Quotes about time
page 87

E. B. White photo
Erasmus Darwin photo
Tom Petty photo
Hermann Weyl photo

“[Physicists and philosophers] stick stubbornly to the principles of a mechanistic interpretation of the world after physics has, in its factual structure, already outgrown the latter. They have the same excuse as the inhabitant of the mainland who for the first time travels on the open sea: he will desperately try to stay in sight of the vanishing coast line, as long as there is no other coast in sight, towards which he steers.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

"Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen" Eranos-Jahrbuch (1948) GA IV, as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409596 (2004)

“I started to see this pattern being there. It was a small office and you can hear everybody talking. And it was just always a lot of activity. Because, you know it started out with the FBI Filegate problem when Craig Livingston (director of the White House’s Office of Personnel Security) got all of those FBI files on so many people. Like 900 files. And if they said 900 it was probably a thousand nine hundred. And then you had the travel office fiasco. Then Whitewater in ‘94 was really starting to kick in. And at that time Robert Fiske was the special prosecutor; that’s before Ken Starr. And they were looking at indicting all kinds of people…And of course, the Clintons were very, very involved with that. There were just so many of those scandals. Cheryl Mills was in and out of the office. The whole cast of characters. They’ve been around forever. I just started hearing over and over and over again. The first time I heard it I thought it, wow! And I heard Bernie Nussbaum talking extremely very loudly. To Hillary. And basically said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Hillary. All you have to say is you don’t recall. You don’t remember anything. Nobody can argue with that.”

Kathleen Willey (1946) White House aide

Kathleen Willey: I Overheard White House Staff Teaching Hillary Her Trademark ‘I Don’t Recall’ Defense https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/05/kathleen-willey-overheard-white-house-staff-teaching-hillary-trademark-dont-recall-defense/ (September 3, 2016)

Stanley Tookie Williams photo
Christopher Titus photo
Rudy Rucker photo
Francis Escudero photo
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero photo

“Although the recession is strong and although hard times await us in the next 2 or 3 months, Spain will continue to grow in the second quarter of 2009.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

As President, 2008
Source: Diciembre 2008. Prensa http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/439407/

Prince photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Ray Comfort photo
Lim Guan Eng photo

“We must have the can do spirit. For example, why must we lose to Singapore every time? Beat them at their own game, you can do it. Penang has beaten them many times.”

Lim Guan Eng (1960) Finance Minister of Malaysia

Lim Guan Eng (2018) cited in " Guan Eng: Let’s give Singapore some competition https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2018/06/19/guan-eng-lets-give-singapore-some-competition/" on The Star Online, 19 June 2018

Carl Sagan photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Happy Rhodes photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man’s 'time' limits him; it does not truly liberate him. Our age – it is of science – of mechanism – of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still in an interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 201
1960s

George W. Bush photo
Dave Sim photo

“Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon. (Cover and title of Cerebus #65, August 1984, collected in Church & State I, p. 7 and 273)”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Usually quoted with "Anything" unspaced (as in the title p. 7), sometimes quoted spaced (as in the art p. 273, as<!--variant requoted in full to be googlable too--> "Any<!--spaced--> <!--here-->thing done for the first time unleashes a demon.") because the cover art http://www.comics.org/issue/175338/ piles "Any" and "thing" (though they are joined, the leg of the "y" being also the bar of the "t").
Compare to a quote misattributed to Emily Dickinson: "Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon." (origin and date unknown, also attributed to Dave Sim<!-- https://books.google.com/books?id=q4D2Xz5N3xkC&pg=PA66 -->)
Church & State volume I (1987)

Charlotte Brontë photo

“It was an honor for me to put on a Chicago Cubs uniform, and I want to personally thank Jim Hendry, the Cubs organization and all the Cub fans for making the past four years so special," Barrett said in a statement. "At the same time, I'm very excited to go to San Diego and do everything that I can to help the Padres win the NL West.”

Michael Barrett (1976) baseball catcher and manager

Barrett bids farewell to his Cubs' fans. The Message was originally posted on his homepage.
Cubs deal Barrett to Padres June 20, 2007 http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070620&content_id=2038291&vkey=news_chc&fext=.jsp&c_id=chc

Assata Shakur photo
Cesar Chavez photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
Kenneth Grahame photo
Charles Krauthammer photo
Joanna MacGregor photo
Annette Widmann-Mauz photo

“A ban does not solve the underlying problem behind it. We have to reach out to parents and make sure girls are empowered to make their own choices. At the same time, women who voluntarily choose to wear a headscarf should not be disadvantaged.”

Annette Widmann-Mauz (1966) German politician

About banning headscarves in Germany. German state looks to ban headscarves for girls https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/10/german-state-looks-ban-headscarves-girls/ (10 April 2018), The Daily Telegraph.

Barry Schwartz photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Stevie Wonder photo

“Call up, ring once, hang up the phone,
To let me know you made it home,
Don't want nothing to be wrong,
With part-time lover.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Part-Time Lover
Song lyrics, In Square Circle (1985)

Haile Selassie photo

“In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Radio broadcast with Mark Rothko, 1943, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990.
1940s

Christopher Titus photo
Scott Ritter photo

“I'll say this about nuclear weapons. You know I'm not sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I'm not in on the planning. I'll take it at face value that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff successfully eliminated nuclear weapons in the first phase of the operation.But keep in mind this. That the Bush Administration has built a new generation of nuclear weapons that we call 'usable nukes.' And they have a nuclear posture now, which permits the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear environment, if the Commander in Chief deems U. S. forces to be in significant risk.If we start bombing Iran, I'm telling you right now, it's not going to work. We're not going to achieve decapitation, regime change, all that. What will happen is the Iranians will respond, and we will feel the pain instantaneously, which will prompt the Bush administration to phase two, which will have to be boots on the ground. And we will put boots on the ground, we will surge a couple of divisions in, probably through Azerbaijan, down the Caspian Sea coast, in an effort to push the regime over. And when they don't push over, we now have 40,000 troops trapped. We have now reached the definition of significant numbers of U. S. troops in harm's way, and there is no reserve to pull them out! There's no more cavalry to come riding to the rescue. And at that point in time, my concern is that we will use nuclear weapons to break the backbone of Iranian resistance, and it may not work.But what it will do is this: it will unleash the nuclear genie. And so for all those Americans out there tonight who say, 'You know what - taking on Iran is a good thing.' I just told you if we take on Iran, we're gonna use nuclear weapons. And if we use nuclear weapons, the genie ain't going back in the bottle, until an American city is taken out by an Islamic weapon in retaliation. So, tell me, you want to go to war with Iran. Pick your city. Pick your city. Tell me which one you want gone. Seattle? L. A.? Boston? New York? Miami. Pick one. Cause at least one's going. And that's something we should all think about before we march down this path of insanity that George Bush has us headed on.</p”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

October 16, 2006
2006

“SALIENCE The notion here is that an effect is attributed to the cause that is most salient in the perceptual field at the time the effect is observed.”

Harold Kelley (1921–2003) American psychologist & academic

Source: "Attribution theory and research." 1980, p. 466

Jack Kerouac photo

“Disobey
Defy
Take your own time
Fly”

"Seize the Vivid Sky" on The Law is an Anagram of Wealth (1993) SPV Record

Vivek Wadhwa photo
Robert Spencer photo

“Conquest, tyranny, treachery, and the clash of cultures bring about corrupt societies, and so does old age. Sometimes the five faces of corruption are visible at the same time.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

The Five faces of Corruption, p. 31 (See also: Samuel P. Huntington..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

Francesco Mario Pagano photo

“Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.”

Source: Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), p. 212.

Alain Daniélou photo
C. A. R. Hoare photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5738. Wickedness is its own Punishment, and many Times its own Cure.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Variant: 5354. Vice is its own Punishment, and sometimes its own Cure.

Nathan Lane photo

“I can remember seeing the movie for the first time at a revival house in L. A. and laughing with everyone else, and never imagining that I would be doing Max one day, even though by then I had already memorized the entire movie.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

On his role in The Producers — reported in Amy Longsdorf (December 25, 2005) "Lane, Broderick play off each other", The Record, p. E01.

Albert Camus photo

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”

[I]l me restait peu de temps. Je ne voulais pas le perdre avec Dieu.
The Stranger (1942)

Noel Gallagher photo

“I'll have my way, in my own time / I'll have my say, my star will shine.”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Magic Pie
Be Here Now (1997)

Anthony Watts photo

“So what's easier to believe as the cause of climate change? That a trace gas called CO2 that has increased on earth from about 280 PPM to 380 PPM in the last 100 years is the cause, or that the giant nuclear fireball a thousand times bigger than earth a mere 8 light-minutes away has been getting more active during the same period is the reason?”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The Missing GW Link http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/03/25/the-missing-gw-link-new-images-shock-scientists-with-view-of-suns-magnetic-field-power/, wattsupwiththat.com, March 25, 2007.
2007

John Napier photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 57, section 3 (p. 686)

Richard Cobden photo

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China.
1850s

Peter Singer photo

“There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a God, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a God worth worshipping could allow the Holocaust to occur.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Interview with the Jewish Chronicle https://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/interviews/peter-singer-is-he-really-the-most-dangerous-man-in-the-world-1.34980, Dan Goldberg, 16 August, 2012.

Calvin Coolidge photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“1923. You challenged your fate. To surmount or to die! It was not yet time. Therefore you became a victim.
Your answer was: Death!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1923. Du fordertest dein Schicksal in die Schranken. Biegen oder brechen! Noch war es zu früh. Deshalb wurdest du Opfer.
Deine Antwort war: Tod!
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Garth Nix photo
Louis Brandeis photo

“In a time of moral and intellectual anarchy, he handed on the great tradition of faith in the mind and spirit of man.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Dean Acheson, former clerk to Justice Brandeis, after Brandeis’s death in 1941.

Roger Manganelli photo
Paul Krugman photo
János Esterházy photo

“We Hungarians accept principle that in time when Germany and Italy fight their giant struggle to guarantee better future of Europe and for fair and permanent peace, small and middle-sized states in the central Europe can only have the obligation to guard and secure in every way peace and understanding in their countries.”

János Esterházy (1901–1957) Czechoslovak member of Czechoslovak national parliament, russian nation politician and hungary nation polit…

About international relationships. Parliamentary speech on November 26, 1940.
International relationships

Frederick Buechner photo
Roberto Bolaño photo
Jane Addams photo
James Hudson Taylor photo

“Consider six or eight hours a day sacred to the Lord and His work, and let nothing hinder your giving this time (to language study and practice) till you can preach fluently and intelligibly.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Five: Refiner’s Fire. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1985, 230).

Plutarch photo
Svetlana Alexievich photo
David Berg photo
Jesse Ventura photo
Gerald of Wales photo

“Happy the state which in times of peace is yet prepared for war.”
Felix est illa civitas quae in pace bellum cogitat.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 2, chapter 9, p. 271.
Compare Vegetius De Re Militari: "Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum" (Let him who desires peace prepare for war).
Descriptio Cambriae (The Description of Wales) (1194)

Stanley Baldwin photo
Chris Cornell photo

“I remember seeing how Layne [Staley] reacted to Andy [Andrew Wood] dying from drugs, and I think that he was scared possibly. And I think he also reacted the same way when Kurt [Cobain] shot himself. They were really good friends. And yet it didn’t stop him. But for me, if I think about the evolution of my life as it appears in songs for example, Higher Truth is a great example of a record I wouldn’t have been able to write [when I was younger], and part of that is in essence because there was a period of time there where I didn’t expect to be here. And now not only do I expect to be here, and I’m not going anywhere, but I’ve had the last 12 years of my life being free of substances to kind of figure out who the substance-free guy is, because he’s a different guy. Just by brain chemistry, it can’t be avoided. I’m not the same, I don’t think the same, I don’t react the same. And my outlook isn’t necessarily the same. My creative endeavours aren’t necessarily the same. And one of the great things about that is it enabled me to kind of keep going artistically and find new places and shine the light into new corners where I hadn’t really gone before. And that feels really good. But it’s also bittersweet because I can’t help but think, what would Jeff be doing right now, what would Kurt be doing right now, what would Andy be doing? Something amazing, I’m sure of it. And it would be some music that would challenge me to lift myself up, something that would be continually raising the bar so that I would work harder too, in the same way they affected me when they were alive basically.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked if there was a lesson to be learned from his friends' deaths caused by substance abuse and if it was not enough to scare everyone ** The Life & Times of Chris Cornell, Rolling Stone Australia, 17 September 2015 https://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/the-life-and-times-of-chris-cornell/2273,
Solo career Era

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5049. Time and Tide tarry for no Man.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo
Italo Calvino photo

“What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

"If on a winter's night a traveller". Chapter 7. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver (1981).

Gregory Scott Paul photo

“The dinosaur world I grew up in was classical. They were universally seen as scaley herps that inhabited the immobile continents. There was no hint that birds were their direct descendents. Being reptiles, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and rather sluggish except perhaps for the smaller more bird-like examples. They all dragged their tails. Forelimbs were often sprawling. Leg muscles were slender in the reptilian manner. Intellectual capacity was minimal, as were social activity and parenting; the Knight painting of a Triceratops pair watching over a baby threatened by the Tyrant King was a notable exception. Hadrosaurs and especially sauropods were dinosaurian hippos, the latter perhaps too titanic to even emerge on land, and if they did so were limited by their bulk to lifting one foot of the ground at a time. Suitable only for the lush, warm and sunny tropical climate that enveloped the world from pole to pole before the Cenozoic, a cooling climate and new mountain chains did the obsolete archosaurs in, leaving only the crocodilians. Dinosaurs and the bat-winged pterosaurs were merely an evolutionary interlude, a period of geo-biological stasis before things got really interesting with the rise of the energetic and quick witted birds and especially mammals, leading with inexorable progress to the apex of natural selection: Man. It was pretty much all wrong. Deep down I sensed something was not quite right. Illustrating dinosaurs I found them to be much more reminiscent of birds and mammals than of the reptiles they were supposed to be. I was primed for a new view.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part I http://gspauldino.com/part1.html, gspauldino.com

José Mourinho photo
David Eugene Smith photo
Fiona Apple photo