Quotes about thinking
page 94

“I am still much attached to them, but now since I am unable to go, it pains me to think of them. So I just stay busy with this work.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2014, "GhoshanaPatra with Narendra Modi", 2014

Pain, Business

“By dancing we could remain in the moment. By dancing we could avoid talking, dwelling on the past, or thinking about the future. We were connected in a way that was neither threatening nor complicated; just circling and swaying, following the oldest rhythms of breath and heartbeat.”

Valya Dudycz Lupescu (1974) American writer

The Silence of Trees (2010)

Way, Past, Future, Dance

“He walked on in silence for a while, thinking of all that he had seen. And the sum of his thought was a sickness against the whole hypocritical system that was despoiling an incredibly rich planet.”

Lester del Rey (1915–1993) Novelist, short story writer, editor

Source: The Eleventh Commandment (1962), Chapter 7 (p. 70)

Silence

“The temptation is to think that Vicente Fox, who heads a country 46% of whose people would like to live in the United States, is but another failed Third World visionary prattling on for the benefit of globalists who have been beavering away on their impossible dream for generations…”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

People, World, Dreams, Country

“Sometimes when I'm having a boring interview on the telephone, and I'm trying to think about something else because the questions are too boring, and I start looking around the room where I work, you know, full of books piled up to the sky, all different kinds of topics. I start calculating how many centuries would I have to live reading twenty-four hours a day every day of the week to make a dent in what I'd like to learn about things, it's pretty depressing. […] You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything… and know that we don't, that's the important part.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview in Cardiff, Wales, UK on March 11, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93W8II_R75Y Quotes 2010s, 2011

Life, Books, Understanding, Question

“An analysis of the concept of mind is an important philosophical issue, but the analysis cannot be reduced to programming of physiological terms… [It remarks the importance of the question] the way people think and the way computers can simulate thinking.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual Structures, 1984, p. 359 cited in: Rajiv Kishore, Ram Ramesh (2006) Ontologies: A Handbook of Principles, Concepts and Applications in Information Systems. p. 300

People, Way, Question

“Many childless single woman would be at my age already in panic. Also I have been thinking for the last 3 years, why I have been sacrificing so much time for my work. But, I have ended up to a thought that I would never change a single day out of my life. It would be lovely to get a family one day, but my life doesn't end even if that would not happen.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Anna interview (2005)

Love, Life, Age, Family

“By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Food, Help

“I think you know grandchildren now don't write a thank you for the Christmas presents that are walkin' on their pants with their cap on backwards, listenin' to the Enema Man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg and they don't like 'em.”

Alan Simpson (1931) American politician

Interview on Fox News reported in Grandparents Don't Care About Their 'Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg'-Loving Grandkids, Friedman, Uri, 2011-03-08, w:The Atlantic, 2017-11-12 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/simpson-grandparents-dont-care-about-their-snoopy-snoopy-poop-dogg/348664/,

Christmas

“In explaining things to people, I've come to terms with the fact that a lot of my goals are very Christian in the end. Because people no longer appreciate the taboos of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. I have to take them as far as they've ever been taken before, on a grand scale, in order for the world to realize we have to start over. It's very much like the mythology of the bible, the end of the world, and the antichrist and people are made to make a choice about their faith. I think certain elements of that are correct.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

As quoted in CMJ (January 1997).
1990s

People, World, Faith, Sex

“Your girlfriend is none too tightly wrapped, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. I don’t think she’s actually crazy, but—I been watching her a long time, and it is my considered opinion that she is none too clear on where the line between fantasy and reality should be drawn.”

Michael Swanwick (1950) American science fiction author

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 5, “Marrow Death” (pp. 180-181)

Forgiveness, Reality, Time

“But with royalty you never know. They think differently than real people. The real world never quite seems to reach them.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 126, “Taglios: Royal Return” (p. 720)

People, World

“Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 2, 1775
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

“A key to the connective tissue with all of the Clintons — everything they do — and we will talk about this probably in just about all the deadly sins we touch on— is their serial dishonesty. And we can focus on this later. But she did swear that she would disclose all the contributions to the Clinton Foundation. As of now —and again another right wing outlet, “The Washington Post,” says that 1100 donations are so far not disclosed. This is a woman who thinks of the truth as anything that is politically expedient for her. And her husband is the same way. And that is the danger of putting them back in the White House.”

Alexander Marlow (1986) american journalist

Marlow: Clintons’ ‘Serial Dishonesty’ The ‘Danger of Putting Them Back In The White House’ http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/03/07/httpswww-youtube-comwatchvtqcycm6uihs/ (March 7, 2016)

Truth, Way, Housing

“Now I ask you whether you yourself have not often noticed that the policy of floating between the old and the new is not tenable? Just think this over. Sooner or later it ends with one's standing frankly either to the right or to the left.
It is no ditch, and I repeat, then it was '48 [the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, ] now it is '84 [1884]; then there was a barricade of paving stones - now it is not of stones, but a barricade as to the incompatibility of old and new.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, Autumn 1884; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 381) p. 38 1880s, 1884

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Way, Feeling

“I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.”

Nicholas Kurti (1908–1998) Hungarian physicist

as quoted by George Porter in the preface of [But the Crackling is Superb, An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, Institute of Physics Publishing, London, UK, 1988, 0-750-30488-X, xvii]

Sadness

“There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 441, trans. Stopp

Variant translation: All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“The need is not for the creation of new analytical techniques specially designed for the negotiation process, but rather for the creative use of analytical thinking that exploits existing techniques.”

Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) American academic

Epilogue, p. 360.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)

“If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

" Timeless Identity http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/" (June 2008)

Life, World

“If space in infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the center of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 38

Dead

“Lang kept at it until everyone had had a turn shooting an AK-47. Then he said, "This weapon can do one other thing I haven't shown you yet. When you move the change lever all the way down instead of to the middle position, this is what happens." He stuck a fresh clip in the repeater, turned toward the target circle, and blasted away. He went through the whole magazine almost before Caudell could draw in a startled breath. "Good God almighty," Rufus Daniel said, peering in awe at the brass cartridge cases scattered around Lang's feet. "Why didn't he show us that in the first place?" He was not the only one to raise the question; quite a few shouted it. Caudell kept quiet. By now, he was willing to assume Lang knew what he was doing. The weapons instructor stayed perfectly possessed. He said, "I didn't show you that earlier because it wastes ammunition and because the weapon accurate past a few meters- yards- on full automatic. You can only carry so many rounds. If you shoot them all off in the first five minutes of battle, what will you do once they're gone? Think hard on that, gentlemen, and drill it into your private soldiers. This weapon requires fire discipline- requires it, I say again."”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 31

God, Way, Question, Change

“You like the Earth, Man, and you — pawing the ground — think of God, the little nursling will recognize you, and will think of you with love, because God lives even in it also. Give nourishment to the developing little creatures, either to plant or to animal, and it will develop for your sweet amazement. Give food for the wild animal starving, and it will slick to you.”

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853–1919) painter from Hungary

The Authority

Love, God, Food, Animals

“If one thinks that there is another authority and force apart from the Creator, he is committing a sin.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Selected Articles

“They came up and we did Sound Of The Crowd. They were under the impression that I was going to work on what they’d done so far and improve that and carry on. I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that, we’re starting again’, which was a bit of a shock for Phil. He argued about that but I said, ‘No, if I’m going to produce you, you’re going to do what I tell you to do. I will listen to your arguments and consider them, and if I still think I’m right we do it my way or it’s the highway. This is my attitude to everybody I produce, it’s a sort of democratic dictatorship!”

Martin Rushent (1948–2011) English record producer

Way

“I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn some day, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance — and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

Ryuji, the sailor in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (1965), p. 38.

Life, Light, Waiting, Past

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“It seems that when an impending catastrophe will affect them personally, in their very flesh and blood, intellectuals start to think more clearly about the legal and institutional prerequisites of a free society.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Ideas That Kill http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_diarist.html (Winter 2000). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Personality

“Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away.
And I'll be okay.
I'm not big on social graces;
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis.
Oh, I've got friends in low places.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

Friends in Low Places, written by DeWayne Blackwell and Earl "Bud" Lee.
Song lyrics, No Fences (1990)

Beer

“The sea is an emptiness where you see only your own reflection, with a lot of time to think about what's important.”

Reese Palley (1922–2015)

https://www.philly.com The Enquirer June 5 2015

Time, Sea

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

Death, Money, Hate, People

“I don't think there is anyone bigger or smaller than Diego Maradona!”

Kevin Keegan (1951) English footballer

“I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Success

“I think, in these days, especially in the States, you have to be a politician or an assassin or something, to really be a superstar.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

As quoted in When You're Strange (2009) by Tom Dicillo

“I don't need to cry so much. I think whatever you let loose with crying, I let loose with singing. I tend to be the one who wants… I'm trying to say this without sounding too touchy-feely. I'm usually the one who's better at comforting the person who's crying, you know?”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Jane magazine, April 2000

Singing, Personality, Cry

“Some people think, Swami calls himself a powerful magnet, but He is unable to attract us. The fault lies in them only.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

Sanathana Sarathi (January 2003), page 10

People

“Putting a shovel in a gallery or museum signified “this shovel has become art.” And it actually was. The action itself is art, because the artist projects himself in choosing the shovel, and especially in placing it out of context. It is art in the sense that the imprint of a hand in a cave is art, the Mona Lisa is art, a happening is art, etc. It is a problem that touches on the ethics and function of the artist: he assumes the right to have this supra-human calling that allows him to say to others, “everything that I touch with my hand is transformed into art.” The artist imposes his anguish, his vision of the world, and himself on others. The artist emasculates the observer. Maybe he thinks that the latter deserves no better… The artist assumes the right to show you what you can see for yourself, what you could obviously see much more clearly without his intervention. I contest this right.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Source: Art is no longer justifiable or setting the record straight, 2000, p. 66-67

World, Art, Problem, Sense

“Boxing Helena was something that I think was pretty cool, but people judged it without even having seen it. It’s not perfect, but I think for the story that we were trying to tell, it turned out pretty good. What it signified was really powerful to me: how society puts us in boxes one way or another.”

Sherilyn Fenn (1965) American actress

Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenn & Now", by Dennis Hensley. Movieline (USA). June 1999. p. 54-59.
on starring in Boxing Helena.

People, Way, Perfection, Box

“We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!”

Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970) American Christian radical

The Book of Ammon

People, World, Way, Change

“They may be a quarter million years more advanced than we are technologically. Their technology will look like magic to us. I don't think that we should be running around thinking these are gods in flying saucers that we should worship. We need to take this in a very rational way.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Source: Quoted in: Researcher's Close Encounters Convince Him Of Extraterrestrials The Virginian-Pilot, Roy A. Bahls, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=VP&p_theme=vp&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAFF84CB5EACDC1&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM (22 March 1995)

God, Way, Flying

“The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking. I am trying to renew poetic style, but within a classical framework. On the other hand, I don't want to lapse into imitating others. Letter to Picasso 1918”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet

Way

“There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory… why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 113.

Way, History, Intelligence, Understanding

“Think of the 40 years of confrontation. What is it we gained?…The old style has exposed itself: it is fruitless.”

Sergei Akhromeyev (1923–1991) Soviet marshal

Quoted in "Mr. Darman's Sermon", July 29, 1989, editorial, New York Times.

“Some force whole regions, in despite
O' geography, to change their site;
Make former times shake hands with latter,
And that which was before come after.
But those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think 's sufficient at one time.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 23
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Sense, Change, Time

“Garner: Before we get off the electoral process, they wanted me to run for Governor [of California] about 8 years ago--ahem--and I didn't want to do it. I wasn't gonna get in with that--
Tavis Smiley: Now you wish you had.
Garner: No, no, no.
Tavis Smiley: Hey, Arnold [Schwarzenegger] won.
Garner: No. I think I could have won easy, but I don't think that they ought to have somebody like me or Schwarzenegger as Governor. It's no way to run a state.”

James Garner (1928–2014) American film and television actor

Tavis Smiley interview (2004)

Way

“The man who is satisfied, because he thinks he is safe, who feels that he has religion enough, because he thinks he has enough to save him from hell, is as ignorant of the power as he is a stranger to the consolation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Gardiner Spring (1785–1873) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 106.

Religion, Feeling, Hell, Christ

“I understood by my reason and by my feeling of my pains that I should die; and I assented fully with all the will of my heart to be at God’s will.
Thus I dured till day, and by then my body was dead from the middle downwards, as to my feeling. Then was I minded to be set upright, backward leaning, with help, — for to have more freedom of my heart to be at God’s will, and thinking on God while my life would last.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Chapter 3

Life, God, Pain, Feeling

“With each succeeding year on the diet — it's called lacto-ovo-vegetarianism — I've felt better. I'm more healthy, I can train with more energy, and I'm not as much of a "hard guy" as I used to be. I've become more concerned with my fellow man and the other inhabitants I share the earth with. Judy and I have now been vegetarians for almost 35 years. We have no fish, fowl or red meat in our diet. Yet I can still carry the same amount of muscle mass as I did in winning my four Mr. Universe titles. People can't believe it. They think that to have big muscles you have to eat meat — it's a persistent and recurring myth. But take it from me, there's nothing magic about eating meat that's going to make you a champion bodybuilder. Anything you can find in a piece of meat, you can find in other foods as well.”

Bill Pearl (1935) American bodybuilder

Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Sports (20th anniversary ed. Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications, 2005), p. 374 https://books.google.it/books?id=wQD2PgD85O8C&pg=PA374.

People, Food, Guy, Fish

“When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 6

Pain, Memory

“For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours … all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Edward Cullen to Bella Swan, p. 304
Twilight series, Twilight (2005)

Time

“I used to wish that I could write songs, like the others—and I've tried, but I just can't. I can get the words all right, but whenever I think of a tune the others always say it sounds like such-a-thing, and when they point it out, I see what they mean.”

Ringo Starr (1940) British musician, former member of the Beatles

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 96

“As for me, I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can't stop tutting and nagging. There's no escape from me's relentless criticism. Me even knows what I'm thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. "You're worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again," whines Me. "How pathetically solipsistic." And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we're there yet.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian 16 August 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/charlie-brooker-writing-deadlines Guardian columns

“It is too easy and simplistic to feel that, if you have not succeeded yet, you will not succeed in the future. Overcoming fatalistic thinking is essential if you really want a great future.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Feeling, Future

“The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting and with good success to implement a further dismemberment of Germany. I think that if I resigned as I threatened to do yesterday, it would simply discredit me to no purpose... This august lady [Fifteenth Army]... has the job of reviewing the strategy and tactics of the war to see how the former conformed to the unit plans and how the tactics changed. Were it not for the fact that it will be, so far as I am concerned, a kick up stairs, I would like it much better than being a sort of executioner to the best race in Europe.
Later when people wake up to what is going on here, I can admit why I took the job.
Am I weak and a coward? Am I putting my posthumous reputation above my present honor? God how I wish I knew…
P. S. No one gives a damn how well Bavaria is run. All they are interested in now is how well it is ruined.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Letter to Beatrice (29 September 1945), published in The Patton Papers (1996), edited by Martin Blumenson Vol. 2 , p. 786 https://books.google.com/books?id=XGP_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA786

God, War, People, Change

“My secret? Hm. Well, I think the secret is this. Don't come up with a really ambitious twelve-CD monster for your first project, because it'll be doomed very quickly. For your very first release, make something small. Put as much effort into it as you can muster, but don't feel pressured. Then, for every subsequent release, push yourself just a little bit harder to make a better product. By the time you've churned out your sixth or seventh, you'll have a pretty solid reputation.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://www.adventure-treff.de/artikel/interviews.php?id=30&lang=eng
Other Articles

Secret, Feeling, Effort, Time

“I think it is time for us to ensconce him in the rocking chair up there that we reserve for senior members of the chamber.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Time

“I really do think that there is at least some degree of causality that most major terrorist attacks took place when the extremists did not have to deal with a democratic Pakistani government, when they operated without check and oversight. I believe that if my government had not been destabilised in Pakistan in 1996, the Taleban could not have allowed Osama bin Laden to set up base in Afghanistan, openly recruit and train young men from all over the Muslim world and declare war on America in 1998.”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

Men, War, World, Training

“I think it is considered bad to be clever, because I think people usually assume that a clever person or a clever band doesn't have substance, doesn't really care about anything. People want music that matters, that believes in something, I think, whether it expresses anger or despair or love. People want to believe that their artists are portraying emotions that they really feel. And I think that's true of Patsy Cline, Johnny Rotten, whoever you want to name. If you believe the artist, you're going to go for it.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

Quotes from interviews

Love, People, Music, Feeling

“In our Mammonistic blindness we have unlearned how to see clearly that the doctrine of the sanctity of interest is a monstrous self-deception, that the gospel of the loan-interest that alone makes one blessed has entangled our entire thinking in the golden web of international plutocracy.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

“When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.”

Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) American politician

Washington Post interview (1994)

Kiss

“I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence, Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Words I Never Said"
Albums, Lasers (2011)

Fear, Silence

“Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you think they will.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

Lawrence Summers in: David Warsh (February 11, 1992) "Avoiding Weimar Russia", Boston Globe, p. 37, Section: Business.
1990s

“My blog is an extension of my thinking. Why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2008

“It seemed to me, thinking quick, that the only way of solving the am-parce [impasse] was to sacrifice Shorty. Like Russian peasants with their children, you know, when they are pursued by wolves and it becomes imperative to lighten the sledge.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Spring Fever

Spring Fever (1948)

Children, Way

“The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

[Shermer, Michael, July, 2008, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results, How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results, Scientific American, 2008-07-24]

Nature

“People call my music complex because I will have instruments playing at their own paces, as if the other instruments weren't even there. It doesn't march along in the same way that most older music does. But to me, I honestly don't think that a work like Debussy's La Mer is any less complex than my work. It's full of all sorts of sounds and textures going on at once, yet we still look at is as beautiful, structured and fluid. That's all I'm trying to do; I'm not out to compose for complexity's sake.”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

From American Gothic: An Interview with Elliott Carter http://edwebproject.org/carter.html (1993) by Andy Carvin.

People, Beauty, Music, Way

“The less [government] the better. As far as your personal goals are and what you actually want to do with your life, it should never have to do with the government. You should never depend on the government for your retirement, your financial security, for anything. If you do, you're screwed… That's all the government should be: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines…I think a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They want their lives to be controlled, to be put into a box… Why should someone put a limit on how much fun I can have, how much I can accomplish?”

Drew Carey (1958) American actor, comedian, game show host, libertarian and photographer

Advocates for Self Government Carey quote http://www.self-gov.org/carey.html Reason Magazine Interview http://reason.com/9711/fe.int.carey.shtml

Life, People, Freedom, Dependency

“Well, I think one thing that we can do, quite simply, is to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood. It's the largest provider of abortion in the United States. They are a billion-dollar industry. As a matter of fact, the head of Planned Parenthood in Illinois said that Planned Parenthood wants to be the LensCrafters of Big Abortion.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Terrence P. Jeffrey Rep. Michele Bachmann: De-Fund Planned Parenthood CNSNews 2010-12-06 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michele-bachmann-can-t-we-minimum-start 2011-04-15 Misquoting Steve Trombley in a 2008 interview with The Wall Street Journal http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9674675 saying "I like to think of it as the LensCrafters of family planning." 2010s

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

Literature, Question, Problem

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life, Death, Smile, Dreams

“When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on”

Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008) British writer

"Celia Celia", from Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits (1991).

Sadness, Hope

“I'm just saying, a lot of people are on medicine, they don't need to be. Because let's be honest folks, it isn't easy for anyone. And I think in most cases, the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment. And to be honest, in the day and age we live in now, if someone comes up to you and says, “I think you might be clinically depressed,” the proper response is, “Thank you, thank you very much. That means I’m awake." Is there any indication we shouldn’t be depressed— are you living on the same planet that I am? Did you ever think that depression is the reasonable human response to the crap we’re going through as a species, meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step, or at least into taking some different course of action so we might survive? Did you ever think that maybe it’s the happy people that are really screwed up in the head? Where’s that spin on the situation? Maybe it's those guys. "Hey, how ya doing?" "I don't know, I feel great, again!" "Really, well, that's creepy and weird. Maybe you should be on medication. Clearly you're self-centered, delusional, narcissistic. I don't know, but you're draining me with your happy. Could you move along because I'm doing the big work, creating a world that functions properly in my brain."”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/2ufif7/comedy-central-presents-bipolar-coaster
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Happiness, People, Age, World

“I just think if you have an emotion and you let that go that moment might pass. If you don't open the door for the person to come in, it would have just been like, "Nice to meet you — goodbye."”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

As quoted in "Heidi Klum: No Regrets About Risqué Oprah Interview" by Samantha McIntyre and Oliver Jones in People (27 October 2007)

Personality

“It would be more realistic to think of all economic enterprise as a public service. Thought of in this perspective, a private economy is a contradiction in terms. Every economy is a public or social (not socialist) economy.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 4 : From Principles to Problems

“We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.
It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” and “evil” had little to do with it.
That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 7 (pp. 105-106)
Glory Season (1993)

Men, Pleasure, Sex, Behavior

“For myself, I detest the fellow, and think him a charlatan. I am certain that, in spite of his frogs, he is making no real progress in physics.”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 10.

“I didn’t allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air because I was very idealistic, and I didn’t want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children.”

Art Clokey (1921–2010) American animator

Interview by Patrick S. Pemberton, "Once and Future Gumby", The Tribune (San Luis Obispo), 13 February 2002, p. A1

Children, Parent

“At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I'd rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I'd never even seen before in my life started running after me to tell me things I'd just decided I didn't think it was a good idea to hear about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that's when I got what you might call a "following."”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I've found that to be absolutely axiomatic.
Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 1: Puberty

Life, Friendship, Feeling, Idea

“Haig does not care how many men he loses. He just squanders the lives of these boys. I mean to save some of them in the future. He seems to think they are his property. I am their trustee. I will never let him rest. I will raise the subject again & again until I nag him out of it—until he knows that as soon as the casualty lists get large he will get nothing but black looks and scowls and awkward questions…I should have backed Nievelle against Haig. Nievelle has proved himself to be a Man at Verdun; & when you get a Man against one who has not proved himself, why, you back the Man!”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Frances Stevenson's diary entry (15 January 1917), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 139
Prime Minister

Men, Boy, Question, Future

“If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and — I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

War

“We are brutal with ourselves…., and one of the consequences this could have is that we will be equally brutal and cold with everyone else. Perhaps that's exactly what I've been missing…. A stroke of a sword, a well-aimed bullet must be less than what I feel when I think of being near you.”

Gudrun Ensslin (1940–1977) German terrorist

Letter to Baader in The element of madness, July 12, 2009, Perlentaucher Medien GmbH, February 22, 2010 http://www.signandsight.com/features/1964.html,

Feeling

“I don’t think they (the Chinese) have better friends in Africa than us. But when we compare to how much money we get, if we succeed, if the MCA is funded by the US Congress for Tanzania, it’s going to be $700 Million. It’s going to be huge, it may be a total of all the Chinese have been giving us all these years.”

Jakaya Kikwete (1950) Tanzanian politician and president

Comparing China's financial assistance to his country. Interviews, Interview with Financial Times, 2007-10-04 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8a07e28-72a3-11dc-b7ff-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check1/

Money

“We often think that when a man insults another man by calling him a “girl,” the insult reflects a contempt for women. No. It reflects a contempt for any man who is unwilling to make himself strong enough to protect someone as precious as a woman.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Women, Girl, Strong

“It is quite likely that it is possible, yes. But what we've said all along -- speaking for both the (Roslin) Institute and the PPL staff - is that we would find it ethically unacceptable to think of doing that. We can't think of a reason to do it. If there was a reason to copy a human being, we would do it, but there isn't.”

Ian Wilmut (1944) embryologist

On human cloning, in "Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume?" by Andrew Ross in Salon February 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000301033550/http://www.salon.com/feb97/news/news2970224.html.

“The [Labour] moderates split off and that split of the moderates delayed the realignment of British politics for at least one generation and possibly two, because as a conservative passionately believing in freedom under the law and believing that socialism cannot stand for that, the realignment - you hear me say my job is to stay in long enough so that everyone knows that socialism and the British character do not mix, so socialism has got to go - is to get the fundamental realignment which I think is in keeping with the British character, which is two parties, a free enterprise party, because if you have political freedom under the rule of law you have got to have economic freedom as well. It is to bring about that can only be done really by eventually the Labour Party splitting off the Left and rejecting the Clause 4 and the command economy, and then we really should get a realignment.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview for The Standard (13 March 1987) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106595 Second term as Prime Minister

Law, Freedom, Passion

“[T]he prime minister has been trying to bully me for twenty-eight years and he has not succeeded yet. I am not frightened of you. I never have been and I never will be. I think nothing of you.”

Helen Suzman (1917–2009) South African politician

As quoted in "The Hon. Member For Houghton" https://web.archive.org/web/19960913173321/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/04/20/the-hon-member-for-houghton (20 April 1987), by E. J. Kahn, The New Yorker 1980s

“I don’t think John Edwards knows what the heck he is talking about. John Edwards wants you and all the Democrats to think, ‘I want us out of there,’ but when you come back and you say, ‘O. K., John. What about the chaos that will ensue? Do we have any interest, John, left in the region?’ Well, John will have to answer yes or no. If he says yes, what are they? What are those interests, John? How do you protect those interests, John, if you are completely withdrawn? Are you withdrawn from the region, John? Are you withdrawn from Iraq, John? In what period? So all this stuff is like so much Fluffernutter out there. So for me, what I think you have to do is have a strategic notion. And they may have it—they are just smart enough not to enunciate it.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Speaking on Edwards' position for immediate withdrawal of about 40,000 American troops from Iraq (February 5, 2007), reported in the New York Observer http://www.observer.com/20070205/20070205_Jason_Horowitz_pageone_newsstory1-2.html 2000s

“I could not think that GOD was poor, that He was short of resources, or unwilling to supply any want of whatever work was really His. It seemed to me that if there were lack of funds to carry on work, then to that degree, in that special development, or at that time, it could not be the work of GOD.”

James Hudson Taylor A Retrospect

(J. Hudson Taylor. A Retrospect. Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, n.d., 90).

God, Time

“When I asked Amin [Husain] and Katie [Davison] what Occupy Wall Street’s ultimate goal was, they said, “A government accountable to the people, freed up from corporate influence.” … Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing your life together in assembly.” … The ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face; what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty gaze of the screen.
In meetings and elsewhere, this Tolstoyan experience of undergoing a personal crisis of meaning, both political and of the soul, seemed deeply shared. Apart from Amin, I’ve met an architect, a film editor, an advertising consultant, an unemployed stock trader, a spattering of lawyers, and people with various other jobs who, after joining OWS, found themselves psychologically unable to go about their lives as before. … Michael Ellick, the minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, said that when he first visited Zuccotti Park he was reminded of his years at a monastery. “When people enter a monastery, they don’t know why they’ve come,” said Ellick. “They are there to find out why they are there, why they were compelled to leave the other world.””

Michael Greenberg (1952) American author

“What Future for Occupy Wall Street?” The New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 2, February 9, 2012

Life, People, World, Way

“Any brute will demand his right to be a law unto himself, beating his wife and his children as he pleases, and defend that right with his father’s rifle and think himself a patriot.”

Kage Baker book Mendoza in Hollywood

Part 3 “The Island Out There” Chapter 3 (pp. 304-305)
Mendoza in Hollywood (2000)

Children, Law

“That is the central idea of our current tradition. It is the idealization of the mass and the negation of the individual; its panacea, its method of realization, is political direction; its goal, as always, is the undefined Good Society… The aim of pedagogy today is not to prepare the individual for his own enjoyment of life, but to enable him to better serve the mass machine; the psychologist makes adjustment to mass-thought the measure of healthy thinking and living; jurisprudence puts social responsibility ahead of individual responsibility; the concern of the scientist in the discovery of principles is secondary to his preoccupation with mass production; the economist studies institutions, not people; and philosophy rejects speculation as to the nature of man or the purpose of life as effort that might better be put to the practical problems of society. Ours is the culture of ‘the all,’ rather than ‘the one.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: One is A Crowd: Reflections of An Individualist (1952), pp. 36-37

Life, People, Idea, Nature

“We had a lot of fun with Casey all through the Series. There never was anything abusive about him. We rode him just to hear his clownish comebacks. I know I kidded him plenty. And when he won the the 1 to 0 game, he ran around the bases with his thumb to his nose and his hand pointed to the Yankee bench. I think it was meant for me in particular as he tried to show me he, too, knew how to hit home runs. Ruppert didn't like it and later said it was undignified. But we didn't mind Casey having his fun.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

In The Babe Ruth Story (1948) by Ruth, with Bob Considine, pp. 123-124

Home, Game

“[H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. […] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. […] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

Hannah Arendt book Eichmann in Jerusalem

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. III.

Communication, Reality, Memory, Time

“(When asked who the three finest old time guitarists were) Well, I would have to pick Travis, you know; I think he's a great man with his music, and there's been many a man that's copied from Merle. You know, they say he learned from a man in Kentucky. Well, I know this Mose Rager he learned from, he learned from Arnold Shultz, the man I speak of, a colored man, in playing the blues. So I think it all leads back to this old colored man back in Kentucky.”

Bill Monroe (1911–1996) American bluegrass musician

Music, Color, Learning, Time

“We're not thinking we're going to take a lot of people up front who are buying Toyota Camrys and Honda Accords and Nissan Altimas and suddenly tomorrow they're going to go shopping at a Ford store.”

Steve Lyons (1960) American baseball player

People

“Here's the story: There's a terrible crisis affecting the American economy. We have come together on a bill to alleviate the crisis. And because somebody hurt their feelings they decide to punish the country. I mean, I would not have imputed that degree of pettiness and hypersensitivity […] But think about this: Somebody hurt my feelings so I will punish the country. I mean, that's hardly plausible. And there are 12 Republican members who were ready to stand up for the economic interests of America but not if anybody insulted them. I'll make an offer: Give me those 12 people's names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they'll now think about the country.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Speaking of the defeat of a financial bailout plan in the House
[Foon, Rhee, http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/09/frank_mocks_gop.html, Frank mocks GOP complaint on bailout, The Boston Globe, September 29, 2008, 2008-11-20]

People, Feeling, Hurt, Country

“When I think of something that really is me, that I'm proud of, is honestly, I would have to say, I've never sold my soul along the way… All those things, you're selling your soul, and I don't think I have.”

Carly Fiorina (1954) American corporate executive and politician

David Webb Show http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/05/ohio-male-rnc-member-calls-carly-fiorina-hot-babe/ (5 August 2015). 2010s, 2015, David Webb Show (August 2015)

Way, Soul

“Typing is no substitute for thinking.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

cited in: John G. Kemeny, ‎Thomas E. Kurtz, Structured BASIC programming (1987) p. 118