Quotes about time
page 94

Francis Bacon photo
Kent Hovind photo
Paul Graham photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Taylor Caldwell photo
William Blackstone photo

“Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”

Book I, ch. 18 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch18.asp: Of Corporations.
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Ram Dass photo

“Hindus learn to look at themselves through borrowed eyes. The two approaches, that of self-discovery and creative response and that of self-alienation and imitation, were both inherited from the immediate history of the freedom struggle, though they derive their strength from the deeper sources in the psyche…. For one, the problem is of helping the society to find its roots, for the other to remake it in the image of a chosen pattern. The one serves; the other manipulates…. [The first approach] once formed a powerful current, and the freedom struggle was waged under its auspices. But increasingly its hold became weak, and in our own times it seems to have lost altogether…. Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi…. Nehru represented, in his own way, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it also had a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us. We, however, believe that deeper Indian nationalism, which is also in harmony with deeper internationalism, may be weak just now, but it has the seed-power and it is bound to come up again under propitious circumstances”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, 1987, p. 4-5

James D. Watson photo

“I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.
Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.
Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.”

Description of Rosalind Franklin, whose data and research were actually key factors in determining the structure of DNA, but who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, before the importance of her work could be widely recognized and acknowledged. In response to these remarks her mother stated "I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way." As quoted in "Rosalind Franklin" at Strange Science : The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology by Michon Scott http://www.strangescience.net/rfranklin.htm
The Double Helix (1968)

René Girard photo

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Walter Slezak photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
A.A. Milne photo

“Nearly eleven o'clock," said Pooh happily. "You're just in time for a little smackerel of something.”

Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter One.

Orson Scott Card photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Srinivasa Ramanujan photo

“I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras… I have no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling"…. Very recently I came across a tract published by you styled Orders of Infinity in page 36 of which I find a statement that no definite expression has been as yet found for the number of prime numbers less than any given number. I have found an expression which very nearly approximates to the real result, the error being negligible. I would request that you go through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published. I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressons that I get but I have indicated the lines on which I proceed. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly…”

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) Indian mathematician

Letter to G. H. Hardy, (16 January 1913), published in Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary American Mathematical Society (1995) History of Mathematics, Vol. 9

Herman Cain photo
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield photo

“It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.”

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

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

Isa Genzken photo
Gloria Estefan photo
Arun Gandhi photo

“I find that what is happening here [in Palestine] is ten times worse than what I had experienced in South Africa. This is Apartheid.”

Arun Gandhi (1934) Indian activist

Occupation "Ten Times Worse than Apartheid" http://www.ipc.gov.ps/ipc_e/ipc_e-1/e_News/news2004/2004_08/179.html, Speech, Palestinian International Press Center, August 29 2004, accessed September 17 2006

Ken Ham photo
Julian Assange photo

“That’s arguably what spy agencies do — high-tech investigative journalism. It’s time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Noam, Cohen, Noam Cohen, Brian Stelter, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/07wikileaks.html?src=mv, Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site, The New York Times, The New York Times Company, April 6, 2010, 2010-06-17]

Tim Berners-Lee photo

“I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html

Winston S. Churchill photo
Gerald Ford photo

“History and experience tells us that moral progress cannot come in comfortable and in complacent times, but out of trial and out of confusion.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Quoted variant: History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.
1970s, State of the Union Address (1975)

Gary Gygax photo
Brian Keith photo
Elfriede Jelinek photo
Walt Whitman photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Thomas Campbell photo

“There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath,
For a time.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Battle of the Baltic (1805), st. 2 http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3042&poem=17248; a poem about the Battle of Copenhagen

A. P. Herbert photo
Fred Astaire photo

“The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us…Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to "popular" dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals…I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Gene Kelly interviewed in Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly, A Biography. W.H Allen, London, 1984. p. 117. ISBN 0491031823.

Leonard Nimoy photo
Sun Myung Moon photo

“The time will come, without my seeking it, that my words will almost serve as law. If I ask a certain thing, it will be done. If I don't want something, it will not be done. If I recommend a certain ambassador for a certain country, and then visit that country and that ambassador's office, he will greet me with the red carpet treatment.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Statement of 1974-03-24, as quoted in Investigation of Korean-American Relations : Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House Of Representatives (31 October 1978) http://www.allentwood.com/articles/conclufraser.html

Benjamin Rush photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“The social value of a poem is proved not by marketing or reviews but by enduring resonance, a process that occurs as a response over time by humanity.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo

“I recall to mind on this occasion, said His Highness, "the words which I spoke nearly 21 years ago when I opened the Representative Assembly in person for the first time after I assumed the reins of Government. The hopes I then expressed of the value of the yearly gatherings of the Assembly in contributing to the well-being and contentment of my subjects have been amply fulfilled. The Legislative Council, too, which came into existence in 1907.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

At the Inauguration of the Reformed Legislative Council and the Representative Assembly on the 17th March 1924 Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 330-32 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt,
As ruler of the state

Jagadish Chandra Bose photo
Sandy Berger photo

“He [Saddam Hussein] will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”

Sandy Berger (1945–2015) US National Security Advisor

(18 February 1998); Quoted on U S News, October 25, 2011 http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/Jamie-Stiehm/2011/10/25/obama-adept-abroad-inept-at-home/comments

George Carlin photo

“I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Napalm and Silly Putty (2001)

Rajiv Malhotra photo

“It is important for Pollock that Muslims not be blamed for the decline of Sanskrit. He writes that any theory 'can be dismissed at once' if it 'traces the decline of Sanskrit culture to the coming of Muslim power'… Trying to prove the timing of Sanskrit's decline prior to the Turkish invasions enables him to absolve these invasions of any blame… I get the impression that Pollock does not want to dwell on whether Muslim invasions had debilitated the Hindu political and intellectual institutions in the first place… Throughout Pollock's analysis, hardly any Muslim ruler gets blamed for the destruction of Indian culture. He simply avoids discussing the issue of Muslim invasions and their destructive influence on Hindu institutions… The impact of various invasions in Kashmir was so enormous that it cannot be ignored in any historical analysis… The contradiction between his two accounts, published separately, is serious: Muslim invasions created a traumatic enough shockwave to cause Hindu kings to mobilize the 'cult of Rama' and therefore the Hindus funded the production of extensive Ramayana texts for this agenda. And yet, the death of Sanskrit taking place at the same time had little relation to the arrival of Muslims. When Hindus are to be blamed for their alleged hatred towards Muslims, the Muslims are shown to have an important presence; but when Muslims are to be protected from being assigned any responsibility for destruction, they are mysteriously made to disappear from the scene.”

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Karen Lord photo

“That was the nature of chaos; its effects spanned time in ways that were not always immediately discernible, not even by beings outside of time.”

Karen Lord (1968) Barbadian novelist and sociologist of religion

Source: Redemption in Indigo (2010), Chapter 9 “A Stranger is Coming to Makendha” (p. 69)

Rene Balcer photo
Stephen Corry photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Helen Diner photo
Federica Mogherini photo
Kent Hovind photo
Curtis Mayfield photo

“Hush now child and don't you cry;
Your folks might understand you by and by.
Move on up towards your destination;
You may find from time to time,
Complications.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Move on Up, from Curtis (1970).
Song lyrics

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 4; as cited in: Melanie Feinberg (2007) "Beyond information retrieval"

Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Pope John Paul I photo
Henry Paulson photo

“Enough is enough… It's time to put country before party and say it together: Never Trump.”

Henry Paulson (1946) 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury

As quoted in CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-henry-paulson-op-ed-hillary-clinton-election-2016/ (June 2016)
Choose country over party (2016)

Joseph von Fraunhofer photo

“The number of different optical phenomena has become in our time so great that caution must be taken so as to avoid being deceived, and also to refer the phenomena to the simple laws.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

In The Wave Theory, Light and Spectra. Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra. Memoirs by Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1981), p. 14 ISBN 0-405-13867-9

Tom Petty photo

“You're flirting with time baby
Flirting with time, but maybe,
Time baby, is catching up with you.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Flirting with Time
Lyrics, Highway Companion (2006)

Nathanael Greene photo
Hans Ruesch photo
Orson Pratt photo
E.E. Cummings photo

“Time's a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all)”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

78
95 poems (1958)

Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze photo

“For a long time I've been telling Stalin that Beria is a crook but Stalin won't listen.”

Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze (1886–1937) Soviet politician

Quoted in "Armed truce: the beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46"‎ - Page 65 - by Hugh Thomas - History - 1986

Ann Chiang photo
Brian Keith photo
Francis Place photo

“I was sometimes brought to a standstill, and at times almost despaired of making further progress… I knew no one of whom I could ask a question or receive any kind of instruction, and the subject was therefore at times very painful.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, 1898, p. 18, as cited in: Ernest Green, Harold Shearman. Education For A New Society (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education), 2012, p. 85

Khaled Mashal photo

“I say that what Israel did to the Palestinian people is many times worse than what Nazism did to the Jews, and there is exaggeration, which has become obsolete, regarding the issue of the Holocaust. We do not deny the facts, but we will not give in to extortion by exaggeration.”

Khaled Mashal (1956) Palestinian terrorist

Hamas Leader Khaled Mash'al Praises Sheik Yousef Al-Qaradhawi for His Support of Suicide Operations and States: The Holocaust Was Exaggerated and Is Used to Extort Germany. Zionist Holocaust against Arabs Much Worse. http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1515.htm, video clip http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1515wmv&ak=null, July 2007
2007

Arthur C. Clarke photo
Peter Gabriel photo
Alexander Calder photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“One can only forget about time by making use of it.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Paul Klee photo

“Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet as in 'Don Giovanni' is closer to us than the epic motion in 'Tristan [und Isolde]'. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the [music of the] nineteenth century.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1917), # 1081, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1916 - 1920

Gerard Bilders photo

“The moon appeared for some time [in the Savoy, Switzerland] and the rocks seemed to be much bigger than they were. The mountains were silvery illuminated and appeared gently against the mysterious blue of the sky - that blue color with moonlight, that has such an indefinable, deep tone; actually it is not a blue.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

Source: 1850's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), p. 19 - quote of Bilder's letter to his maecenas Johannes Kneppelhout, from Savoy, near Geneva, Switzerland, September 1858

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“The most pressing question of our time is this: Is European society to be taken over by a radical invasion of Muslim immigrants?”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

"Author, activist condemns Muslim faith at Palm Beach talk", Palm Beach Daily News (21 March 2009)

Richard III of England photo

“Right trusty and well beloved, we greet you well, and where, by your letters of supplication to us delivered by your servant John Brackenbury, we understand that, by reason of your great charges that ye have had and sustained, as well in the defence of this realm against the Scots as otherwise, your worshipful city remaineth greatly in poverty, for the which ye desire us to be good mean unto the King’s Grace for an ease of such charges as ye yearly bear and pay unto His Highness, we let you wit that for such great matters and businesses as we now have to do for the weal and usefulness of the realm, we as yet ne can have convenient leisure to accomplish this your business, but be assured that for your kind and loving dispositions to us at all times showed, which we ne can forget, we in goodly haste shall so endeavour us for your ease in this behalf as that ye shall verily understand we be your especial good and loving lord, as your said servant shall show you, to whom it will like you herein to give further credence; and for the diligent service which he hath done to our singular pleasure unto us at this time, we pray you to give unto him laud and thanks, and God keep you.”

Richard III of England (1452–1485) English monarch

Letter to the city fathers of York in April or early May 1483 as Lord Protector for his nephew, Edward V, reprinted in Richard the Third (1956) http://books.google.com/books?id=dNm0JgAACAAJ&dq=Paul+Murray+Kendall+Richard+the+Third&ei=TZHDR8zXKZKIiQHf2NCpCA

Ayumi Hamasaki photo
African Spir photo
Stephen Crane photo
Balasaraswati photo

“Although she was blind by that time, she was the best critique of my dance. If there is any one I would like to known, I would like to be remembered as Danam’s granddaughter.”

Balasaraswati (1918–1984) Indian dancer

Her observation on her grandmother Danammal’s influence on her in dance and music quoted in "Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life", page=39
Quote

Stanley Baldwin photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Van Morrison photo
Joseph Campbell photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo