Quotes about the world
page 94

Richard Watson Gilder photo
Paul Simonon photo
Dwight Morrow photo

“The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.”

Dwight Morrow (1873–1931) American politician

From a letter to his son, as quoted in Harold Nicolson, Dwight Morrow (1935), p. 52

Justine Tunney photo

“Perhaps I should go back to doing what I did before occupy: troll the world and cause pandemonium.”

Justine Tunney Software developer from the USA

2 March 2014

Michael Shea photo
Allen C. Guelzo photo
Bono photo

“The thing about The Dubliners is — line'em up, the hardest rock'n'roll bands in the world, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Oasis, Nirvana, U2 — we're all a bunch of girls next to The Dubliners.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

As quoted on Ronnie Drew (2008), talking about Irish folk band The Dubliners

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley photo
John F. Kennedy photo
David Thomas (born 1813) photo
Jane Roberts photo
Lytton Strachey photo
Ovadia Yosef photo
Estelle Getty photo

“The only time you'll see me as a Democrat is when I play Sophia. In the real world I'm a Republican from head to toe.”

Estelle Getty (1923–2008) actress

Interview, The Sun Sentenial, May 11, 1986

Steven Erikson photo
Lew Rockwell photo
Ted Chiang photo
Daniel Handler photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Michael Chabon photo
Regina E. Dugan photo

“The DARPA model has three elements:
Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.
Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.
Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

“Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems (2013)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Book II, ch. 6 (trans. Constance Garnett)
Pyotr Miusov, summarizing an argument made by Ivan at a social gathering
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Masiela Lusha photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

"The Art of Controversy" as translated by T. Bailey Saunders
Essays

Quentin Crisp photo
Mark Kac photo
Ben Croshaw photo

“Humanity will be forever at war as long as there is no common enemy. World peace demands a new Hitler.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

16 February 2010
Twitter

Conor Oberst photo
Albert Pike photo

“The Secret of the Occult Sciences is that of Nature itself, the Secret of the generation of the Angels and Worlds, that of the Omnipotence of God.”

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXXII : Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret

Gerhard Richter photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Lydia Maria Child photo

“The United States is…a warning rather than an example to the world.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

To the twenty-fifth-anniversary meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1857)
1850s

Bernard Lewis photo
Ibn Khaldun photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Gordon B. Hinckley photo
Alan Hirsch photo

“A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus’s name.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 171

Susan Sontag photo

“Does the functioning of the world economy tend to concentrate wealth and power, or does it tend to diffuse it?”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter One, Nature of Political Economy, p. 14

Harry Truman photo
Alyssa Milano photo

“The world has so much suffering in it already—choosing to be vegetarian is one thing you can do to reduce the suffering on a daily basis.”

Alyssa Milano (1972) American actress, singer, producer

Interview with peta2, as quoted in "Chrissie Hynde to NYC: No More Violence at Ground Zero" by PETA (13 October 2008) https://www.peta.org/blog/chrissie-hynde-nyc-violence-ground-zero/.

Mary Parker Follett photo

“One of the most interesting things about business to me is that I find so many business men who are willing to try experiments. I should like to tell you about two evenings I spent last winter and the contrast between them. I went one evening to a drawing-room meeting where economists and M. Ps. talked of current affairs, of our present difficulties. It all seemed a little vague to me, did not seem really to come to grips with our problem. The next evening it happened that I went to a dinner of twenty business men who were discussing the question of centralization and decentralization. Each one had something to add from his own experience of the relation of branch firms to the central office, and the other problems included in the subject. There I found L hope for the future. There men were not theorizing or dogmatizing; they were thinking of what they had actually done and they were willing to try new ways the next morning, so to speak. Business, because it gives us the opportunity of trying new roads, of blazing new trails, because, in short, it is pioneer work, pioneer work in the organized relations of human beings, seems to me to offer as thrilling an experience as going into a new country and building railroads over new mountains. For whatever problems we solve in business management may help towards the solution of world problems, since the principles of organization and administration which are discovered as best for business can be applied to government or international relations. Indeed, the solution of world problems must eventually be built up from all the little bits of experience wherever people are consciously trying to solve problems of relation. And this attempt is being made more consciously and deliberately in industry than anywhere else.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xxi-xxii

Auguste Rodin photo

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Peter Whittle (politician) photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play
And in one word, just nothing.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Louise Burfitt-Dons photo
Osama bin Laden photo
George Sarton photo

“The whole past and the whole world are alive in my heart, and I shall do my part to communicate their presence to my readers.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Amartya Sen photo

“Globalization is not in itself a folly: It has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Amartya Sen, "Ten theses on globalization." New Perspectives Quarterly 18.4 (2001): 9-9.
2000s

Newton Lee photo

“Transhumanists around the world are cooperating to mitigate existential threats to humankind.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Tenzin Gyatso photo

“Each of us has the potential to contribute … You have a great opportunity to make a new shape of the world.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

As quoted in "Dalai Lama urges students to shape world" in The Seattle Times (15 May 2001) http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010515&slug=dalai15m0.

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
Helen Keller photo

“The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Five-sensed World (1910)

Warren Farrell photo
Baba Amte photo
Carl I. Hagen photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Gore Vidal photo

“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 12

Rollo May photo
William Fitzsimmons photo

“I saw the whole world from your eyes, at least the glimpse you let me see. And what a glimpse you let me see.”

William Fitzsimmons (1978) American musician

Until When We Are Ghosts (2006), My Life Changed

Shirley Temple photo

“Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship.”

Shirley Temple (1928–2014) American actress and diplomat

Quoted in Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women by Bill Adler, p. 94

John Adams photo
Wilhelm II, German Emperor photo
Ernst von Glasersfeld photo

“As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Source: Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self, 1970, pp.186-7 cited in: Vincent Kenny (2010) Remembering Ernst von Glasersfeld http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm at oikos.org, retrieved Oct 11, 2012.

Boris Cyrulnik photo
Ron Paul photo
Muhammad photo
Pat Condell photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?”

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

1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

Jean-François Lyotard photo
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay photo
Samael Aun Weor photo
Steven M. Greer photo

“The conventional world of science thinks what I'm doing is nonsense, yet I'm one of the biggest skeptics in the UFO community because 90 percent of what I hear about this subject is nonsense. A lot of the information (about aliens) presented to the public is some kind of fantasy, but at its core there's always a little truth.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Undated
Source: [Pearson, Mike, Is The Proof Out There, Too?, Rocky Mountain News, June 6, 1999, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=RM&p_theme=rm&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB4EDDE3547235C&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM, 2007-05-12, http://nbgoku23.googlepages.com/ISTHEPROOFOUTTHERETOO.htm, 2007-05-12]

Naomi Klein photo
Bob Nygaard photo

“They [the psychics] find someone that's at a vulnerable point in their life. They create a sense of dependency. They create a pseudo-world. They will tell people, "I'm doing God's work. I'm taking the money to the altar". The amount of money that these people are defrauded of by these so-called psychics is astronomical. We're talking in the billions of dollars.”

Bob Nygaard private detective specializing in psychic fraud

This Ex-Cop Has Locked Up 28 ‘Psychic’ Scammers, Returned $3.2M to Victims https://web.archive.org/web/20180126035505/http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2017/08/ex-cop-psychic-scammers/, patheos.com (21 August 2017)

Sören Kierkegaard photo
Karel Čapek photo
Leigh Brackett photo
H.L. Mencken photo
Fritz Leiber photo
Max Scheler photo

“"This law of the release of tension through illusory valuation gains new significance, full of infinite consequences, for the ressentiment attitude. To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling. Therefore such phenomena as joy, splendor, power, happiness, fortune, and strength magically attract the man of ressentiment. He cannot pass by, he has to look at them, whether he “wants” to or not. But at the same time he wants to avert his eyes, for he is tormented by the craving to possess them and knows that his desire is vain. The first result of this inner process is a characteristic falsification of the world view. Regardless of what he observes, his world has a peculiar structure of emotional stress. The more the impulse to turn away from those positive values prevails, the more he turns without transition to their negative opposites, on which he concentrates increasingly. He has an urge to scold, to depreciate, to belittle whatever he can. Thus he involuntarily “slanders” life and the world in order to justify his inner pattern of value experience.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Howard Scott photo