Quotes about time
page 95

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo

“My blonde was here again today. This time with her little boy at her breast. I had to draw her as a mother, had to. That is her single true purpose. Marvelous, these gleaming white breasts in her fiery red blouse. The whole thing is so grand in its shape and color..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of Marianne's Journal, Worpswede 1897; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 193
1897

Linda Evangelista photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Ryan Adams photo
Anish Kapoor photo
Estelle Getty photo

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

Estelle Getty (1923–2008) actress

Interview, The Sun Sentenial, May 11, 1986

James Callaghan photo
Ralph Vary Chamberlin photo
Charles Taze Russell photo

“You have to look, and looking is so difficult. We are used to thinking. We reflect all the time, well or not, but people are not taught how to look. It takes a very long time.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, The Main Thing Is Looking: Interview with Alain Desvergnes (1979), p. 70

Regina E. Dugan photo

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

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

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

Lewis Mumford photo
Quentin Crisp photo
J. B. S. Haldane photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to Edward Coles (1814)

Noam Chomsky photo
Sidney Lanier photo

“O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart — 'tis tired of head.”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

"The Symphony" (1875).
Poetry

John Major photo

“It is time to return to those core values, time to get back to basics: to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family, and not shuffling it off on other people and the state.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Nicholas Wood, Jill Sherman, Sheila Gunn, "Major gives seal of approval to Tories' right-wing agenda", The Times, 9 October 1993
Conservative Party conference speech, 8 October 1993. The phrase was associated with personal morality and backfired when a succession of senior Conservatives fell to scandals that winter.
1990s, 1993

Dennis Skinner photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth? It is the master of pure contemplation (theoria), and the master of a practice guided by theoria, i. e., the philosopher-statesman. To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone. Led by the philosopher, the slave in Plato’s Meno is capable of grasping the truth of a geometrical axiom, i. e., a truth beyond change and corruption. But since truth is a state of Being as well as of thought, and since the latter is the expression and manifestation of the former, access to truth remains mere potentiality as long as it is not living in and with the truth. And this mode of existence is closed to the slave — and to anyone who has to spend his life procuring the necessities of life. Consequently, if men no longer had to spend their lives in the realm of necessity, truth and a true human existence would be in a strict and real sense universal. Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality. For in the given reality, procurement of the necessities is the life-long job of the majority, and the necessities have to be procured and served so that truth (which is freedom from material necessities) can be. Here, the historical barrier arrests and distorts the quest for truth; the societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group. This state of affairs contradicts the universal character of truth, which defines and “prescribes” not only a theoretical goal, but the best life of man qua man, with respect to the essence of man. For philosophy, the contradiction is insoluble, or else it does not appear as a contradiction because it is the structure of the slave or serf society which this philosophy does not transcend. Thus it leaves history behind, unmastered, and elevates truth safely above the historical reality. There, truth is reserved intact, not as an achievement of heaven or in heaven, but as an achievement of thought — intact because its very notion expresses the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 128-130

Georges Bernanos photo
Robert Jordan photo
Ibn Khaldun photo
Harry Truman photo
Ani DiFranco photo
Jesper Kyd photo

“No matter how good your music is, if someone loops it 20 times in the wrong place, it won't sound good.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

Electronic Musician interview, 2005

Jacob Zuma photo

“As Africans, long before the arrival of religion and [the] gospel, we had our own ways of doing things, … Those were times that the religious people refer to as dark days but we know that, during those times, there were no orphans or old-age homes. Christianity has brought along these things.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

At an event in KwaZulu-Natal, Jacob Zuma blames Christianity for South Africa's problems http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8971472/Jacob-Zuma-blames-Christianity-for-South-Africas-problems.html, The Telegraph, 21 December 2011

Bill Mollison photo
Ted Cruz photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“Architecture is treated as crystallisation; sculpture, as the organic modelling of the material in its sensuous and spatial totality; painting, as the coloured surface and line; while in music, space, as such, passes into the point of time possessed of content within itself, until finally the external medium is in poetry depressed into complete insignificance.”

Die Architektur ist dann die Kristallisation, die Skulptur die organische Figuration der Materie in ihrer sinnlich-räumlichen Totalität; die Malerei die gefärbte Fläche und Linie; während in der Musik der Raum überhaupt zu dem in sich erfüllten Punkt der Zeit übergeht; bis das äußere Material endlich in der Poesie ganz zur Wertlosigkeit herabgesetzt ist.
Part III https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/ch03.htm
Lectures on Aesthetics (1835)

Nyanaponika Thera photo
John Herschel photo
Robert M. Sapolsky photo

“Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.”

Robert M. Sapolsky (1957) American endocrinologist

"Sapolsky on Religion", Human Behavioral Biology 150/250 (Spring 2002) http://blip.tv/file/2204956/

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“Time heals all wounds.”
Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Truly from Terentius, Heautontimorumenos, Act III, scene i
Misattributed

John Crowley photo
Pete Seeger photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition. We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another. Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality. The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat. Every business has its risk and its times of depression. It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries. Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss. The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Tom DeLay photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Valentino Braitenberg photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“Europeans have just been better organized for genocide… Far from enjoying the prospect of taking over Europe by having babies, Europe’s Muslims are living on borrowed time…”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

Source: 2000s, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007), p. 334

Neil Armstrong photo
Willa Cather photo
Russell Brand photo

“It’s six months since I did the interview with Jeremy Paxman that inspired this book, and British media today is awash with halfhearted condemnations of my observation that voting is pointless and my admission that I have never voted. My assertion that other people oughtn’t vote either was born of the same instinctive rejection of the mantle of appointed social prefect that prevents me from telling teenagers to “Just Say No” to drugs. I cannot confine my patronage to the circuitry of their minuscule wisdom. “People died so you’d have the right to vote.” No, they did not; they died for freedom. In the case where freedom was explicitly attached to the symbol of democratic rights, like female suffrage, I don’t imagine they’d’ve been so willing if they’d known how tokenistic voting was to become. Note too these martyrs did not achieve their ends by participating in a hollow, predefined ritual, the infertile dry hump of gestural democracy; they did it by direct action. Emily Davison, the hero of women’s suffrage, hurled herself in front of the king’s horses; she defied the tyranny that oppressed her and broke the boundaries that contained her. I imagine too that this woman would have had the rebellious perspicacity to understand that the system she was opposing would adjust to incorporate the female vote and deftly render it irrelevant. This woman, who left her job as a teacher to dedicate her life to activism, was imprisoned nine times. She used methods as severe and diverse as arson and hunger-striking to protest and at the time of her death would have been regarded as a terrorist.”

Revolution (2014)

Steve Kagen photo

“We did our job. We took out a murderous dictator in Saddam Hussein and have given the freely elected government of Iraq all the time and money we can afford. It is time to direct our efforts away from Iraq and back after Osama bin Laden and his followers. The Iraqi government must take responsibility for the security of its own people.”

Steve Kagen (1949) American politician

[12 July 2007, http://kagen.house.gov/apps/list/press/wi08_kagen/redeployment.html, "Kagen Sponsors Iraq Redeployment Legislation to Move Away from Iraq and Back After Osama Bin Laden and His Followers", Representative Steve Kagen, U.S. House of Representatives, 2007-07-21]
Iraq

Jack Vance photo
Margaret Thatcher photo

“My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The News of the World (20 September 1981), quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 342.
First term as Prime Minister

John Ruskin photo
P. L. Travers photo
Baba Amte photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Each time you sit down to practice, take a few minutes to feel in your heart why this is important to you.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Practice Tip http://eofcentre.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/just-practice-so-simple-really/. (2012-06-25) (Topic: Practice)

Katie Couric photo
Dana Gioia photo

“It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

35
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Cat Stevens photo

“But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Father and Son
Song lyrics, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Austin Grossman photo

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Fannie Lou Hamer photo

“It's time for America to get right.”

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) American civil rights activist (October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977)

As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 8, by Hay Mills (1993).

Thorstein Veblen photo
Woody Allen photo
Elias Canetti photo

“I can’t be twenty-two again. I can’t subject myself to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 17
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Joni Madraiwiwi photo

“This is a small country with limited resources. Can we afford the time spent on endless debates about ethnicity and identity?”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Tourism Forum at the Sheraton Resort, 7 July 2005.

Ernst von Glasersfeld photo

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

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

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

Michele Simon photo
Joe Hill photo

“Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Telegram to William "Big Bill" Haywood (1915-11-18), quoted in International Socialist Review, vol. XVI (December 1915)

Mark Steyn photo
Nakayama Miki photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Edwin Arlington Robinson photo

“No matter what we are, and what we sing,
Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

Closing couplet- Quatrain 111 Children of the Night 1897 edition kindle ebook ASIN B004UJKLY2

John F. Kennedy photo
John P. Kotter photo
John Ruskin photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo

“A remedy is needed to meet the evil now existing in most of the southern states, but especially in that one which I have the honor to represent in part, the State of South Carolina. The enormity of the crimes constantly perpetrated there finds no parallel in the history of this republic in her very darkest days. There was a time when the early settlers of New England were compelled to enter the fields, their homes, even the very sanctuary itself, armed to the full extent of their means. While the people were offering their worship to God within those humble walls their voices kept time with the tread of the sentry outside. But, sir, it must be borne in mind that at the time referred to civilization had but just begun its work upon this continent. The surroundings were unpropitious, and as yet the grand capabilities of this fair land lay dormant under the fierce tread of the red man. But as civilization advanced with its steady and resistless sway it drove back those wild cohorts and compelled them to give way to the march of improvement. In course of time superior intelligence made its impress and established its dominion upon this continent. That intelligence, with an influence like that of the sun rising in the east and spreading its broad rays like a garment of light, gave life and gladness to the dark.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)

Francis Bacon photo
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay photo
Aisha photo
William Somervile photo

“For the next inn he spurs amain,
In haste alights, and skuds away,
But time and tide for no man stay.”

William Somervile (1675–1742) English poet

The Sweet-Scented Miser, line 98.

Alexander Maclaren photo
Rufus Wainwright photo
Dharampal photo

“There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. (…) The conclusion that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the population actually perished), may be taken as a mere forerunner of what was to come. (…) During the latter part of the 19th century, impressions of decay, decline and deprivation began to agitate the mind of the Indian people. Such impressions no doubt resulted from concrete personal, parental and social experience of what had gone before. They were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated at times. By 1900, it had become general Indian belief that the country had been decimated by British rule in all possible ways; that not only had it become impoverished, but it had been degraded to the furthest possible extent; that the people of India had been cheated of most of what they had; that their customs and manners were ridiculed, and that the infrastructure of their society mostly eroded. One of the statements which thus came up was that the ignorance and illiteracy in India was caused by British rule; and, conversely, that at the beginning of British political dominance, India had had extensive education, learning and literacy. By 1930, much had been written on this point in the same manner as had been written on the deliberate destruction of Indian crafts and industry, and the impoverishment of the Indian countryside.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Dharmapal: The Beautiful Tree, Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. (1983)

Isaac Asimov photo

“He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of realism makes them fools for others.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 4 “The Emperor; in part I, “The General” originally published as “Dead Hand” in Astounding (April 1945)

Victoria of the United Kingdom photo

“Affairs go on, and all will take some shape or other, but it keeps one in hot water all the time.”

Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901) British monarch who reigned 1837–1901

Letter to King of the Belgians, Nuneham, 15th June, 1841 (Note: Nuneham was the house of Edward Vernon Harcourt, Archbishop of York).

Harry Truman photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Nguyen Khanh photo
Max Scheler photo

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

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Paul Tsongas photo

“You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.”

Paul Tsongas (1941–1997) American politician

1992 Democratic National Convention. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/16/news/under-big-top-excerpts-remarks-delivered-tsongas-brown-convention.html

Herbert Read photo
Anne Brontë photo

“Those, whose time is fully occupied, seldom complain of solitude.”

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXIX : The Neighbour; Helen to Walter

Edith Wharton photo

“When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

The Children http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400741.txt (1928), ch. XXV

Susan Neiman photo