Quotes about absence
page 5

“Liberty (or freedom) is the absence of coercion by other human beings.”

John Hospers (1918–2011) American philosopher and politician

Source: Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, (1971), p. 10

“Some of you may doubt the truth of what I now say, and argue that the Lord could teach him. This is a mistake. The Lord could not have taught him in any other way than in the way in which He did teach him. You believe Adam was made of the dust of this earth. This I do not believe, though it is supposed that it is so written in the Bible; but it is not, to my understanding. You can write that information to the States, if you please-that I have publicly declared that I do not believe that portion of the Bible as the Christian world do. I never did, and I never want to. What is the reason I do not? Because I have come to understanding, and banished from my mind all the baby stories my mother taught me when I was a child. But suppose Adam was made and fashioned the same as we make adobies; if he had never drunk of the bitter cup; the Lord might have talked to him to this day, and he would have continued as he was to all eternity, never advancing one particle in the school of intelligence. This idea opens up a field of light to the intelligent mind. How can you know truth but by its opposite, or light but by its opposite? The absence of light is darkness. How can sweetness be known but by its opposite, bitter? It is by this means that we obtain all intelligence.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourse 2:6-7 (October 23, 1853)
1850s

Truth, World, School, Way

“Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens of that awful absence of self respect.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

Life, Women, Men, Freedom

“Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner–the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Exercises, Understanding, Sense

“What upsets me the most is that I was an accountable representative of a system under which people suffered, also under which repression was aimed at individuals, who were persecuted because of their oppositional stance. Their position was the right one. My position was the wrong one. We were not capable of democracy, but rather tried in the absence of better arguments to get rid of the other opinion with direct violence.”

Günter Schabowski (1929–2015) German politician

Am meisten bedrückt mich, dass ich ein verantwortlicher Vertreter eines Systems war, unter dem Menschen gelitten haben, dass Repressionen gegen einzelne Menschen gerichtet waren, die wegen ihrer oppositionellen Haltung verfolgt wurden. Ihre Einstellung war die richtige. Meine Einstellung war die falsche. Wir waren nicht demokratiefähig, sondern haben versucht, mangels besserer Argumente uns der anderen Meinung mittels direkter Gewalt zu entledigen.
[citation needed]

People, Democracy, Suffering

“The passing-place for trains is fixed and determined, with orders positive and defined that neither shall proceed beyond that point until after the arrival of the other; whereas, in the absence of the telegraph, conductors are governed by general rules, and their individual understanding of the same,—which rules are generally to the effect, that, in case of detention, the train arriving first at the regular passing-place shall, after waiting a few moments, proceed cautiously (expecting to meet the other train, which is generally running as much faster, to make up lost time, as the cautious train is slower) until they have met and passed; the one failing to reach the half-way point between stations being required to back,—a dangerous expedient always,—an example of which operation was furnished at the disaster on the Camden and Amboy Railroad near Burlington; the delayed train further being subjected to the same rule in regard to all other trains of the same class it may meet, thus pursuing its hazardous and uncertain progress during the entire trip.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 49: Cited in: "Railway Engineering in the United States" in The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858. p. 651-2

Way, Understanding, Time, Waiting

“Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'être. We should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers, or landscape, or faces whose mere reflection it might have been. Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; not yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised to the level of a pure effusion at the first step.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

1910s, Du Cubisme (1912)

Art, Flowers, Nature

“They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.”

Arthur Ransome book Swallowdale

Swallowdale (Chapter 4), 1931

Home

“In recent years, Britain has withdrawn from the world. On Syria, on Europe, on Ukraine this government has been on the periphery: all victim of the same lack of long-term strategic thinking about British foreign policy and the absence of a moral compass. It is time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and carve out a new long-term narrative that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage once again.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

World, Thinking, Time

“The preamble to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take away the wives or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and children. Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they defended enforced widowhood—the two great props of the Caste system. They defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can such a Society show its face before civilized nations? Can such a society hope to survive?”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

In support of the Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on only one condition it could be saved—namely, rigorous social reform. Quoted in Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah
At his 100th Anniversary lecture delivered in 1943 on Ranade, Gandhi & Jinnah by Dr. Ambedkar

Women, Marriage, Children, Family

“It is a common misconception that low wages are the main factor influencing prices. The reality is that low capital costs, and the absence of taxation and regulation, are far more important.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

Reality

“Definite portions of a manifoldness, distinguished by a mark or by a boundary, are called Quanta. Their comparison with regard to quantity is accomplished in the case of discrete magnitudes by counting, in the case of continuous magnitudes by measuring. Measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be compared; it therefore requires a means of using one magnitude as the standard for another. In the absence of this, two magnitudes can only be compared when one is a part of the other; in which case also we can only determine the more or less and not the how much. The researches which can in this case be instituted about them form a general division of the science of magnitude in which magnitudes are regarded not as existing independently of position and not as expressible in terms of a unit, but as regions in a manifoldness.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Science, Parting

“Admittedly America has not fully succeeded. The absence of definition, of principles, and of methods of Americanization shows her success thus far to have been rather a happy accident, an outcome which cannot be expected in a more exacting future. Has it been regarded as a war necessity to be dealt with expeditiously and then dropped, or will it become a science, thereby progressing from emotion to reason, from impulse to logic, and from chaos to order? With the war ended, there is danger that we will turn aside to new interests, unless a foundation of science can be laid and a philosophy evolved.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

War, Happiness, Science, Success

“Animal behavior has evolved to battle parasites. In fact, we have parasites to thank for the existence of sex. Sex is a costly and time-consuming method of reproduction. Experiments have shown that, in the absence of parasites, species evolve toward parthenogenesis—or cloning—as the reproductive method of choice. In parthenogenesis each individual is able to self-replicate. But this produces almost no genetic variation. In the presence of parasites, cloning, while more energy-efficient, is not a viable reproductive strategy. It presents a stationary genetic target to parasites, who, once introduced into such a system, will quickly dominate it. …”

Daniel Suarez Daemon

Source: Daemon (2006), Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol

Sex, Behavior, Time, Animals

“Good will is obviously present also in the case where the innocently goodhearted person acts beneficently because she enjoys it. As already mentioned, certain moral psychologies even encourage us to think that this innocent good-heartedness is the only thing we could possibly mean by a “good will.” Kant’s claim is that it is not, and that the true value of good will “shines forth more brightly” when it is found in the contrasting case, where it must struggle to overcome adversity. This claim certainly has an air of paradox about it, because it means that what is most essentially deserving of moral esteem is found only in cases where the moral agent is faced with conflicting motivations, or at least with an absence of any natural, spontaneous motivation to do the right thing.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Motivation, Nature, Thinking, Personality

“The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.”

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal (1965), p. 60

Way

“The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 318.

Animals

“I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise. For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2013, Obama's war on global warming is economic suicide (2013)

Faith, Exercises, Suicide, Science

“The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 2

Feeling, Parting

“I had zero experience at the time, but I wanted to create something that no-one else was doing. It was that absence of anything like Mafia that really motivated me. I was really proud to finish it and even more proud that the final product was almost identical to the original vision.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

10 Years On: Interview With Mafia Director Daniel Vavra http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mafia-director-daniel-vavra-gta-grand-theft-409859 (November 29, 2012)

Motivation, Time

“In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1

Dreams

“Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 118

“The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

"The Teaching of the History of Science" Sci. Monthly 7, 193-211 (1918).

Way, History, Knowledge, Science

“There is … no first person plural to the verb "cogito." Observation, verification, and inference are functions which are perfected only in their independent individual exercise. I am not unmindful of the importance of the corroboration of one mind by another; but such corroboration is valuable only in so far as both minds have reached their results alone. Corroboration implies the absence of collusion. The devotee of the intellect must, then, have the strength to work alone.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Exercises, Personality, Perfection

“A letter then, breathing of home and affection, is a treasure; it is like a memento from the dead, for absence is as death in all but that its resurrection is in this life.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

Life, Death, Home, Dead

“It has been estimated that even in the absence of net investment, the mere substitution of modern machinery for worn-out equipment in the United States would cause an annual productivity increase of approximately 1.5 percent.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Four, Standstill and Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, II, p. 88

“Hayek’s essential political philosophy was that liberty is the supremacy of law. To some, this may appear a paradoxical conception of liberty, for liberty is too often considered to be the absence of law. This, however, was the exact opposite of Hayek’s view. He thought that liberty is not possible without law. Right law is liberty.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Law, Appearance

“All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three.”

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) English priest and theologian

The Hidden Stream (1952). London: Burns Oates, p. 142.
Knox alludes to John Robert Seeley's much-quoted statement in The Expansion of England (1883) that "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind".

Business, Singing, Time

“The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

“The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 59.

Men, Christ

“The orgy of thieving in Iraq has more to do with the character of the people than the absence of restraining troops. And to think that good, decent, law-abiding young British and American men and women laid down their lives to liberate this thieving mob.”

Robert Kilroy-Silk (1942) British politician

Sunday Express, 4 May 2003

Women, Men, People, Law

“When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Chap. VIII: The Masses Intervene In Everything, And Why Their Intervention Is Solely By Violence
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Travel, Sense, Appearance, Country

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Semper in absentes felicior aestus amantes.

Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet

II, xxxiii, 43.
Elegies

Heart, Missing You, Relationship

“Tektology is concerned only with activities, but activities are characterized by the fact that they produce changes. From this point of view it is out of the question to think about a simple and pure "preservation" of forms, one that would constitute a real absence of changes. Preservation is always only a result of immediately equilibrating each of the appearing changes by another opposing change; it Is a dynamic equilibrium of changes.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 78

Question, Thinking, Appearance, Change

“Our upriser is The Mahdi, who should be waited for in his absence, and obeyed in his appearance. He is the third of my sons.”

Muhammad al-Taqi (811–835) ninth of the Twelve Imams of Twelver Shi'ism

Misnad al-Imām al-Jawād, p. 131
Religious Wisdom

Appearance, Waiting

“Tell the merchant that he must not rely for one moment on the Home Rulers for any one thing that is wise and good, nor indeed on any political combination of Irishmen. They have never yet done anything for themselves or their country and have never yet as a party shown what ought to be done. The absence of political and economical knowledge in Ireland is remarkable, and what there is of a sensible middle class is apparently crushed or smothered by the extreme men, who are always in pursuit of some phantom and who seem not to know the substance even when they see it.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Mr. O'Donoghue (15 March 1874), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 445
1870s

Men, Home, Knowledge, Country

“Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Pain, Cry

“I would call the human right to peace an ultimate or “end right”, in that the state of peace is the result of the promotion and protection of human rights. Indeed, a society where human rights are upheld is a society that is free of the kind of structural violence that leads to armed conflict. Now, as it has been said many times, peace is not the mere absence of war. Peace in a holistic sense, peace in its individual and collective dimension, entails a state of internal and external harmony.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

AEDIDH Consultation 16. May 2011 http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Lectures/right%20to%20peace.shtml : The United Nations Human Rights to Peace Consultation.

War, Peace, Sense, Time

“So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life — real life, I mean — that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a new-born babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

the first lines in 'Manifesto du Surréalisme', Andre Breton, 1924
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Life, Women, Way, Feeling

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Du Cubisme (1912)

Art, Flowers, Nature

“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 2
O Pioneers! (1913)

Country, Depressing

“Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Sí, me apartaré. Prefiero lamentarme de tu ausencia que de ti.
Voces (1943)

“The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Source: The External Control of Organizations, 1978, p. 46

“Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express, be it verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, (is) the real working of the mind. Dictated by the unconsciousness, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and free from aesthetic or moral preoccupations.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote from 'Manifesto du Surréalisme', André Breton, Paris, Editions KRA, 1929
1920's

Exercises

“I don't often use the words "godawful" and "abomination" to describe a movie, preferring to reserve such terminology for extreme instances when I feel duped and mortally offended. Case in point: Bachelorette. Often with a bad film, I search for something positive or productive to say, cognizant as I am that there are real people with real feelings behind the production. That won't be happening here. When it comes to watchability, the only thing to distinguish this from Freddy Got Fingered (the turd standard for cinematic badness) is the absence of the sexual molestation of animals. And one could make a convincing argument that the sexual molestation of animals might improve Bachelorette.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

This possibility that this might not be the worst movie of the year is frightening to contemplate - Directed by Lesley Headland. Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=2513 of Bachelorette (2012). Zero star reviews

People, Feeling, Search, Animals

“Absence from whom we love is worse than death,
And frustrate hope severer than despair.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"Hope, like the short-lived ray that gleams awhile", line 35.

Love, Death, Hope, Despair

“The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: The Culture We Deserve (1989), p. 118

People, World, School, Star

“Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.”

William Cowper Retirement

Source: Retirement (1782), Line 623.

“I always have felt strange when we came home
To the dark house after so long an absence,
And the key rattled loudly into place
Seemed to warn someone to be getting out
At one door as we entered at another.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" The Fear http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fear-the/" 1910s

Home, Housing

“Apart from these three acts, Mr. President, the Court further declared VOID “the use of unprogrammed funds despite the absence of a certification by the National Treasurer that the revenue collections exceeded the revenue targets for non-compliance with the conditions provided in the relevant GAA.””

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“Americanization, finally, is not any one of these things alone. There may be a home stake, and in the absence of identity of economic interest, it may fail. All other elements may be present, but if the court fails, the immigrant turns away. Americanization is the bringing to bear in the life of every stranger who enters the country, the sum total of American ideals in his home, in the shop, in the neighborhood, and in the legislatures and courts. The native-born American is the keeper of these ideals. His is the spirit that will maintain the free and strong institutions of America. His reception of the immigrant and the contacts he makes with him in large measure determine the immigrant's understanding of America and his reaction towards it. It is here that we enter the field of the science of racial relations. No effective program can be made until we set our own house in order, until we attain the right attitude individually, and until we equip ourselves with the necessary information to give us the right approach to the many races who are among us but not of us, whose faces, regardless of the high wages, the luxuries, and the freedom of America, are set towards the east.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Home, Understanding, Freedom

“The power of an idea to serve as the foundation of co-ordination is so great that one may observe many examples of co-ordination even in the absence of any single leader or of any framework of authority.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Notes on the Theory of Organization," 1937, p. 38

Idea

“Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address to the United Nations (1963)

Men, World, Peace, Change

“I've experienced such extremes both in the band and in my personal life, feelings that last for just a few seconds at a time, that it's like a drug. After a while, when they're not there you notice the absence of it and nothing seems real anymore and nothings quite sharp enough or focused enough.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

Spin magazine 1989

Life, Feeling, Time, Personality

“This absence of similarity among military questions naturally brings out the inability of memory to solve them; also the sterility of invariable forms, such as figures, geometrical drawings (épures), plans (schémas), etc. One only right solution imposes itself : namely, the application, varying according to circumstances, of fixed principles.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 154

Question, Nature, Memory, Drawing

“In drawing an inference or conclusion from facts proved, regard must always be had to the nature of the particular case, and the facility that appears to be afforded, either of explanation or contradiction. No person is to be required to explain or contradict, until enough has been proved to warrant a reasonable and just conclusion against him, in the absence of explanation or contradiction.”

Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden (1762–1832) British barrister and judge, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench

King v. Burdett (1820), 1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 140.

Nature, Appearance, Drawing, Personality

“The notion that human interaction could spontaneously and autonomously achieve a stable, orderly, self-sustaining form of equilibrium in the absence of government intervention—what François Quesnay and the first school of économistes dubbed un ordre naturel in the late 1750s—has facilitated a conception of the market as a self-regulating system that could only prosper by purging itself of the prejudicial meddling of governments and politics. In the face of this new conception of an orderly market, governance would be relegated outside that autonomous space, charged with the responsibility of policing and punishing those who deviate—those who do not see the natural laws or, in more technical jargon, who bypass the market.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 241

School, Law, Nature

“d) Difference between the approved budget for the contract and the contract bid price. Savings may also result from unused compensation and related costs arising from unfilled, vacant or abolished position, non-entitlement to allowance and benefits, and leaves of absences without pay.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“Let us abandon the obsolete division of rights into artificial categories of first, second and third generation rights – with their intrinsic prejudices. Let us consider redefining human rights in functional terms. I am suggesting a functional paradigm of enabling rights (such as the rights to peace, food, health and homeland), inherent rights (such as equality and non-discrimination), procedural rights (such as access to information, freedom of expression and due process) and what I would call outcome rights, that is, the practical realization of human dignity in the form of the right to our identity, to achieve our potential and to be just who we are, free to enjoy our own culture and opinions. The absence of this outcome right to dignity and self-respect is reflected in much of the strife we see in the world today.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order 67th session of the General Assembly http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12732&LangID=E. 2013

Health, World, Peace, Food

“Even if the absence of evidence for a given god were not evidence of its absence, it would still be evidence that the belief in that god is unreasonable. That's the only proposition that any atheist of any kind has to demonstrate in order to win the argument. Because anything beyond that… is just having fun.”

Scott Clifton (1984) American television actor, musician, internet personality.

God, Atheism and Evidence, as Theoretical Bullshit, hosted on YouTube. (11 January 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9stJ8h2ilZU

God

“If vision is a field, think about what we could do differently to create one. We would do our best to get it permeating through the entire organization so that we could take advantage of its formative properties. All employees, in any part of the company, who bumped up against the field, would be influenced by it. Their behavior could be shaped as a result of “field meetings”, where their energy would link with the fields form to create behavior congruent with the organizations goals. In the absence of that field, in areas of the organization that hadn’t been reached, we could hold no expectation of desired behaviors. If the field hadn’t extended into that space, there would be nothing there to help behaviors materialize, no invisible geometry working on our behalf”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

Source: Leadership and the New Science (1992), p. 54

Behavior, Thinking, Help, Parting

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

Imagination, Learning, Time

“[S]ince the essence of the soul is but a will to bestow, and all its manifestations and possessions are fulfillments of that will to bestow (…) therefore it is immortal and irreplaceable. The soul, with all its manifestations is eternal and exists forever. Absence does not apply to them upon the departure of the body. On the contrary, the absence of the corrupted form of the body, greatly strengthens it, thus enabling it to rise to the Heavens. Thus we have clearly shown that the persistence in no way depends upon the concepts it has acquired, as philosophers claim, but its eternality is in its very essence, meaning in its will to bestow, which is its essence. And the concepts it acquires are its reward, not its essence.”

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

Assorted Themes, On Eternal Bestowal and Transient Reception

Way, Soul, Departure, Dependency

“Boredom is so endemic to our culture, particularly among youth, that we imagine it to be a near-universal default state of human existence. In the absence of outside stimuli we are bored. Yet…boredom is virtually unique to Western culture (and by extension to the global culture it increasingly dominates).…greed like boredom is absent in most hunter-gatherer cultures based on a more open conception of self.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible http://charleseisenstein.net/project/the-more-beautiful-world-our-hearts-know-is-possible/ The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. The Vision and Practice of Interbeing (2013)

Youth, Imagination, Universe

“In the absence of a criminal code, a court might give a reprimand for a punch in the nose in Ryazan, while the sentence in Tula might be shooting.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

Krylenko on the importance of having a universal criminal code, quoted in Yuri Feofanov & ‎Donald D. Barry, Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era

“We have parts of our system which are overwhelmed by regulation. It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem. It was despite the presence of regulation you got huge risks built up.”

Timothy Geithner (1961) American central banker and politician

House Financial Services Committee, March 26, 2009 http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/press031309.shtml

Problem, Parting

“Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here. He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization—the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do something else; the relationship between the banker and its client as one of ambivalence and reliance on the father figure; the use of accounting conventions as repression and the absence of reality testing; the work environment as the pleasure/pain principle—current pleasure for future damage, let someone else pick up the pieces; leveraging and doubling our bets as counter-phobic behavior; termination therapy as what happens when the CFO and Treasurer get caught; and, of course, transference—how the trader seeks to shift responsibility to his or her superior when the string runs out.”

Eugene Rotberg (1930)

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs. http://3197d6d14b5f19f2f440-5e13d29c4c016cf96cbbfd197c579b45.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/collection/papers/1990/1994_0623_RotbergTestimony.pdf, 23 June 1994

Pain, Pleasure, Behavior, Reality

“In the public sphere, perception is reality: it's more important to be seen to do something than actually to do it. At least when private companies use PR and advertising they must spend their own money and there are other corporations vying for our business. If a company doesn't give us what we want they face bankruptcy. Public institutions, however, are monopolies. We have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. If we don't like the way our particular police force operates it's not like we can choose another one or even withhold the money used to run the one we don't like. We're forced - under threat of imprisonment - to pay for a monopoly service and for it to tell us how great it is. This is the real danger of institutional PR. In the absence of competition it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability can exist. PR stifles debate and suppresses opinion through the use of centralized press offices and communication protocols.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Pages 45-46.
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, 1st Edition

Money, Way, Communication, Business

“Do you enjoy your work? Are you happy to get out of bed each morning and dress for the office? If you answered ‘no’ to either of these questions, you are not alone. In a 2014 Conference Board survey, 52 per cent of Americans claimed to be unhappy at work and in a recent CIPD study 23 per cent of Britons claimed to be looking for a new job. In the same survey only about one-third claim to feel engaged with their work. You can see the effects of this in absence, stress and depression. In fact, you can see it in the rush hour in the tired and sad-looking faces of so many commuters.”

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

Happiness, Sadness, Feeling, Question

“In principle, it might be possible to obtain evidence of focal-attentive processing in the absence of awareness of what is being processed… in practice, however, a complete dissociation of consciousness from focal-attentive processing is difficult to achieve.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Source: Is human information processing conscious?, 1991, p. 665; As cited in: Giorgio Marchetti, " Against the view that consciousness and attention are fully dissociable https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279725/." Attention and consciousness in different senses (2011): 23.

“You have failed to consider the ramifications of the solutions and pose a problem that simply would not exist if you did. This taxes my patience, which is already legendary in its general absence.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: XML and lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/06d4be5b6f5bc154 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Problem, Patience

“Effective leadership begins with having the right mindset; in particular, it begins with having an ownership mind-set. This means a willingness to put oneself in the shoes of a decision maker and think through all of the considerations that the decision maker must factor into his or her thinking and actions.
Having an ownership mind-set is essential to developing into an effective leader. By the same token, the absence of an ownership mind-set often explains why certain people with great promise ultimately fail to reach their leadership potential.
An ownership mind-set involves three essential elements, which I will put in the form of questions:”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Can you figure out what you believe, as if you were an owner?
Can you act on those beliefs?
Do you act in a way that adds value to someone else: a customer, a client, a colleague, or a community? Do you take responsibility for the positive and negative impact of your actions on others?
These elements are not a function of your formal position in an organization. They are not a function of title, power, or wealth, although these factors can certainly be helpful in enabling you to act like an owner. These elements are about what you do. They are about taking ownership of your convictions, actions, and impact on others. In my experience, great organizations are made up of executives who focus specifically on these elements and work to empower their employees to think and act in this way.
Source: What You're Really Meant To Do, 2013, p. 22-23

People, Shoe, Question, Thinking

“And death?
I don’t fear death.
I dread the absence of it.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

Divided by Infinity (p. 195)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Death, Fear

“Kuhn acknowledges having used the term "paradigm" in two different meanings. In the first one, "paradigm" designates what the members of a certain scientific community have in common, that is to say, the whole of techniques, patents and values shared by the members of the community. In the second sense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton’s Principia, which, acting as a common model or an example… stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation. Thus the question is for Kuhn to investigate by means of the paradigm what makes possible the constitution of what he calls "normal science". That is to say, the science which can decide if a certain problem will be considered scientific or not. Normal science does not mean at all a science guided by a coherent system of rules, on the contrary, the rules can be derived from the paradigms, but the paradigms can guide the investigation also in the absence of rules. This is precisely the second meaning of the term "paradigm", which Kuhn considered the most new and profound, though it is in truth the oldest.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Truth, Communication, Question, Problem

“Diogenes the cynic, seeing one of the so-called freedmen pluming himself, while many heartily congratulated him, marveled at the absence of reason and discernment. “A man might as well,” he said, “proclaim that one of his servants became a grammarian, a geometrician, or musician, when he has no idea whatever of the art.” For as the proclamation cannot make them men of knowledge, so neither can it make them free.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

157
Every Good Man is Free

Men, Art, Idea, Knowledge

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and its halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers' attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.”

Robert Harris book The Ghost

Source: The Ghost (2007), Ch. 9.

Books, Universe, Reading

“I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

Study

“Of a commonwealth, whose subjects are but hindered by terror from taking arms, it should rather be said, that it is free from war, than that it has peace. For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character : for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done. Besides, that commonwealth, whose peace depends on the sluggishness of its subjects, that are led about like sheep, to learn but slavery, may more properly be called a desert than a commonwealth.”
Civitas, cuius subditi metu territi arma non capiunt, potius dicenda est, quod sine bello sit, quam quod pacem habeat. Pax enim non belli privatio, sed virtus est, quae ex animi fortitudine oritur; est namque obsequium constans voluntas id exsequendi, quod ex communi civitatis decreto fieri debet. Illa praeterea civitas, cuius pax a subditorum inertia pendet, qui scilicet veluti pecora ducuntur, ut tantum servire discant, rectius solitudo, quam civitas dici potest.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Liberally rendered in A Natural History of Peace (1996) by Thomas Gregor as:
"Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 5, Of the Best State of a Dominion

War, Peace, Spring, Learning

“Only the absence of honesty and of a true love of art provides some artists with the affrontery to live on stale cans of artistic economics stocked up for years, and, year in year out, until they are fifty, to mutter about what they had first started to talk about when they were twenty.”

Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) Russian artist

Quote, 1913, in 'Osnovy novogo tvorchestva i prichiny ego neponimaniia,', in 'Soiuz molodezhi' (St. Petersburg), March 1913, p. 20; translated in John E. Bowlt, The Russian Avant- Garde: Theory and Criticism; Thames and Hudson, London 1988, p. 109

Love, Art

“The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning — in other words, of absurdity — the more energetically meaning is sought.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Martin J. Rees (1942) cosmologist, astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, President of the Royal Society

As quoted in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (1971) http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730010095_1973010095.pdf by Bernard M. Oliver, and John Billingham, Ch. 2 : Life in the Universe, p. 3 ; this has frequently misattributed to Carl Sagan, who quoted it in some of his presentations.

“At Gundar we conceive 'innocence' as a positive quality, not merely an insipid absence of guilt," stated the Nolde. "We are not the fools that certain untidy ruffians might suppose.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 5, section 1, "The Seventeen Virgins"

Fools

“The celebrated physicist and mathematician A. M. Ampere coined the word cybernetique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of "Essai sur la philosophic des sciences", 1845, Paris). Ampere's grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and electrical systems. It is thus perhaps ironical that Ampere's word should be borrowed by N. Wiener to name this new science, so important to modern warfare. The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the animal and the Machine," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii. About the origin of the word Cybernetics

Behavior, Communication, Nature, Science

“Among Jews, there is an absence of drunkenness, always a fruitful source of domestic strife and misconduct.”

Hermann Adler (1839–1911) Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911

Source: Quoted in Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (One-volume edition), p. 933

“There is not one who speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence," wrote Pascal. "All affection is based on this mutual deception, and few friendships would survive if we knew what our friends were saying of us behind our backs.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Friendship

“Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes, Act 1
The Flies (1943)

Soul

“Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 338)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

“These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with Revenge of the Nerds II. The movie doesn't have the nerve to be about real nerds. It hedges its bets. A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/revenge-of-the-nerds-ii-nerds-in-paradise-1987 of Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (13 July 1987) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Life, People, Guy, Feeling

“Education to the extent that it raises an individual's future earnings, increases her future tax payments; in the absence of any subsidy, an individual's investment in education confers a 'dividend' on future taxpayers.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, School Education, p. 297-298

Education, Future

“Tolstoy, the Russian writer, said in War and Peace: “I cannot conceive of a man not being free unless he is dead.” While this statement sounds a bit exaggerated, it gets at a basic truth. What Tolstoy is saying in substance is that the absence of freedom is the presence of death. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

[http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/17July1959_AddressattheFiftiethAnnualNAACPConvention.pdf Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention (17 July 1959)
1950s

Death, War, Truth, Peace

“Before people crow about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I suggest they wait a bit.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Prime Minister's monthly press conference, April 2003 http://web.archive.org/20030511155256/www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page3535.asp, Prime Minister's website. 28 April 2003. 2000s

People, Waiting

“The number both of pupils and school places in 1922 is… all too small. But, inadequate as they are, they represent something like an educational revolution compared with the almost complete absence of public provision which existed prior to 1902.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Secondary Education For All (1922)

Education, School

“What's at the heart of all sales and marketing: creating demand even in the absence of logic.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.169

Heart

“Aaron Russo: Do you think America is going deeper and deeper into becoming a police state?
Ron Paul: Yeah, I think we're moving in that direction, because there's not much we can do without permission. The absence of a police state is that people are free, and if you don't commit crimes you can do what you want. But today, you can't open up a business, you can't develop land, you can't go to the bank, you can't go to the doctor without the government knowing what you're doing. They talk about medical privacy, that's gone. Financial privacy, that's gone. The right to own property, that's essentially gone. So you have to get permission from the government for almost everything. And if that is the definition of a police state, that you can't do anything unless the government gives you permission, we're well on our way. This is something that people eventually, I hope, will get sick and tired of, and say enough is enough.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

America: Freedom to Fascism, 2006 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5355374476580235299&hl=en 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Hope, Way, Business

“Abdul Qadir Badaoni who was then one of Akbar's court chaplains or imams, states that he sought an interview with the emperor when the royal troops were marching against Rana Pratap in 1576, begging leave of absence for "the privilege of joining the campaign to soak his Islamic beard in Hindu infidel blood."”

`Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni book Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

Badaoni, Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, vol. II, p. 383; Smith, Akbar the Great Mogul, p. 108. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3
Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

“The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart (1939)

People, Thinking, Sense, Heart

“If you make the light dominate too much, the breadth of the planes leads to the absence of half tints, and consequently to discoloration; the opposite abuse is harmful above all in big compositions destined to be seen from a distance, like ceilings, etc. In the latter form of painting, Paul Veronese goes beyond Rubens through the simplicity of his local color and his breadth in handling the light... Veronese had greatly to strengthen his local color in order that it should not appear discolored when immunized by the very broad light he threw on it.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 1850; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 230 – 231
1831 - 1863

Color, Light, Appearance, Painting