Quotes about thinking
page 93

“Beloved, don't fret that you gave yourself so quickly!
Believe me, I don't think badly or wrongly of you.
The arrows of Love are various: some scratch us,
And our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison.
But others strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points
Pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood.
In the heroic ages, when gods and goddesses loved,
Desire followed a look, and joy followed desire.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Roman Elegies

Elegy 3
Roman Elegies (1789)

Love, God, Age, Strong

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
1990s

Way, Idea, Problem, Sense

““Are you sharpness personified?”
Khouri poured herself a few final sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 2 (p. 27).

Coffee

“No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism…”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Life, People, School, Future

“Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts-and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to respond to these generations of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 883, Page 128
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (1986)

Dreams

“Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 7
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Weather, Sea

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Men, Feeling, Understanding, Universe

“Systems philosophy brings forth a reorganization of ways of thinking. It creates a new worldview, a new paradigm of perception and explanation, which is manifested in integration, holistic thinking, purpose-seeking, mutual causality, and process-focused inquiry.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 31-32

Way

“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Books, Reading

“I think about us diving
Diving off a rock, into another moment…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

“George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], gave us a speech, attempting to distinguish 'we' from 'they' … and how does he do it?…. He says "Our god" — of course it’s actually the same God — but that's a detail, lets hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament so he says … "Our God is the God who named the stars" … Here's the problem with his comment … The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

" I, Skeptic—Modern Skepticism in the Internet Age", The Amaz!ng Meeting 6 keynote speech (June 2008) http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/watch/2008/06/19/george-bush-and-star-names. 2000s

God, Star, Problem

“I remember we adjourned for lunch and a friendly Afrikaner warder asked me the question, "Mandela, what do you think is going to happen to you in this case?" I said to him, "Agh, they are going to hang us." Now, I was really expecting some word of encouragement from him. And I thought he was going to say, "Agh man, that can never happen." But he became serious and then he said, "I think you are right, they are going to hang you."”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Interview segment http://www.radiodiaries.org/mandela/t_movement.html on All Things Considered (NPR) broadcast (27 April 2004) 2000s

Question

“In addition to that sentience, which the insect or animal has, the human being is endowed with intellect. Intellect is what is cognized, which the animal need not do. So it is this power of the intellect to discriminate and interpret what is cognized that gives the individual being a sense of individuality and makes him consider himself something special in this manifestation. What is more, he goes to the extent of believing that the entire manifestation has been created for his benefit! So, all the time he is thinking, In what way can I benefit by exploiting nature?”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

And the extent to which the human being has 'benefited' himself, we can all see.
Page 16

Way, Nature, Sense, Time

“Tell yourself every morning as you go to work that you love your job. Think of it as interesting, even fascinating. By so doing you will ultimately get enthusiastic about your work — and you will undoubtedly do a better job.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Power Of The Plus Factor (1987)

Love

“There's a little pond, in a small town in Poland, where they used to dump the ashes. The pond is still gray, even half a century later. I've heard it said that the holocaust had no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. I'd like to think that's not true. But if it is, then no one on Earth survived this war.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

World War Z

War, Soul, Personality

“When people speak about the results of the 1860 Presidential election, it’s usually given out that Lincoln had, I think, 39 percent of the popular vote in that election. But, of course, there were 10 states in the South who formed part of the ten or the eleven states of the Confederacy, in which no Republican electors were on the ballots. And since we know that at least 100,000 men from those states came north to join the Union Army, there were at least 100,000 votes that weren't counted.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

Men, People, Parting

“Yet, even did it be ever proved that Man once to be a fish, I to have no cause to abate the first part of mine argument; but to have the more need of the thought, that I gain power to accept the Fact; for I still then to have no occasion that I think Man to have been truly a Fish, or aught truly different from a Man; but only that he did be once Modified physically to his need, and to be still possessed of the Man-Spirit, though all lackt of development. Yet, truly, I to be less offend in my Reason, if that it be shown that Man did be ever somewise in his present shape, though mayhap so brutish as the Humpt Men; but yet I do be ready to consider all matters, and do build no Walls about my Reason. Yet, neither I to have an over-ready acceptance of aught, but to need that my Reason shall approve.”

William Hope Hodgson book The Night Land

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 15

Men, Fish, Parting

“At the very core of RIM — at its DNA — is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable.”

Thorsten Heins (1957) German Canadian businessman

Canuck Quotes: RIM and the BlackBerry http://canadianaconnection.com/2012/04/canuck-quotes-rim-blackberry in Canadiana Connection (18 April 2012).

“[G]enetically my legs are supposed to be huge. I can't really think about it, or I'll go crazy.”

Rihanna (1988) Barbadian singer, songwriter, and actress

On working out. Allure magazine, January 2008.

“The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.”

Ben Elton book Stark

"Court, Hippies and Love at First Sight"
Stark (1989)

“Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a sort of compost heap of the libidinal and the symbolic? Aren't D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Paul Theroux imperialists? What do black Africans think of Conrad, Bellow, Updike and Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why don't the white guys look for the heart of darkness in their own bathrooms?”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Heroine: A Contraption of Attitudes" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E4DF103BF932A15750C0A964948260&scp=30&sq=, The New York Times (21 March 1982)

Guy, Heart

“Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact—which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

After the McLean v. Arkansas creationism trial, as quoted in Review of the National Center for Science Education Vol. 24, No. 6 (November–December 2004) http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol24/620_then_a_miracle_occurs_12_30_1899.asp

Truth, Art, Question, Appearance

“If you think it’s easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you’ve probably never tried.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

"Menus: Spicy Fried Calamari", Stacey's at Waterford, 2008-01-14 http://www.eatatstaceys.com/staceys-waterford/menus-lunch.php, Restaurant menus

“I am convinced, in short, that the importance of truth for the kind of historical enquiries I am considering has been much exaggerated. I take this to be a product of the fact that so much of the meta-historical discussion has hinged around the analysis of scientific beliefs. In such cases the question of truth may perhaps be of some interest. But in most of the cases investigated by historians of ideas, the suggestion that we need to consider the truth of the beliefs under examination is, I think, likely to strike the historian as strange.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

Truth, Idea, Question

““I think you look on death as your friend,” she murmured. “That is a strange friend for a young man to have.”
“The only faithful friend in this world,” he said. “Death is always sure to be at your side.””

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 21 (p. 148)

Death, World, Faith

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

Love, Books, Way, Search

“This morning, when I got my mail — there's concrete all over the ground — cement, you know — and these little clovers — the little green clovers, like from St. Patrick's Day — the plant — were growing up out of the cement — no dirt and no nothing and no rain — and there they were, growing up out of the cement, and I was thinking — "that's like me."”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"My Nightgown is Blue and I am too!" (20 March 2009)

“I don't know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old-fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve — ascertain — a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don't think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that's exactly what Milton Friedman does.”

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

"Interview with F. A. Hayek", in Cato Policy Report (February 1983)
1980s and later

Money, People, Books, Imagination

“The only person I do worry about, that I want to be a good person for, I think is my responsibility, is my sister. I'm going to be cool for you, okay. I like, I need to, I like being by myself right now. I think it's good for me.”

Britney Spears (1981) American singer, dancer and actress

Diane Sawyer interview http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2003_11_23/story_1024.asp, 60 Minutes (23 November 2003)

Sister, Personality

“Christianity is ever-present, with its wonderful parable of the prodigal son, to urge us to counsels of forbearance and forgiveness. Jesus was full of love for souls of women wounded by the passions of men, and He loved to bind their wounds, drawing from those same wounds the balm which would heal them. Thus he said to Mary Magdalene: "Your sins, which are many, shall be forgiven, because you loved much?" a sublime pardon which was to awaken a sublime faith.
Why should we judge more strictly than Christ? Why, clinging stubbornly to the opinions of the world which waxes hard so that we shall think it strong, why should we too turn away souls that bleed from wounds oozing with the evil of their past, like infected blood from a sick body, as they wait only for a friendly hand to bind them up and restore them to a convalescent heart?”

Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895) French writer and dramatist, son of the homonym writer and dramatist

Le christianisme est là avec sa merveilleuse parabole de l'enfant prodigue pour nous conseiller l'indulgence et le pardon. Jésus était plein d'amour pour ces âmes blessées par les passions des hommes, et dont il aimait à panser les plaies en tirant le baume qui devait les guérir des plaies elles-mêmes. Ainsi, il disait à Madeleine : - "il te sera beaucoup remis parce que tu as beaucoup aimé", sublime pardon qui devait éveiller une foi sublime. Pourquoi nous ferions-nous plus rigides que le Christ ?
Pourquoi, nous en tenant obstinément aux opinions de ce monde qui se fait dur pour qu'on le croie fort, rejetterions-nous avec lui des âmes saignantes souvent de blessures par où, comme le mauvais sang d'un malade, s'épanche le mal de leur passé, et n'attendant qu'une main amie qui les panse et leur rende la convalescence du coeur ?
La Dame aux Camélias, English translation by David Coward; Oxford University Press, Sep 18, 1986.

Love, Women, Men, World

“The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Truth, Justice, Idea

“Eight simple steps of what I think caused the Flood and explain all these strange phenomena on the planet. Then we'll go into a little bit more detail and then we'll close this down.
1. Noah and the animals got safely in the ark.
2. A 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space. As it was breaking up, some of the fragments got caught and became the rings around the planets. They made the craters on the Moon, the craters on some of the planets, and what was left over came down and splattered on top of the North and South pole.
3. This super cold snow fell on the poles mostly, burying the mammoths, standing up.
4. The dump of ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep. The spreading ice caused the Ice Age effects. The glacier effects that we see. It buried the mammoths. It made the earth wobble around for a few thousand years. And it made the canopy collapse, which used to protect the earth. And it broke open the fountains of the deep.
5. During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals would settle out, and dead plants, and all get buried. They would become coal, if they were plants, and oil if they're animals. And those are still found today in huge graveyards. Fossils found in graveyards. Oil found in big pockets under the ground.
6. During the last few months of the flood, the unstable plates of the earth would shift around. Some places lifted up; other places sank down. That's going to form ocean basins and mountain ranges. And the runoff would cause incredible erosion like the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks.
7. Over the next few hundred years, the ice caps would slowly melt back retreating to their current size. The added water from the ice melt would raise the ocean level creating what's called a continental shelf. It would also absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere which allows for radiation to get in which is going to shorten people's life spans. And in the days of Peleg, it finally took affect.
8. The earth still today shows the effects of this devastating flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Life, People, Age, Mountain

““They want to find an imaginary mean between cupidity and charity,” says Arnaud, “as though our love could end and rest in any object other than God, this being charity, or in the creature, this being cupidity.” In this “imaginary mean” the new man had now established himself, and spent the greater part of his life; it was his spiritual homeland on earth. There he created habits for himself and made laws; he felt at ease and found ways of being virtuous and useful to his neighbors. God would not be angry with him for acting according to his own rules. Thus the worldly man was able to live perfectly well without thinking of a God who had formerly wanted everything done for his sake alone.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 121-122

Love, Life, God, Law

“Anderson Cooper: Is Islam at war with the West?
Donald Trump: I think Islam hates us. There is something there, there is a tremendous hatred there, and we have to get to the bottom of it. There is an unbelievable hatred of us.
Cooper: In Islam itself?
Trump: You're going to have to figure that out, but there is a tremendous hatred and we have to be very vigilant, we have to be very careful and we can't allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States and of people that are not Muslim.
Cooper: The question is is there a war between the West and radical Islam or is it between the West and Islam itself?
Trump: Well it's radical but it's very hard to define, it's very hard to separate because you don't know who's who.”

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

9 March CNN interview, as quoted in "US Election 2016: Donald Trump tells CNN TV interviewer 'Islam hates us'" http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-election-2016-donald-trump-tells-cnn-tv-interviewer-islam-hates-us-1548760 by Harriet Sinclair, International Business Times (10 March 2016) 2010s, 2016, March

Hate, War, People, Question

“Lincoln had a wonderful faculty for understanding the topography of a country, and he was quite familiar with the one in which the army was about to operate; he carried a small chart in his pocket, on which were marked all the rivers and hills about Richmond, with the city itself, and the different points where General Lee had his forces posted, the lines of defense, and, in fact, all the information that a general of an army wanted. During our rides which were always within the lines he would stop and spread out his chart on his knees and point out to me what he would do if he were the general commanding, taking good care, at the same time, never to interfere in any way with General Grant, whom, I rather think, he considered the better strategist of the two.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 282

Way, Understanding, Time, Country

“[In response to using profanity] I think I was just being myself for a moment there…Look, I think people should be kind of light about this. It's something that plenty of people have heard in their lives for sure.”

Eric Garcetti (1971) American politician

quoted by Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-kings-swearing-apology-20140617-story.html (July 17, 2014) 2014, Los Angeles Kings Stanley Cup celebration

People, Light

“Our interest must not risk Iraq's interests. If we can build an Iraq on the basis of our own independence and sovereignty, I think this Iraq will be respected by others, whether it be the Americans, Iranians or any other country. And this is what we are working to achieve. We have to work with the Iraqi people - so far they have been divided and all other external forces found it easy to intervene because they found receptive ears. What we are saying is that we should reinforce Iraqi unity.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

People, Country

“So far from holding God to be finite, I hold, and in the book clearly teach, that all minds are infinite (in the true qualitative sense of the word), and God preeminently so. (See my pp. 330 seq., 363, and 373). Eternity, self-existence, self-activity, freedom, and infinity are to me all interchangeable terms, and are so treated wherever they turn up in the course of the book. My reviewer falls into a non sequitur when he concludes that I make God finite because I make him one of a community of spirits, each absolutely real; not God's finitude, but his definiteness, is what follows from that. This confusion of the definite with the finite is very common, and is the explanation of two tendencies in sceptical thinking — the tendency to deny the personality of God, whose infinity is supposed to mean his utter indefiniteness, and the tendency, in recoil from the former, to assert God's finitude in order to save his personality, which of course must be definite. But the true infinite, as distinguished from the pseudo-infinite, the infinite of quality in contrast to the infinite of quantity, is entirely definite; more definite, indeed, than any finite can be.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix E: Reply to Criticisms of Mr. J.M.E. McTaggert, p.421-2

God, Books, Communication, Sense

“Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de très bon foi, believes itself right. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak.”

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

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (2 February 1816)
1810s

Soul, Sincerity

“The legitimacy of prophetic moral discourse, I believe, is without question. It is not, however, sufficient as moral discourse. It undercuts preoccupation with meager thinking about means to short-range ends. … It does not concern itself with incremental choices that have to be made by persons and institutions in which good and evil are intricately intermingled.”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 55

Question, Evil, Personality

“I think the hard thing about this job [stand-up] — I mean, I think this part is great — but that the traveling is y'know, 'cause — 'cause I'm gone a lot from home and this time I'm out for three-and-a-half weeks without going home, and that's hard, to be gone three-and-a-half weeks 'cause then I have to ask my friends, "Would you mind going to the house and watering the plants, and turn some lights on and make it look like somebody's home, and make sure that the mobile over the crib isn't tangled or the baby's gonna get bored…"”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Taste This

Travel, Home, Light, Water

“[Apple] needs the support of the U. S. government in the way that BlackBerry has the support of the Canadian government. If not, it needs to think about moving phone leadership and operations to a country that will supply it with that defensive support. If it doesn't do this soon, it will eventually have its phones compromised and that could be the end of much of Apple's iPhone business.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Apple vs. BlackBerry vs. The FBI vs. Bill Gates http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/apple-vs.-blackberry-vs.-the-fbi-vs.-bill-gates.html in IT Business Edge (1 March 2016)

Way, Business, Support, Country

“I think I still have something to give. There is still that passion, that fire in me that says, ‘Let’s feel sorry for yourself for a day or so and let’s get back at it. Let’s get back on the horse.”

David Wright (1982) American baseball player

" quoted by the New York Post http://nypost.com/2017/09/07/david-wright-is-certain-about-what-hell-be-doing-next-season/

Feeling, Passion, Horse

“Scotty and I became good friends. We had an immediate musical rapport that was sensational. We did a lot of listening and talking. Besides technique, he had governing, control. I think he was the first bass player who was fleet-footed in the musical sense.
[…]
What a trauma! It struck me right down—that someone I was developing such a relationship with would suddenly not be there.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

On bassist Scott LaFaro and his premature demise, as quoted in Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro https://books.google.com/books?id=KnTSqVu9Zr4C&pg=PA67&dq=%22Clare+relates%22+intitle:Jade&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMI-9Dphf_kxgIVCGk-Ch3DaQiT#v=onepage&q=%22Clare%20relates%22%20intitle%3AJade&f=false (2009) by Helene LaFaro-Fernandez, pp. 67-68

Music, Sense

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Commencement Address at Kenyon College. Gambier, Ohio. May 21, 2005.
Essays

Education, Understanding, Sense, Freedom

“Even traditionally well educated and literate individuals are significantly restricted by the fact that they are able to use only a fraction of the biological and conceptual thinking tools which are available”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

the mind map
The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

Education

“I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, — for I have had a little experience in that business, — that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, — and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)

Fools, Business, Strong, Country

“I think a life in music is a life beautifully spent and this is what I have devoted my life to.”

Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

Penso che una vita per la musica sia una vita spesa bene ed è a questo che mi sono dedicato. As quoted at a tribute page on his official website, lucianopavarotti.com (September 2007) http://www.lucianopavarotti.com

Life, Music

“[The Spanish news] really keeps me awake at night and in the day I can think of nothing else. I did not think it possible that anything could have made me regret being out of office, but I now wish I was in a situation, in which it might be possible to assist this glorious cause.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lady Holland (2 July 1808), quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 169.
1800s

Night

“I can't keep up with your turning tables
Under your thumb, I can't breathe.I won't let you close enough to hurt me, no.
I won't ask you, you to just desert me.
I can't give you, what you think you gave me.
It's time to say goodbye to turning tables.”

Adele (singer) (1988) British singer-songwriter

Turning Tables, written by Adele and Ryan Tedder.
Song lyrics, 21 (2011)

Time, Hurt

“This election was lost four and five and six years ago not this year. They dident start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the dryest little spot. But he dident know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands. They saved the big banks but the little ones went up the flue.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Nationally syndicated column number 518, And Here’s How It All Happened (1932), as published in the Tulsa Daily World, 5 December 1932.<ref>
Weekly columns

Money, People, Hope, Water

“The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Art, Music, Dead

“I think there are some objective [musical] qualities… how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Music, Time

“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world – life as I see it.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

1930s

Life, World, Color, Effort

“Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the idea that Iran's goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is ridiculous. Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: That we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs. Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it's not crazy. It's detestable but it's deterrable. Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world's most dangerous regime won't use the world's most dangerous weapons. And I promise you that as Prime Minister, I will never gamble with the security of Israel. From the beginning, the Ayatollah regime has broken every international rule and flouted every norm. It has seized embassies, targeted diplomats and sent its own children through mine fields. It hangs gays and stones women. It supports Assad's brutal slaughter of the Syrian people. Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terror. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Iran's proxies have dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers, planted thousands of roadside bombs, and fired over twenty thousand missiles at civilians. Through terror from the skies and terror on the ground, Iran is responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. In 1983, Iran's proxy Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 240 American servicemen. In the last decade, its been responsible for murdering and maiming American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just a few months ago, it tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant just a few blocks from here. The assassins didn't care that several Senators and members of Congress would have been murdered in the process. Iran accuses the American government of orchestrating 9/11, and it denies the Holocaust. Iran brazenly calls for Israel's destruction, and they work for its destruction – each day, every day. This is how Iran behaves today, without nuclear weapons. Think of how they will behave tomorrow, with nuclear weapons. Iran will be even more reckless and far more dangerous.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference http://www.aipac.org/pc/videos/2012/monday-gala-plenary/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu (March 2012). 2010s, 2012

Women, Children, People, World

“I know of people who secretly think about themselves: God must be really happy that I still believe in Him at all.”

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

Good heavens! That's not enough!
What's the use of walking with God? Walking with God is no illusion p. 209
Jesus Our Destiny

God, Happiness, People

“I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane.”

Martin Scorsese (1942) American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor

Scorcese on Scorsese, "Mean Streets—Alice Doesn't Live here Anymore—Taxi Driver".

Way, Reality

“"To renew" applies when we are fighting with the enemy, and an entangled spirit arises where there is no possible resolution. We must abandon our efforts, think of the situation in a fresh spirit then win in the new rhythm. To renew, when we are deadlocked with the enemy, means that without changing our circumstance we change our spirit and win through a different technique.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Effort, Change, Fight

“What one thinks is possible might not always be so. I try to do my best but, finally, everything lies in God's hands. I consider my skills as a musician to be a blessing from God. Even today, before I perform, I am unsure of whether I will be able to move my audience. I leave everything to Him… He pulls the strings in my life.”

A. R. Rahman (1966) Indian singer and composer

A R Rahman: In tune with life

Life, God

“I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say.”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), pp. 239–240

War, Books, World, Boy

“If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

Source: Why Evolution is True (2009), p. 138

“Glenn Beck: But I was standing on the stage with Freedom Works on Friday in a show that we’re going to air tonight at 8:00 on TheBlaze and I was giving a speech and it struck me about halfway through, the similarities of what is being done right now to the beginning of our country— we are repeating, and we're at the very beginning of it, but we're repeating all of the steps that it took for use to be free in— around the time of the Declaration of Independence, don't you think?
David Barton: I agree. And I look—
Glenn Beck: It's starting to happen.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2012-11-05
Will Christians show up this time? Glenn interviews David Barton
http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/11/05/will-christians-show-up-this-time-glenn-interviews-david-barton/
The Glenn Beck Program
Radio, quoted in * 2012-11-05
Beck & Barton Say Romney Will Win Because 'We are Repeating all of the Steps' the Founders Took to Create This Nation
Kyle
Mantyla
RightWingWatch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-barton-say-romney-will-win-because-we-are-repeating-all-steps-founders-took-create-nati
2012-11-07
2010s, 2012

Freedom, Time, Country

“The wounded want power, nothing else; they think it will keep them from being hurt again.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Hurt

“I don’t tell myself I am a hero. People do look up to performers and think of them as heroes…Hero worship in India is too big. It is both right and wrong. It is fair to respect people who have done things that others haven’t but it is not right to traet them as gods.”

Kapil Dev (1959) Indian cricketer

Quoted in [Datta Bandegiri,Asavari Fadanis & Aparna Atre, Paper solution English Reader(L.L.) Std.X, http://books.google.com/books?id=iBg8W5l2DlUC&pg=PA87, Jeevandeep Prakashan Pvt Ltd, 87–, GGKEY:C8230HKTBTZ, 87]

God, People

“I do not think we are deceived to grow,
But that the crudest fancy, slightest show,
Covers some separate truth that we may know.

In the one Truth, each separate fact is true;
Eternally in one I many view,
And destinies through destiny pursue.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Truth

“Translation:I have spend a long time thinking, the arbitrators who holds the power calling others cheap, I don't see how elegant they are, for example, it is cheap to go for a $100 prostitute, but to spend one million on a show girl(singers or actress) is elegant, looking at porno is cheap, reading Red Head documents(all Communist documents have red color heading) is elegant, it is cheap to buy a replica gun, it is elegant to gun down two men in one go, it is cheap to play World of Warcraft, it is elegant to have sex with fashion models…”

Han Han (1982) Chinese writer and racing driver

From Han Han's blog: Beginning from today, I shall be a cheap man. 从今天起，做一个低俗的人 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0100gnj4.html

Men, World, Sex, Color

“At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations.
With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

excerpt[François Englert - Biographical, Nobel Prize in Physics (nobelprize.org), 2013, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/englert-bio.html]

World, Law, Search, Idea

“I think right about now I should answer some questions that are probably on your mind. You're probably thinking to yourself, 'Janeane, why are you not wearing the half-shirt that you're usually so fond of wearing? Because when we see you we like to see the half shirt.' You know I'm very fond of that and I'm fond of the low-slung jean and the thong, as you know. In fact when I go into a bar and I see ladies wearing the low-slung jeans and the half-shirts, I go up to them and say, 'On behalf of everyone here, thank you. Thank you!' 'Hey, pretty lady, are you wearing a thong? What a creative way to create favor with the opposite sex. That is so exciting. Let me understand the dynamic of the thong: so there's just a slender thread that just resides in your nether region for the better part of the day - just a string that rides in your anatomical hinterlands… it just hangs in there all day at work and then all day at the bar, so I can see how the gentlemen find that so exciting.'… Don't 'ooh' me, I'm not the one with the thong!”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

standup performance accessible through .WAV files available on the Internet
Standup routines

Sex, Way, Understanding, Question

“I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U. S.-one of unprecedented permissiveness. 'Fuzzification, is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation.”

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930–2016) Hungarian-born American electrical engineer

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1972), cited in: Lotfi A. Zadeh " My life and work - a retrospective http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/papers/Preface%20ACM-My%20Life%20and%20Work--A%20Retrospective%20View.pdf" in: Appl. Comput. Math., V.10, N.1, Special Issue, 2011, p. 4-9

Idea, Question

“What do you think you're doing?! Helps to have a map!' Also, 'Can you find the missing parts of my face?”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Guise of the Wolf (January 26, 2014), Research stream

Help, Parting

“There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."”

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) English priest and theologian

Langford Reed, The Complete Limerick Book (1924)
The topic of this limerick and the following one is George Berkeley's philosophical principle, "To be is to be perceived".

God, Tree

“I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Way, Drink, Beer, Business

“As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

In response to whether Anathem "reflects today's culture or politics," from an interview published Sept. 22, 2008 by MIT News http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/stephenson-qa-0922.html

Money, People, Way

“This latest skirmish in the high art/low art war has played out most fiercely over Mr. Tidwell, who shocked balletomanes when he left American Ballet Theater in 2005, then added insult to injury by joining the third season of “So You Think You Can Dance.””

Danny Tidwell (1984) American dancer

The New York Times La Rocco Claudia. "TV Viewers Discover Dance, and the Debate Is Joined" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/arts/dance/21revo.html?ref=dance#, The New York Times, September 21, 2007 About

War, Art, Dance, Season

“Anyway, my fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me. To think that a once-scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California and then stand here…then stand here in Madison Square Garden and speak on behalf of the president of the United States -- that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

2000s, Speech at the Republican National Convention (31 August 2004)

Dreams, Boy

“With the added psychological deterrent of litigation, my clashes with the pigs declined somewhat in frequency. They focused primarily on isolating me from others. Their efforts to perpetuate a discontinuity in our unity has been the pigs’ only effective weapon against me. And they’ve admitted in a thousand ways that their greatest fear is ending up with many other prisoners on their hands who think and act as I do. Their isolating me was long a tactic that I could not devise an effective countermeasure against, that is, until after 2001, when I was first exposed to revolutionary theory and have since come to understand the role of ideology. Without a unifying ideology, there can be no unity of struggle. Ideology was something I’d never had, and thus something I could not share. The prisoners who’d united in struggle with me had done so because of me. Not because of a shared principle. Therefore, when I was no longer around, they lost the initiative to struggle on.”

Kevin Rashid Johnson (1971) American prisoner and social activist

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Fear, Way, Understanding, Effort

“But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 14, 1763, p. 123
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Housing

“There is rarely an exception: once a cat makes up her mind to do something, your pleadings matter not at all. A dog, in the same circumstances, no matter how urgently he needs to do something, will change his mind if you insist. He is made for compromise, for self-sacrifice, for thinking about how you feel. Not cats.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 2

Dogs, Feeling, Cats, Change

“Writers who are also artist's only think of themselves as truly living when they are engaged in their sweet labour.”

Edward Storer (1880–1944) British writer

'Leigh Hunt' Herbert and Daniel, London, 1913

“This [covariance] is something that is not in the habit of thinking of most amateur investors. They look at their investments one at a time, and they don't, you always have to go back and say, what's the covariance? That's what really matters for what happen to your portfolio. Because when you invest in a lot of companies that are all the same, you're asking for trouble, because the whole thing is going to either blow up or succeed. And you can't live like that. You have to be looking for low covariance.”

Robert J. Shiller (1946) American economist

Robert Shiller. Chalk Talk - Covariance, Financial Markets (Coursera) https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global/lecture/41Ujc/chalk-talk-covariance.

Time

“I have been consistent and committed to comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship. I think our best chance was in 2007, when Ted Kennedy led the charge on comprehensive immigration reform. We have Republican support. We had a president willing to sign it. I voted for that bill. Senator Sanders voted against it. Just think, imagine where we would be today is we had achieved comprehensive immigration reform nine years ago. Imagine how much more secure families would be in our country, no longer fearing the deportation of a loved one; no longer fearing that they would be found out. … In 2006, when Senator Sanders was running for the Senate from Vermont, he voted in the House with hard-line Republicans for indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants, and then he sided with those Republicans to stand with vigilantes known as Minute Men who were taking up outposts along the border to hunt down immigrants. So I think when you were running for the Senate, you made it clear by your vote, Senator, that you were going to stand with the Republicans. When you got to the Senate in 2007, one of the first things you did was vote against Ted Kennedy’s immigration reform which he’d been working on for years before you ever arrived.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Love, Men, Fear, Family

“I didn't really think too much about the fact that it was about aliens. I was intrigued by that aspect of it, but I was more intrigued by the relationship between Mulder and Scully, and how intelligent this woman was, and that she would stand up in the face of his intelligence and feel comfortable with him.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

On her first impressions of The X-Files — reported in Betsy Pickle (June 19, 1998) "Scully's strength is Anderson's inspiration", The Knoxville News-Sentinel, p. T11.
1990s

Feeling, Intelligence

“I began studying philosophy and economics about the same time. The similarity of the two disciplines struck me at once. I found no difficulty in grasping the differences between the great philosophical systems as they were presented by our textbooks and our teachers. Economic theory was easier still. Indeed, I thought the successive systems of economics were rather crude affairs compared with the subtleties of the metaphysicians. Having run the gamut from Plato to T. H. Green (as undergraduates do) I felt the gamut from Quesnay to Marshall was a minor theme. The technical part of the theory was easy. Give me premises and I could spin speculations by the yard. Also I knew that my 'deductions' were futile…
Meanwhile I was finding something really interesting in philosophy and in economics. John Dewey was giving courses under all sorts of titles and every one of them dealt with the same problem — how we think… And, if one wanted to try his own hand at constructive theorizing, Dewey's notion pointed the way. It is a misconception to suppose that consumers guide their course by ratiocination—they don't think except under stress. There is no way of deducing from certain principles what they will do, just because their behavior is not itself rational. One has to find out what they do. That is a matter of observation, which the economic theorists had taken all too lightly. Economic theory became a fascinating subject—the orthodox types particularly — when one began to take the mental operations of the theorists as the problem…
Of course Veblen fitted perfectly into this set of notions. What drew me to him was his artistic side… There was a man who really could play with ideas! If one wanted to indulge in the game of spinning theories who could match his skill and humor? But if anything were needed to convince me that the standard procedure of orthodox economics could meet no scientific tests, it was that Veblen got nothing more certain by his dazzling performances with another set of premises…
William Hill set me a course paper on 'Wool Growing and the Tariff.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

I read a lot of the tariff speeches and got a new sidelight on the uses to which economic theory is adapted, and the ease with which it is brushed aside on occasion. Also I wanted to find out what really had happened to wool growers as a result of protection. The obvious thing to do was to collect and analyze the statistical data... That was my first 'investigation'.
Wesley Clair Mitchell in letter to John Maurice Clark, August 9, 1928. Originally printed in Methods in Social Science, ed. Stuart Rice; Cited in: Arthur F. Burns (1965, 65-66)

Way, Behavior, Game, Idea

“You were founding members of the mighty SMU Mob, bouncing like mad and watching in wonder as your then-Student Body President, Señor Lobster, danced with joy after all those Pony victories right here in Moody. And you'll think back to those carefree fall game days on the Boulevard – though I don’t recall seeing too many of you in the football stadium.”

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

2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)

Game, Victory, Joy, Dance

“Sometimes both sides of the civil war are evil, and sometimes intervention sometimes makes us less safe. This is real the debate we have to have in the Middle East. Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam, and we're more at risk. So, I think we need to think before we act, and know most interventions, if not a lot of them in the Middle East, have actually backfired on us.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2015-09-16
CNN REAGAN LIBRARY DEBATE: Later Debate Full Transcript
CNN
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/09/16/cnn-reagan-library-debate-later-debate-full-transcript/
2010s

War, Evil, Time

“Over Christmas, Allen Newell and I created a thinking machine.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1956) quoted on CMU Libraries: Problem Solving Research http://shelf1.library.cmu.edu/IMLS/MindModels/problemsolving.html 1940s-1950s

Christmas

“Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canadian Indians: "I've told you what a foul decadent lazy crowd they are & what I think of them!! But this camp is pitched right inside an Indian reserve … & we have hundreds of the mouldy local tribe camped around us"”

Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (1894–1972) king of the United Kingdom and its dominions in 1936

6 October 1919
Around the World with the Prince of Wales

“I have asked many teachers and parents what they thought mathematics to be and why it was important to learn it. Few held a view of mathematics that was sufficiently coherent to justify devoting several thousand hours of a child's life to learning it, and children sense this. When a teacher tells a student that the reason for those many hours of arithmetic is to be able to check the change at the supermarket, the teacher is simply not believed. Children see such "reasons" as one more example of adult double talk. The same effect is produced when children are told school math is "fun" when they are pretty sure that teachers who say so spend their leisure hours on anything except this allegedly fun-filled activity. Nor does it help to tell them that they need math to become scientists---most children don't have such a plan. The children can see perfectly well that the teacher does not enjoy math any more than they do and that the reason for doing it is simply that it has been inscribed into the curriculum. All of this erodes children's confidence in the adult world and the process of education. And I think it introduces a deep element of dishonestly into the education relationship.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Life, Children, World, Education

“I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Bernard, Act II
Arcadia (1993)

People, Time

“If they (the ASME) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Cited in: Harold F. Smiddy and Lionel Naum. " Evolution of a "Science of Managing" in America https://archive.org/details/selectedreadings00shul," in: Selected readings in management, Fremont A. Shull (edd), 1957. p. 16-17 1950s, "Management's Debt to the Engineers", 1952

Love, Education, History, Girl

“Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Charles Cooley (1927). Life and the Student: Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society, and Letters. p. 200

Imagination, Game

“The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Way

“There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Finder” (p. 43)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

People, Parting

“I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea…. I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1959)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Way, Idea, Understanding

“I think he who knows himself will know accurately, not the opinion of others about him, but what he is in reality… he ought to discover within himself what is right for him to do and not learn it from without…”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

As quoted in The Works of the Emperor Julian (1923) by Wilmer Cave France Wright, p. 91
General sources

Reality, Learning

“Think a hundred times before you take any decision, but once a decision is taken, stand by it as one man.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the League Lucknow session in 1937, following elections held under the Government of India Act, as quoted in Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Founder of Pakistan (1976) by Ziauddin Ahmad Suleri, p. 1

Decision, Time