198.stm

Peace

“Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him — in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Source: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 8: The Failure of the Middle Class

Men, God, Way, Fashion

“The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 15, Speaking Bitterness, A Story by Comrade Snarky

Women, Men, Pleasure, Beauty

“The fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Lines completed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

Heart

“.. I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris. That's quite different. Long before the war [World War 1. ] I already had a distaste for the 'artistic life' I was involved in. – It's quite the opposite of what I'm looking for. – And so I tried, through the Library, to escape from artists somewhat. Then, with the war, my incompatibility with this milieu grew. I wanted to go away at all costs. Where to? My only option was New York where I knew you [ Walter Pach, artist and friend of Duchamp] and where I hope to be able to escape leading the artistic life, if needs be through a job which will keep me very busy. I ask you to keep all this from my brothers [all his brothers were artists as well] because I know my leaving will be very painful for them.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the same goes for my father and sisters.
Quote in Duchamp's letter to Walter Pach, Paris 27 April 1915; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 157
1915 - 1925

Life, Pain, War, Hope

“I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game

The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.

Nobody wants to have their name, you know, besmirched on the front of newspapers and people say wicked things about them and their family and call them all sorts of names, accuse them of being anti-Semitic and everything else. I mean that’s not part of my design. I don’t enjoy experiencing that. That’s just coming from some place that I have no control over.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

2 August 2006 article http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/08/02/mel-gibson-holocaust-numbers-gamersquo.html

Death, War, People, Family

“You will keep America out of the hands of communists by what you do here, you will keep it by making it seem unnecessary to the disadvantaged. It has been the New Deal, it has been democratic socialism which has been a major force from keeping the world from communism.”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

Debate with Barry Goldwater, University of Arizona campus, Tucson, Arizona, November 1961

Communication

“Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 366
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Hope, Way, Feeling, Passion

“The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 54
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Life, Men, Success, Dependency

“I've been a television writer for a dozen years, and I've been fortunate to put words in the mouths of some great female characters. They've been working women, mostly, and I like to think they've become role models for a generation of girls trying to figure out their futures.
But let's be honest: TV isn't going to change anyone's perceptions of working women in the real world just by promoting fictional females to ever-higher positions of authority. And I'm not doing my job if I put a woman's career before her character.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

How to Succeed at Vampire Slaying and Keep Your Soul (2005)

Women, Girl, Thinking, Change

“A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book The Years of Rice and Salt

Book 1: "Awake to Emptiness", Ch. 1
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

“Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.”

Henry Miller book Plexus

The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

Life, Dreams, Reality, Effort

“If ones tries to vanquish foes in the outer world,
They increase in greater measure.
If one conquers his Self-mind within,
All his foes soon disappear.”

Milarepa (1052–1135) Tibetan yogi

Song to the Hunter

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

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

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

Truth, Beauty, Art, Study

“Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars:
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 2.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Star

“This book is a long conference of God, the angels, and Mahomet, which that false prophet very grossly invented; sometimes he introduceth God, who speaketh to him, and teacheth him his law, then an angel, among the prophets, and frequently maketh God to speak in the plural. … Thou wilt wonder that such absurdities have infected the best part of the world, and wilt avouch, that the knowledge of what is contained in this book, will render that law contemptible …”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

John Adams: John Adams Library (Boston Public Library) BRL; Du Ryer, André, ca. 1580-ca. 1660, tr; Adams, John, 1735-1826, former owner, "[ 2013-05-01 http://ia700200.us.archive.org/4/items/korancommonlycal00john/korancommonlycal00john.pdf, The Koran : commonly called the Alcoran of Mahomet (1806)]," Springfield [Mass.] : Printed by Henry Brewer, for Isaiah Thomas, Jun. 1770s

God, Books, Law, Angels

“The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1965)

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

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Stupid Little Things
Resurrection (2014)

Love, Stupidity, Past, Hurt

“We agree to recognise Lithuanian independence on condition that the desire of the Lithuanians for a military convention and a customs, monetary and postal union with Germany, communicated to us some time ago by a Lithuanian delegation, still remains. For to be candid, the idea of full independence for these peripheral countries seems to me to be purely theoretical and impracticable…The whole development of world politics shows that we have not only great and powerful individual countries like Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, but associations of States fighting against each other…I do not believe in Wilson's universal League of Nations, I think that after the peace it will burst like a soap bubble. Great and powerful complexes of nations with hundreds of millions of inhabitants, armies of millions of men and exports amounting to thousands of millions, will be confronting each other. In the circumstances such small fractional nationalities will not be able to exist in complete independence, without seeking to lean on one side or the other. Just as there is no independent Belgium in the sense that it gravitates towards one side or the other, so it is not possible to conceive of a completely independent Lithuania, Balticum or Poland without that provisio.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

1910s, Speech in the Reichstag, 18 March 1918

Men, Peace, Communication, Idea

“American capitalism has helped finance the communist take over of the world. Somebody is going to answer to God for this.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

God, Help

“Not only has capitalism not entered into its final crisis anywhere in the world, but Fascism was first successful in marginally industrialized Italy—in a nation that had only begun its industrial development. Italian industrial capitalism was hardly at the end of its life cycle. It was at little more than its commencement. Moreover, subsequent movements elsewhere in Europe that have been characterized as fascist proved to 'have been most successful in mobilizing lower classes in underdeveloped… countries.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), pp. 18-19

Life, Success, Country

“It is a mistake to think that social progress is to depend upon anything happening to the working people: some say that they are to be given more material goods and all will be well; some think they are to be given more "education" and the world will be saved. It is equally a mistake to think that what we need is the conversion to "unselfishness" of the capitalist class.”

Mary Parker Follett The New State

Source: The New State, 1918, p. 117. Chapter XIV: "The Group Principle at Work"

People, Education, Thinking, Dependency

“This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world. The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

Preface
Business Cycles, 1913

Books, Business, Season

“I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“The ever-increasing cattle population is wreaking havoc on the earth's ecosystems, destroying habitats on six continents. Cattle raising is a primary factor in the destruction of the world's remaining tropical rain forests. … Cattle are also a major cause of global warming. … The devastating environmental, economic, and human toll of maintaining a worldwide cattle complex is little discussed in public policy circles. … Yet, cattle production and beef consumption now rank among the gravest threats to the future well-being of the earth and its human population.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), pp. 1-2

Future

“I'm an animal lover and my two cats are my world, so I don't wear any fur. I don't support the fur industry. And I'm not really into animal prints either, I just don't like the idea of me saying "I'm wearing a big cat today."”

Alyssa Campanella (1990) American model

"Meet the former Miss USA turned fashion blogger, Alyssa Campanella, who is dominating NYFW" https://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/11/meet-the-former-miss-usa-turned-fashion-blogger-alyssa-campanel/21310867/?guccounter=1, interview with AOL (February 11, 2016).

Cats, Lovers, Idea, Support

“Theology is now called to listen fully to the world, even if such a listening demands a turning away from the church's witness to Christ.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Preface

Christ

“The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Liar, liar, abaya on fire,” http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27264 WorldNetDaily.com, April 17, 2002. 2000s

“.. [that] the overturning of the old world of arts will be etched across your 'palms”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

recto
admonition from the cover of Malevich's 'novykh sistemakh v iskusstve' (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); the cover is reproduced in Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, Larissa A. Zhadova, (trans. Alexander Lieven); London: Thames and Hudson, 1982
the notice on the verso reads: 'Work and edition by the workshop [artef] of artistic labor at the Vitebsk Svomas'
1910 - 1920

Art

“P. S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199705201832.LAA28393@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“The narrow way, the way of holiness, not only leads to life, but it is life. Walking there, serene are our days, peaceful our nights, happy — high above the disorders and miseries of a wretched world—shall be our hourly communion with God; happy — full of assurance, of calm and sacred triumph, shall be our dying hour.”

Richard Fuller (minister) (1804–1876) United States Baptist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 316.

Life, God, Happiness, Peace

“Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity there is no such jump, and because jump is missing in the world of quantity it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Bateson (1978) " Number is Different from Quantity http://www.oikos.org/batesnumber.htm". In: CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, pp. 44-46

Water

“I have been a vegetarian for a few years and just recently I have become a vegan … I took this step following my inner feeling. … If we think for a moment how man manages animals and what impact he has on animal world we could say he was not human at all. Just think of all slaughter houses and production of beef or poultry where conditions for animals are impossible. Animals are transported in lorries many times without any water, which is extremely cruel. It is not that people are bad, they just don't think about it. … it is unreasonable to expect from people with lower levels of consciousness, who are cruel to animals, to end wars, to stop manipulating others, to help eradicate world poverty. In short as long as consciousness level is low all the disagreements in the world today will remain and possibly increase to the point of annihilation of humans.”

Janez Drnovšek (1950–2008) Slovenian politician

“Vegetarianism would increase the chance for long-term survival of mankind,” interview with Osvoboditev živali (January 2006) http://www.osvoboditev-zivali.org/?arhv=01738.

War, People, Feeling, Thinking

“Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last wrods any world. Listen all you board syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consumated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn forever”

William S. Burroughs book Nova Express

Source: Nova Express (1968), Chapter One

“How does the rest of the world perceive America under Obama? We're the nation that stood by and didn't lift a finger when the Iranian public was protesting their government. We voiced no support and did not try to help in any significant way, and the protest was soon quelled. We're the nation that drew red lines in Syria and watched them being crossed without a whimper. We're the nation that only uttered a few lukewarm words as Putin invaded the Crimea and the Ukraine. We're the nation that traded five of the world's most dangerous terrorists for one American deserter. We're the nation that gave away the store to insure that Iran can finance its terrorist attacks and be assured of having a nuclear device in a few years.”

Charlie Daniels (1936) American singer and musician

2010s, 2016, Letter to America's Enemies (2016)

Way, Support, Help

“Now was it night, when in deepe rest enrol'd
Are waves and windes, and mute the world doth show
Weari'd the beasts, and those that bottome hold
Of billow'd sea, and of moyst streames that flow,
And who are lodged in cave, or pen'd in fold,
And painted flyers in oblivion low,
Under their secret horrours silenced,
Stilled their cares, and their harts suppelled.”

Richard Carew (antiquary) (1555–1620) English scholar

Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Hierusalem (1594), Canto II, stanza 96

Secret, Silence, Painting, Sea

“There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution.. . . His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin’s time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe.. . . One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 69, 77, 358

Life, Question, Support, Change

“A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Broken Heart".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Life, Soul, History, Heart

“[R]adical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed. This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel-mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Death, People, Books, Beauty

“There is something in this universe that justifies the biblical writer in saying, "You shall reap what you sow." This is a law-abiding universe. This is a moral universe. It hinges on moral foundations. If we are to make of this a better world, we've got to go back and rediscover that precious value that we've left behind.”

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

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954) Source: Rediscovering Lost Values http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/rediscovering_lost_values/, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954)

Law, Universe

“For in the cross of Christ, as in a splendid theatre, the incomparable goodness of God is set before the whole world.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Re John 13:31 (Torrance 1959 edition).
St John

God, Christ

“Now I know it’s unfashionable to refer to colonialism in anything other than negative terms. And certainly, no part of the world is unscarred by the excesses of empires. But in the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant…This genius for governance shown by the mother country at the time no doubt explains in part why Canada’s path to independence was so long, patient and peaceful.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Address to the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce July 14, 2006 http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=2&id=1247 : On Canada
2006

Peace, Time, Parting, Country

“The world isn't going to become an Islamic caliphate, but that doesn’t stop the Islamists from pursuing that as a goal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

As quoted in "Here's what's driving North Korea's nuclear program — and it might be more than self-defense" http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-missile-worship-2017-story.html (1 May 2017), by Jonathan Kaiman 2010s

“Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which are transitory or fluctuating so as to develop a logical way of thinking about the latter, and of understanding the time sequences to which they give rise in particular cases.
Good economists are scarce because the gift for using "vigilant observation" to choose good models, although it does not require a highly specialised intellectual technique, appears to be a very rare one.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Letter to Roy Harrod (4 July 1938), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XIV (1971), p. 297

Art, Way, Understanding, Nature

“The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail (16 November 2016)

Question, Time

“The fundamental thesis of ordinary conventionalism, represented for instance by Poincare, states that there are problems which cannot be solved by appeal to experience unless one introduces a certain convention, since only such a convention, together with experimental data, makes it possible to solve the problem in question. The judgements which combine to make up such a solution are thus not forced on us by empirical data alone, but their adoption depends partly on our recognition, since the said convention which co-determines the solution of the problem can be arbitrarily changed by us so that as a result we obtain different judgements.
In the present paper it is my intention to make that thesis of ordinary conventionalism more general and more radical. Namely, we want to formulate and to prove the theorem that not only some, but all the judgements which we accept and which combine to make up our image of the world are not univocally determined by empirical data, but depend on the choice of the conceptual apparatus by means of which we make mappings of those empirical data. We can, however, choose this or that conceptual apparatus, which will change our whole image of the world.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, "Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur", in Erkenntnis, 1934, Vol. 4, p. 259; as cited in: Schaff (1962;81-82)

Question, Problem, Change, Dependency

“Tolstoy set for himself the highest ideal that has ever been given to the world, and Tolstoy failed. He has had pointed at him fingers of scorn, and very unworthy fingers they were, but who has the right to judge Tolstoy for failure to live perfectly a life that has for two thousand years been an unattainable ideal to millions of earnest souls?”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 53

Life, Soul, Failure

“It may be seen, in my work, that the course which I have adopted is that followed by the natural philosopher, in order to grasp the laws that regulate the material world. By the seizure of facts, I seek to rise to an appreciation of the causes whence they spring.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Law, Spring, Nature

“I feel it is our inherent duty as a humane society, above any intangible responsibility, to invest in our world's children’s potential, passion and confidence.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

Quoted in the Tolucan Times http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/

Children, Feeling, Confidence, Passion

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books, Housing

“You think of those kids out there. I say kids. I have seen them. They are the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue — I mean you name it — get rid of the war; there will be another one. Out there we've got kids who are just doing their duty. I have seen them. They stand tall, and they are proud. I am sure they are scared. I was when I was there. But when it really comes down to it, they stand up and, boy, you have to talk up to those men. And they are going to do fine; we've got to stand back of them.”

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

Informal conversation with one of a group of employees who had gathered in a corridor to greet him at the Pentagon (May 1, 1970), reported in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970, p. 417, footnote 1.
1970s

Men, War, People, Books

“Got a home on high
Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
In another land
So far away.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Astral Weeks
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Home

“A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs

Books, Wine

“I remember hearing about an old comic strip back in the days of St. Ed's. Two guys are talking to each other, and one of them says he has a question for God. He wants to ask why God allows all of this poverty and war and suffering to exist in the world. And his friend says, "Well, why don't you ask?" The fellow shakes his head and says he's scared. When his friend asks why, he mutters, "I'm scared God will ask me the same question."”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution (2006), p. 65

God, War, Guy, Question

“Suppose everybody cared enough, everybody shared enough, wouldn't everybody have enough? There is enough in the world for everyone's needs but not enough for everyone's greed.”

Frank Buchman (1878–1961) Evangelical theologist

Remaking the world, The Speeches of Frank N.D. Buchman, Blandford Presss 1947, revised 1958, p. 46
Moral attitude

“Bob Hope will go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, providing they have a camera there and three people. He'll go to the opening of a market to receive an award. He'd get an award from Thom McCan for wearing their shoes. It's pathetic. It's a bottomless pit. A barrel that has no floor. He must be a man who has an ever-crumbling estimation of himself. He's constantly filling himself up. He's like a junkie – an applause junkie. What happens to those people when they can't get up and do their shtick, God only knows. Bob Hope, Christ, instead of growing old gracefully or doing something with his money, be helpful, all he does is he has an anniversary with the President looking on. It's sad. He gets on an airplane every two minutes always going someplace. It didn't bother him at all to work the Vietnam War. Oh, he took that in his stride. He did his World War II and Korean War act. "Our boys" and all that. He’s a pathetic guy.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Money, God, War, People

“But the first ingredient, let me emphasize, is the cessation of work on missile sites on Cuba and measures to render such weapons inoperable, under effective international guarantees. The continuations of this threat, or prolonging of this discussion concerning Cuba by linking these problems to the broader questions of European and world security, would surely lead to the peace of the world. For this reason I hope we can quickly agree along the lines outlined in this letter of October 26th.”

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

1962, Second Letter to Nikita Khrushchev

Peace, Hope, Question, Problem

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”

Fay Weldon (1931) English author, essayist and playwright

Down Among the Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1971] 1973) p. 172.

Life, Death, Time

“I believe public transport has a great future as we see increasing signs of economic recovery and it has a major role to play in helping Europe and the rest of the world meet the challenge of climate change.”

Brian Souter (1954) British businessman

As quoted on the Stagecoach Group Web Site http://www.stagecoachgroup.com/scg/media/press/pr2010/2010-06-14/ (22nd May 2010)

Change, Future, Help

“There are times when a company’s know-how, product range, and labor relations are in harmony with the world around it. The business situations are familiar, the company is well organized, and employees are trained and prepared. During those times, managers do not need to develop and implement new ideas. Their job is to allocate resources to promote growth and development, channeling capital and people to the parts of the organization best positioned to benefit from the current state of affairs. Those parts of the organization then become larger, better established, and more powerful.
But just when the company has organized itself, outside circumstances may change. New technologies come on the scene, markets shift, interest rates fluctuate, consumers’ tastes change, and the company must enter a new phase of life. In order to stay in sync with the outside world, it must be able to alter its marketing strategy, its product range, its organizational form, and where and how it does its manufacturing. And once a company has adapted to a new environment, it is no longer the organization it used to be; it has evolved. That is the essence of learning.”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Cited in: Richard C. Huseman, Jon P. Goodman (1998), Leading with Knowledge: The Nature of Competition in the 21st Century. SAGE Publications, p. 72.
The Living Company, 1997

Life, People, Idea, Business

“The classical worldview was atomistic and individualistic; it viewed objects as separate from their environments and people as separate from each other and from their surroundings. The systems view perceives connections and communications between people, and between people and nature, and emphasizes community and integrity in both the natural and the human world.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 11.

People, Communication, Nature

“He is potentially brilliant, and he is going to be exciting, but potential is nothing unless you can produce it. I would think he's way, way, way, miles away from international World Cup football.”

Theo Walcott (1989) English association football player

Bobby Robson, former manager of England, 2006 ( Source http://www.cnn.com/2006/SPORT/football/05/08/england.gamble/index.html) About

Way, Thinking, Football

“We're not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 5 (p. 133)

“As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Theseus, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Parting

“You've got to be a very clever people to win a big war and to rule half the world -- but the Japanese didn't behave is clever people. In the first few weeks of conquering any town, they would hold marching exercises as part of their campaign to terrorize residents. They marched six to eight to twelve abreast, chanting Japanese martial songs and stamping on the ground in an exaggerated manner.”

Robert Kuok (1923) Malaysian businessman

Cap 3 "Under the Japanese Heel"

War, People, Exercises, Parting

“It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of al other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Facism did.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)

People, Understanding, Learning, Country

“Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world.”

Frank Bruno (1961) British boxer

Interview with Emma Brockes http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,6000,1599231,00.html

Sport, Box

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

Art

“It took only a few days to block off the little room on the third floor back of the Piquette Avenue plant and to set up a few simple power tools and Joe Galamb's two blackboards. The blackboards were a good idea. They gave a king-sized drawing which, when all initial refinements had been made, could be photographed for two purposes: as a protection against patent suits attempting to prove prior claim to originality and as a substitute for blueprints. A little more than a year later Model T, the product of that cluttered little room, was announced to the world. But another half year passed before the first Model T was ready for what had already become a clamorous market…”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 97 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

Idea, Drawing

“Manners must adorn knowledge, and smooth its way through the world. Like a great rough diamond, it may do very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

1 July 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Way, Knowledge

“For Greek democracy failed, and the reasons for its failure are full of instruction. The great ruling ideas which the Greeks gave to the world, ideas which England later was to absorb and spread over a quarter of the globe, freedom and self-government, social equality and civic patriotism, these were corrupted by demagogues and flatterers of the people. It was so fatally easy to think that freedom meant doing what you like, that one man was not only as good as another but equally able to fill any office whatsoever, that majorities could do no wrong, that you could make Utopian laws for your own country without regard to what other nations or other empires were doing…Freedom of speech was stifled and public men who refused to advocate pleasures for the public multitude were banished. Politicians rivalled one another in bribing the electorate.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 35-36.
1930

Men, People, Pleasure, Law

“Not chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the world, harmoniously confus'd,
Where order in variety we see,
And where, though all things differ, all agree.”

Alexander Pope book Windsor Forest

Source: Windsor Forest (1713), Line 13.

“But, good God, what is this when compared with that deep and true music of the wise, whereby the proportions of natural things are investigated, the harmonical concord and the qualities of the whole world are revealed, by which also connected things are bound together, peace established between conflicting elements, and whereby each star is perpetually suspended in its appointed place by its weight and strength, and by the harmony of its lucent spirit”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 291)

God, Peace, Music, Star

“Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, February 7, 2014, "President Obama's Magic Words and Numbers" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-president-obamas-magic-words-and-numbers/2014/02/07/220fbc04-8f76-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html at washingtonpost.com. 2010s

People, Sincerity