Quotes about acceptance (3726 quotes, page 22)

“Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Address to the Prague World Congress of International PEN Club (7 November 1994) http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/wipcnews/peninternationaldeeplysaddenedbydeathofvclavhavelaconstantchampionforfreedomofexpression/

World , Feeling

“Your Excellency, Mr President: I greet you, in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continue to oppose the war by economic means, which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq. I greet you, too, in the name of the Palestinian people, amongst whom I've just spent two weeks in the occupied Palestinian territories. I can honestly tell you that there was not a single person to whom I told I was coming to Iraq and hoping to meet with yourself who did not wish me to convey their heartfelt, fraternal greetings and support. And this was true, especially at the base in the refugee camps of Jabaliyah and Beach Camp in Gaza, in the Balatah refugee camp in Nablus and on the streets of the towns and villages in the occupied lands.I thought the president would appreciate knowing that even today, three years after the war, I still met families who were calling their newborn sons Saddam; and that two weeks ago, when I was trapped inside the Orient House, which is the Palestinian headquarters in al-Quds [Jerusalem], with 5,000 armed mustwatinin [settlers] outside demonstrating, pledging to tear down the Palestinian flag from the flagpole, the hundreds of shabab [youths] inside the compound were chanting that they wish to be with a DSh K [machine gun] in Baghdad to avenge the eyes of Abu Jihad. And the Youth Club in Silwan, which is the one of the most resistant of all the villages around Jerusalem, asked me to ask the president's permission if they could enrol him as an honourary member of their club and to present him with this flag from holy Jerusalem.I wish to say, sir, that I believe that we are turning the tide in Europe, that the scale of the humanitarian disaster which has been imposed upon the Iraqi people is now becoming more and more widely known and accepted. Fifty-five British members of parliament opposed the war, but 125 are demanding the lifting of the embargo; and this does not include the invisible section of the Conservative Party who must also be moving in that direction, and Sir Edward Heath is being a very persuasive advocate inside the Conservative Party.It is my belief that we must convey the very clear picture that 1994 has to be the year of the ending of the embargo against Iraq. Otherwise, famine and all the awful consequences, including acts of despair by Iraqis, will be the result; and this is the message we must convey to civilized opinion in Europe.Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem
"'I greet you in the name of thousands of Britons'", The Times, January 20, 1994, citing BBC monitoring service at 9 PM on January 19 as its source.
Speech to Saddam Hussein, January 19, 1994.
Source: See also David Morley Gorgeous George: The Life and Adventures of George Galloway, London: Politicos, 2007, p. 210-11. Galloway disputes the reporting of this quote and has repeatedly stated that the conclusion was a salute to "the Iraqi people" rather than Saddam Hussein personally.

Life , War , People , Youth

“Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear the most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. xix

People , Fear , Feeling , Change

“My father loved us so much, but he's the kind of person that chokes you. He doesn't leave you your own pleasures. If you think or feel one way and he feels the other way, he won't accept it. My mother wanted to work. People wanted her to do movies, but he just wanted her to be at home, be a mother, be a wife, be this Venus, this planet he could land on anytime.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

Love , People , Pleasure , Way

“They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Life , Way , Feeling

“She really was a person who cared very much about others. She worked for justice and inclusion and making sure that women's voices were heard. She wasn't willing to just accept the world as we were told it was, but worked to help make it more beautiful. I am very grateful for her bringing that into my life.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Molly Vetter, friend of Wadewitz — quoted in: Wetzel, Diane. (April 23, 2014). "NP grad, Wikipedia editor dies in Calif." http://www.nptelegraph.com/news/np-grad-wikipedia-editor-dies-in-calif/article_c7be4462-ab39-53ad-b3e8-9055b51d3bdf.html NPTelegraph.com. North Platte, Nebraska. — and: Wetzel, Diane (April 23, 2014). "North Platte grad, 37, Wikipedia editor, dies in climbing fall" http://www.omaha.com/article/20140423/NEWS/140429478/1707. Omaha World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska).
About

Life , Women , World , Justice

“A pattern is a fully realized form original, or model accepted or proposed for imitation. With patterns, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor.”

Peter Coad (1953) American software entrepreneur

Source: Object-oriented patterns. (1992), p. 158

“The NTC should start cracking the whip and fix the system immediately. It cannot be business as usual anymore. Let’s do away with the mentality of just accepting the present situation and start doing something about it. he problem is that government agencies that are supposed to monitor these telcos and help consumers don’t seem to feel the urgency of the situation.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Philippine Daily Inquirer http://technology.inquirer.net/43213/ntc-urged-to-crack-whip-on-telcos
2015

Feeling , Business , Problem , Help

“The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.”

Russell Lynes (1910–1991) American art historian

Reader's Digest, December 1954

Art

“The modern systems view, which flowered during World War II (though building on principles in the wind much earlier), has already borne its first fruits and is in danger of a superficial acceptance into the corpus of sociology by way of the incorporation of some of its now common vocabulary.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii.

War , World , Way , Flowers

“To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin; and in order to apply and develop, “simple interpretation” is obviously not enough.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/mar/x01.htm
Uncritical Criticism
January–March
1900
Collected Works
3
yes
Lenin
Vladimir Ilich
Marxists.
1900s

“When Voltaire was bornreally but one church which, of course, was ignorant, tyrannical and barbarous in the extreme. All creeds are alike, and whenever there is but one, and the rulers honestly believe in that one, they are bound to be ignorant, barbarous and cruel. All sorts of heresies were punishable by death. If anyone dared to write a pamphlet or book that questioned any part of the accepted faith, the book was at once consigned to flames and the author was lucky if he did not meet the same fate. Religion was not maintained by the precepts of the priest, but by the prison, the torture chamber and the fagot. Everyone believed; no one questioned. The religious creeds, while strict and barbarous, did not interfere with the personal conduct of any of the rulers. They were left free to act as they pleased, so long as they professed to believe in the prevailing faith.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Death , Fate , Books , Faith

“It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

Lie , Behavior , Understanding , Nature

“To say that we must attend meticulously to the environmental case does not mean that we must go to the other extreme and wholly neglect the economic case. Here we must beware of some of our friends. For parts of the conservationist lobby would do precisely this. Their approach is hostile to growth in principle and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. It has a manifest class bias, and reflects a set of middle and upper class value judgements. Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them. They are highly selective in their concern, being militant mainly about threats to rural peace and wildlife and well loved beauty spots: they are little concerned with the far more desperate problem of the urban environment in which 80 per cent of our fellow citizens live…As I wrote many years ago, those enjoying an above average standard of living should be chary of admonishing those less fortunate on the perils of material riches. Since we have many less fortunate citizens, we cannot accept a view of the environment which is essentially elitist, protectionist and anti-growth. We must make our own value judgement based on socialist objectives: and that judgement must…be that growth is vital, and that its benefits far outweigh its costs.”

Anthony Crosland (1918–1977) British politician

'Class hypocrisy of the conservationists', The Times (8 January 1971), p. 10
An extract from the Fabian pamphlet A Social Democratic Britain.

Love , Hostility , People , Peace

“Most people wander through life, carelessly taking whatever risk crosses their paths without compensation, but never consciously accepting extra risk to pick up the money and other good things lying all around them.”

Aaron C. Brown (1956) American financial analyst

Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 67

Life , Money , People , Lying

“While parents are naturally in a leadership role, strong families strive to share decision-making. They resolve differences by respecting other viewpoints and accepting compromise solutions. One family decided to spend money on a son's music lessons rather than replace worn carpeting. The compromise was to pitch in and clean the carpet. In another family, everyone but the youngest daughter loved to ski. They rented a vacation condo with plenty of activities for the daughter, and the skiers accepted an hour's drive to the slopes.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

10 Keys to a Strong Family (2002)

Love , Money , Family , Music

“Islam has no mechanism for excommunication. Individuals can leave the ummah and be regarded as apostates (murtad). But no one who swears he is a Muslim can be excluded. Even very bad Muslims are still Muslims as long as they haven’t thrice publicly rejected the two testimonies. (The two testimonies are accepting the oneness of God and that Mohammed is His Prophet.) Thus, neither Obama nor anyone else is qualified to decide who is a Muslim — or what is “true Islam.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Obama’s elementary errors on Islam http://nypost.com/2015/02/20/obamas-elementary-errors-on-islam/, New York Post (February 20, 2015).
New York Post

God

“Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 19

“Dear Mr. Rosenberg [art-dealer in Paris, then], - Many thanks for your good letters which are a great encouragement to me. I assure you that you are the man who has encouraged me the most so far. Please excuse the tone of declaration. I will also show my gratitude when I am in Paris by doing a good life-size portrait of you, or of a member of your family if you prefer, and I would like you to accept it as a gift. I intend to be in Paris around 15 November. My mother and my brother send their best wishes.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Mr. Rosenberg, please accept my devotion, esteem and gratitude.
Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Rosenberg, Rome, 13 Oct. 1925; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO TO LÉONCE ROSENBERG, 1925-1939 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/309-338-Rosenberg_Metaphysical_Art_ENG.pdf, p. 317
1920s and later

Life , Family , Art , Gratitude

“So we already have the evidence of the dichotomy that runs through our culture. We all engage in purposeful activity, and we judge ourselves and others in terms of success in achieving the purposes that we set before ourselves. Yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated. Purpose is a meaningful concept in relation to our own consciousness of ourselves, but it is allowed no place in our understanding of the world of facts.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) Christian missionary

Foolishness to the Greeks. Eerdmans, 1986, 77-78.

World , Understanding , Success

“It would be foolish and wrong to ignore the fact that all our universities today tread a very dangerous path. Increasingly, they are accepting government money because they are doing things that government wants done. How great a peril is this in a democracy?”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at the Congress of the Association of the Universities of the British Commonwealth, Montreal, September 1, 1958
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Money , Democracy , Universe

“Marriage is not at all what romantic lovers imagine it to be; it is an institution founded upon an instinct; to be successful, it requires not only physical attraction, but will-power, patience, and the always difficult acceptance of "the other"; finally, if these conditions are fulfilled, a beautiful and lasting affection can be established - a unique and, to those who have never known it, incomprehensible mingling of love, friendship, sensuality, and respect, without which there is no true marriage.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Love , Friendship , Marriage , Beauty

“When we look at the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument, it seems on the surface that we are completely full of ourselves and yet at the same time terribly dubious, sometimes completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility as a cause célèbre. We show no faith in ourselves by accepting this idea that we’ve caused Global Warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. These are hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of the few whom offer us the way to salvation.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The adapability of man to his climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/04/07/the-adapability-of-man-to-his-climate/, wattsupwiththat.com, April 7, 2007.
2007

Faith , Hope , Way , Idea

“My collages are only ideas for things much larger – things to cover walls. In fact all the things that I have done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern 'icon'. We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese & the African and the Island primitives – with their relation to life. It should meet the eye direct.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Quote in a letter to John Cage, 4 September 1950; as quoted in "Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective", ed. Diane Waldman, Guggenheim museum, New York 1997, p. 11
1950 - 1968

Life , Art , Idea , Hell

“Justification is the act of God as a Judge; adoption as a Father; by the former we are discharged from condemnation, and accepted as righteous; by the latter we are made the children of God and joint-heirs with Christ.”

John Guyse (1680–1761) British independent minister

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 362.

God , Children , Christ

“The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will.Washington still hasn’t learned this. American hubris can lead the administration and Congress into a bailout solution that the rest of the world, which has to finance it, might not accept.”

Paul Craig Roberts (1939) American economist

"The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation," http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09242008.html CounterPunch (2008-09-24)

World , Learning , Dependency , Country

“I still get heartbreak fan mail. I think fans who send them are in denial. They are unable to accept that I am married now. And, yes, I enjoy it”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

laughs
Male fans rections about Ghoshal's marriage http://www.mid-day.com/articles/singer-shreya-ghoshal-rubbishes-pregnancy-rumours-bollywood-news/17710170

Thinking

“The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 97

Art , Idea , Sport , Perfection

“I believe until a man has given up himself he has given up nothing - all his knowledge of accepted aesthetics are of no avail until he has stepped aside from them and given up himself – himself only through the eyes of himself. What a problem everlasting then is it not? A life time of breathless endeavor to be the thing and do the thing of his being – So easy to travel along with claques and crowds, voicing vociferously the great discoveries of each – How ineffably difficult, voicing the soul of one man – alone to himself and – then to whomever else hears..”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to w:Alfred Sieglitz, June 1911, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 147
1908 - 1920

Life , Travel , Soul , Knowledge

“Though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men , World , Fear , Way

“How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness… – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Paul Churchland. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. (1st ed.). MIT Press. 1995. pp. 181: Talking about Freudian analysis.

Failure , Science

“Some one has said, 'Through struggle and suffering man can pass from the freedom to choose j or evil to the higher freedom that abides in the steadfastly chosen good." And again the "Gita" in ( II Ver. 27 states that our existence is brief and death is certain and that our human dignity requin to accept pain and suffering for the sake of the right.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Suffering

Death , Pain , Freedom , Suffering

“Accept these images for what they are —
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"San Francisco Night Windows"

Soul , Past , Heart

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Weight of Glory (1949)

God , Pain , Secret , World

“He realised how oddly detached he was. […] He enjoyed every moment, but he knew that his enjoyment came largely from standing a little apart. He was not a cynic, for there was no sourness in him. He had a kindliness towards most things, and a large charity. But he did not take sides. He had not accepted any mood, or creed, or groove of his own. Vix ea nostra voco [I scarcely call these things our own] was his motto. He was only a seeker […] occupied in finding out what was in his soul.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 20

Soul , Mood

“Reading O'Rahilly's life of Father William Doyle. I'm surprised this book hasn't left a deeper mark, for it contains - often in parallel terms - the whole teaching of the Little Way which created such a stir in the case of Thérèse. But it seems people prefer to accept such things from a lovely young girl complete with smile, roses and veil. One can't help wondering whether Thérèse would have met with the same enormous response had she been hopelessly ugly - a hunchback with a squint, or old…”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

Love , Life , People , Books

“Our relationships as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a beautiful woman – we should accept with gratitude any favours she offers, but we should not expect too much nor believe all that is said.”

Lev Artsimovich (1909–1973) Soviet physicist

as quoted by E.E. Kintner at the Artsimovich Memorial Session of the Seventh International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research

Beauty , Gratitude

“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience—and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself—consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

World , Learning , Waiting

“Moses had described a path to God, but this path was neither taken up by everyone nor was it understood by everyone. Jesus illuminated and perfected this path; nevertheless, many even now remain unbelievers. Muhammad tried to make the same path easier, so that it might be accepted by all, even idolaters. These are the most famous of the said paths to God, although many others were presented by the wise and the prophets”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

Cribratio Alkorani (Sifting the Qur'an)

God , Perfection

“Two signs of learned person are: acceptance of other people's criticism, and being knowledgeable about the angles and dimensions of rhetoric and debate.”

Husayn ibn Ali (626–680) The grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 252
Regarding Wisdom

People , Knowledge , Learning , Personality

“I heard my mother remark occasionally: 'A man who accepts a job under anyone is a slave.' That impression became so indelibly fixed that even after my marriage I refused all positions. I met expenses by investing my family endowment in land. Moral: Good and positive suggestions should instruct the sensitive ears of children. Their early ideas long remain sharply etched.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Marriage , Children , Family , Idea

“Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support.”

Michael Perelman (1939) American economist

Source: The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000), p. 2

People , Support

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Parting

“[W]hat intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft repeated, than the story of a large research program that impaled itself upon a false central assumption accepted by all practitioners? Do we regard all people who worked within such traditions as dishonorable fools? What of the scientists who assumed that the continents were stable, that the hereditary material was protein, or that all other galaxies lay within the Milky Way? These false and abandoned efforts were pursued with passion by brilliant and honorable scientists. How many current efforts, now commanding millions of research dollars and the full attention of many of our best scientists, will later be exposed as full failures based on false premises?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Fall in the House of Ussher", p. 187
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People , Fools , Way , Failure

“What we demand from the Soviet architect is that, as an artist and because of his perceptive intellect, he will fully comprehend and amplify the faintest ripple of developing energies much sooner than the masses — who tend to be shortsighted as far as their own growth is concerned — and that he will transform this energy into tangible architectural form... The club's role is to become a University of Culture. If one accepts the premise that private dwellings should strive to operate on the basis of the greatest possible austerity, then by contrast, public dwellings should provide the maximum of available luxury accessible to all. The term 'reconstruction' is therefore not applicable to this case, since there is no building precedent in the past.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'The Club as a social force'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Universe , Past

“It is accepted fact that the world has been moving from an economy of goods to an economy of knowledge. And knowledge is the single most important resource to any advanced society.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

World , Knowledge

“I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility. One can easily concoct imaginary situations in which it would be inadvisable, even immoral to do so […] [I will not defend] the assumption that it is reprehensible for a powerful nation to invade a weak and tiny neighbor in order to impose on it an "acceptable" government […] just as I would not take the trouble to justify my belief that one should assist a child being attacked by a rabid dog.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Arthur Dorfman, reply by Noam Chomsky http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12104, New York Review of Books, April 20, 1967.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s

Dogs , Feeling , Imagination

“This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Five, The Pain Threshold

Feeling , Nature , Universe

“There's no escaping it-the world is full of lies. It is safest always to accept what one hears as if it were utterly commonplace and devoid of interest.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

73
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)

World

“Women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

p. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
(1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Question , Anger , Women , Life

“I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Address to the nation on the situation in Southeast Asia (30 April 1970); in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970, p. 410
1970s

History

“Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Spirituality and Temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Cromwell's preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals, March 1533.

God , People , World , History

“The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most "unquestionable" truths. A century ago, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud's sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton's theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein's theory, although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to have been taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000), p. 4

People , Truth , Stupidity , Question

“Roswell Gardiner has never wavered in his faith, from the time when his feelings were awakened by the just view of his own insignificance, as compared to the power of God! He then learned the first, great lesson in religious belief, that of humility; without which no man can be truly penitent, or truly a Christian. He no longer thought of measuring the Deity with his narrow faculties, or of setting up his blind conclusions, in the face of positive revelations. He saw that all must be accepted, or none; and there was too much evidence, too much inherent truth, a morality too divine, to allow a mind like his to reject the gospel altogether. With Mary at his side, he has continued to worship the Trinity, accepting its mysteries in an humble reliance on the words of inspired men.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Sea Lions or The Lost Sealers (1849)

Men , God , Truth , Faith

“A weary and exhausted understanding of religion is not acceptable. A Muslim should speak lively, fluently and sincerely. A Muslim would not feel the need for a heavy peroration.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

24 June 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

Religion , Feeling , Understanding , Sincerity

“On May 19, 2009, I was taken to the White House to meet President Obama. We'd met once before when he'd visited the Pentagon during his first week in office, but as DJS I'd been in a collection of other civilian and military leaders, so it was unlikely he remembered the man who would soon command his military effort in Afghanistan. I'd been in the Oval Office before with President George W. Bush, but the atmosphere in the West Wing in the final and opening months of administrations differed perceptibly. Although it was four months into Obama's term, there was still a feeling of newness to the people, who moved with an air of excited purpose through the hallways. When the president was available, the door opened and Obama walked to the entrance to greet me into the room. The meeting was short, but cordial. The president offered no specific guidance but locked his eyes with mine and thanked me for accepting the responsibility.”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Source: My Share Of The Task (2013), p. 288

People , Feeling , Effort , Housing

“I do not conceal my lack of admiration for a pain fully long list of redistributive measures undertaken by modern governments. Many serve no ethically accepted purpose such as compassion for the needy; indeed, they serve only as recognition of which groups possess or lack political influence.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

Pain

“If you’re doing it right, you’re not asking the audience to buy into your point of view at all. If you’re doing it right, you’re asking the audience to accept the character’s point of view as the character’s point of view. That can be anything. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies from characters’ points of view that are not our own. That’s part of the gift movies give us.”

Scott Derrickson (1966) American screenwriter and film director

Interview: Filmmaker Scott Derrickson on Horror, Faith, Chesterton and His New Movie http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/interview-scott-derrickson (July 1, 2014)

Parting

“Arun Shourie tells us that a lot can be learned from the case of Narayan Guru who, early this century, as a member of the unapproachable Ezhava caste in Kerala, became an acknowledged religious leader and profoundly changed caste relations in Kerala for the better. He 'attained the highest spiritual states, thereby acquired unquestioned authority, and transformed society from within the tradition'. He made use of a major loophole in the rigidities of the caste system, a loophole which Hindu society deliberately maintained precisely because Hinduism was not merely a social system but, among other things, also a spiritual system: renunciates in general, and sages with acknowledged yogic realization in particular, are above the worldly divisions such as caste. They also have the authority to herald social transformations which Hindus would never accept from purely political busybodies.”

Narayana Guru (1855–1928) Indian social reformer

Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Learning , Change

“I am saying this with all humility. I know him (Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad). I love him as a father and a leader. I have fought against him. And now I accept that he is the best man to lead Malaysia now.”

Anwar Ibrahim (1947) Malaysian politician

Anwar Ibrahim said during the Port Dickson bi-election campaign rally, quoted on Channel News Asia, "'I love him as a father and a leader': Anwar, Mahathir in show of unity at by-election rally" https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/anwar-ibrahim-mahathir-port-dickson-by-election-pakatan-10805828, 9 October 2018.

Love

“Kashmir's conversion to Islam on a large scale also dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century…. However, it was during the reign of Sikandar Butshikan (1394-1417), that the wind of Muslim proselytization blew the strongest. He invited from Persia, Arabia and Mesopotamia learned men of his own faith; his bigotry prompted him to destroy all the most famous temples in Kashmir - Martand, Vishya, Isna, Chakrabhrit, Tripeshwar, etc. Sikandar offered the Kashmiris the choice between Islam and death. Some Kashmiri Brahmans committed suicide, many left the land, many others embraced Islam, and a few began to live under Taqiya, that is, they professed Islam only outwardly. It is said that the fierce intolerance of Sikandar had left in Kashmir no more than eleven families of Brahmans. …By the time of Akbar’s annexation of Kashmir (C. E. 1586) the valley had turned mainly Mohammadan. When Father Xavier and Brother Benedict went to Kashmir with Akbar this is what they learnt: “In antiquity this land was inhabited by the Moors, possibly a reference to Timur (contemporary of Sikandar the Iconoclast), and since then the majority of the people accept Islam.””

Sikandar Butshikan

When Kashmir was under Muslim rule for 500 years (1319-1819) Hindus were constantly tortured and forcibly converted.
K. S. Lal (1993). Indian Muslims: Who are they. New Delhi: Voice of India.

Death , Men , People , Family

“Many shall seek; do you strive. For wishing is one thing, and willing is another, and doing is yet another. And in regard to entrance into Christ's kingdom, our "doing" is trusting Him who has done all for us. " This is the work of God, that ye should believe on Him whom He hath sent." Does your wish lead to the acceptance of the condition? Then it will be fulfilled.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 619.

God , Christ

“I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.
I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable …”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 49

Question , Business , Thinking , Time

“I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms. All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

"Letters-General Questions Answered" p. 1 http://www.woz.org/letters/general/01.html
Woz.org files

Life , People , School

“Why don't we write code that just works? Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code that has years of testing? This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable. […] Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines."”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Those two really do work.
Torvalds, Linus, 2011-04-13, Linux 2.6.39-rc3, 2011-04-21 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1126136,
2010s, 2011

Thinking , Change

“In excluding me from the shadow cabinet, Margaret Thatcher has chosen what I believe to be the only wholly honest solution and one which I accept and welcome.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

February 1975.[citation needed]
Post-Prime Ministerial

“The generally accepted idea that He will return as a triumphant warrior, omnipotent and irresistible, has surely no basis in fact. That He will ultimately lead His people, humanity, into Jerusalem is a fact, founded on a secure foundation, but it will not be into a Jewish city called Jerusalem but into "the place of peace" (as the word "Jerusalem" means).”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter III: The Reappearance of the Christ, World Expectancy

People , Peace , Idea

“The bourgeoisie … lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests!”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Source: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), p. 112

Death , Sleep , Freedom , Appearance

“Some students cannot accept that radical openness of history, and they lapse into some form of fundamentalism or traditionalism that simply clings to theological formulas of the past.”

Roger Haight (1936) American theologian

Preface, p. vii
Dynamics Of Theology

History , Past

““It’s not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.”
“We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love,” said her two MOHmies, as one. “That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.”…
“If we are powerful,” sang her MOHmies, “we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.””

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 240).
Jack Glass (2012)

Love , People , Help

“We are now committed to an unqualified art, not illustrating outworn myths or contemporary alibis. One must accept total responsibility for what he executes. And the measure of his greatness will be in the depth of his insight and his courage in realizing his own vision.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Letter to Dorothy Miller February 5, 1952; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 193
1950s

Art , Courage

“People who are loving toward each other set up their marriages so that it is possible for both partners to get what they need from life and so that no one is expected to give up his needs to meet those of his spouse. And when their partner meets one of their needs they accept it as a gift, instead of viewing each unmet one as if it were a betrayal.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Love , Life , Marriage , People

“It’s very important to be able to accept things, you know. Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most of never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.”

Alexander McCall Smith (1948) British writer

Love Over Scotland, chapter 112.
The 44 Scotland Street series

Art , Thinking , Learning , Forgetting

“As the average Athenian citizen was not awfully bright, it was necessary to have a great many of them on each jury. … They did not have to prove that they were completely ignorant before they were accepted as jurymen. That was taken for granted.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Pericles

“Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience?”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Sense , Science

“In order to try to remove what we are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many signs, to Marx's work today, which is to say also to his injunction. What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that "changes the world. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered-by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We'll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia! We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: "Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long.29 He doesn't belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties-, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great philosopher."”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

We have heard this and we will hear it again.
Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

People , World , Fear , Fashion

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 272 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

“I definitely think this is the best time to be in the industry. Earlier, films were made on a set pattern- love story, family drama, one is rich and other is poor type formulas. But today there are different kinds of films being made and accepted by the audience. I wish I was there in the industry today…I wish I was born in today's time.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Waheeda Rehman not in favour of biopics and remakes

Love , Family , Thinking , Time

“If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 7-8.

Truth , Thinking , Decision , Help

“Values in a free society are accepted voluntarily, not through coercion, and certainly not by law… every time we write a law to control private behavior, we imply that somebody has to arrive with a gun, because if you desecrate the flag, you have to punish that person. So how do you do that? You send an agent of the government, perhaps an employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Flags, to arrest him. This is in many ways patriotism with a gun – if your actions do not fit the official definition of a "patriot," we will send somebody to arrest you.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

The Flag Burning Amendment
2003-06-03
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr060303.htm
2000s, 2001-2005

Alcohol , Law , Way , Behavior

“At the moment of a revolution there is no question of setting up a democracy like that in America. If they accuse me of dictatorship, I accept. I am creating a nation. Liberty must be suppressed until the end of the war in Algeria—until the nation becomes homogeneous.”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[TUNISIA: No Time for Democracy, TIME, Monday, Sept. 29, 1958, 1, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,821168,00.html, September 6, 2011]

War , Democracy , Question

“The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

Truth , Time

“But Rizvi has summarized them in the following words from Waliullah’s magnum opus in Arabic, Hujjat-Allah al-Baligha: “According to Shah Wali-Allah the mark of the perfect implementation of the Sharia was the performance of jihad. There were people, said the Shah, who indulged in their lower nature by following their ancestral religion, ignoring the advice and commands of the Prophet Mohammed. If one chose to explain Islam to people like this it was to do them a disservice. Force, said the Shah, was the better course - Islam should be forced down their throats like bitter medicine to a child. This, however, was possible only if the leaders of the non-Muslim communities who failed to accept Islam were killed, the strength of the community was reduced, their property confiscated and a situation was created which led to their followers and descendants willingly accepting Islam. Another means of ensuring conversions was to prevent other religious communities from worshipping their own gods. Moreover, unfavourable discriminating laws should be imposed on non-Muslims in matters of rule of retaliation, compensation for manslaughter, and marriage and political matters. However, the proselytization programme of Shah Wali-Allah only included the leaders of the Hindu community. The low class of the infidels, according to him, were to be left alone to work in the fields and for paying jiziya. They like beasts of burden and agricultural livestock were to be kept in abject misery and despair.””

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times, Canberra. 1980, p.285-6 Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

God , Marriage , People , Religion

“Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil.”

Daniel Hannan (1971) British politician

2010s, Russian aggression (2018)

“Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 81)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Truth , Knowledge , Animals

“When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander." "And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia two kings.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

42 Alexander
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

Sun

“Right now, we say in a traditional home one parent stays home with the children and the other provides the financial support for that family. That is the acceptable and right thing to do. If we begin to expand that, not only do we dilute the resources that are available, we begin to dilute things like health care, retirement, all the things offered to families that help them be a family.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

Anjeanette
Damon
Sharron Angle launches bid to run against Harry Reid
2009-10-22
Reno Gazette-Journal
http://www.rgj.com/article/20091022/NEWS/910220349/Sharron-Angle-launches-bid-to-run-against-Harry-Reid

Children , Health , Family , Home

“The term 'fundamentalist', which was coined in 1920, derives from the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the United States from 1910 to 1915. It has since been implicitly defined as meaning a person who believes that, since The Bible is the Word of God, every proposition in it must be true; a belief which, notoriously, is taken to commit fundamentalist Christians to defending the historicity of the accounts of the creation of the Universe given in the first two chapters of Genesis. On this understanding a fully believing Christian does not have to be fundamentalist. Instead it is both necessary and sufficient to accept the Apostles' and/or The Nicene Creed. In Islam, however, the situation is altogether different. For, whereas only a very small proportion of all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments are presented as statements made directly by God in any of the three persons of the Trinity, The Koran consists entirely and exclusively of what are alleged to be revelations from Allah (God). Therefore, with regard to The Koran, all Muslims must be as such fundamentalists; and anyone denying anything. asserted in The Koran ceases, ipso facto, to be properly accounted a Muslim. Those whom the media call fundamentalists would therefore better be described as revivalists. This conceptual truth not only places a tight limitation upon the possibilities of developmental change within Islam, as opposed to the tacit or open abandonment of one or more of its original particular claims, but also opens up the theoretical possibility of falsifying the Islamic system as a whole by presenting some known fact which is inconsistent with a Koranic assertion.”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Turning away from Mecca (The Salisbury Review, Spring 1996) quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm

God , Truth , Understanding , Universe

“Therefore THE IDEA OF 'ARTISTIC WORK' MUST BE ABOLISHED AS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT OF WHAT IS CREATIVE and work must be accepted as one of the functions of the living human organism in the same way as the beating of the heart or the activity of the nerve centers, so that it will be afforded the same protection.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Way , Idea , Heart

“We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years– contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence– Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.”

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

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/debtext/30318-06.htm, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 301, col. 762.
House of Commons debate on Iraq, 18 March 2003.
2000s

History , Intelligence

“If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr? If you have always been that, then why lose your title?
I have a title, which is the same one that I have always had.
But it's not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

On his refusal of a knighthood.
"Paul Scofield: Man for all seasons" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1092962.stm, BBC News (2000-12-30)

“Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 25; as cited in: Thomas Diefenbach (2009) Management and the Dominance of Managers. p. 138

People

“The currently (2010) widely accepted/believed description of the birth and evolution of the universe and of its contents is "Lambda Cold Dark Matter Concordance Cosmological Model" (LCDM CCM) … My own research was very much confined to the early version of the LCDM CCM (mid-1990's) when I began performing numerical experiments on the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. I was quite happy with the CCM, as everyone else, and did not bother with the fundamental issues raised by some. With time, however, it became apparent that the LCDM CCM accounts poorly for the properties of the satellite galaxies and their distribution about the Milky Way. Warm dark matter models fared no better.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

Pavel Kroupa: Dark Matter, Cosmology and Progress website, July 4, 2010 http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_cosmology.html,

Way , Birth , Universe , Time

“Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" Billions and Billions of Demons http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jan/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons/" in: The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, p. 31
Review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
Quote often taken out of context, see Lewontin on materialism http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Lewontin_on_materialism on evolutionwiki.org, and for example this example http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102006325?q=Lewontin&p=par at Watchtower Online Library.

Life , God , Health , World