Quotes about accomplishment
page 9

“It is evident that this, among many other of the purposes of my father's scheme of education, could not have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept me from having any great amount of intercourse with other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping not only the ordinary corrupting influence which boys exercise over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling; and for this he was willing that I should pay the price of inferiority in the accomplishments which schoolboys in all countries chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education were principally in the things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves, and from being brought together in large numbers.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/35/mode/1up p. 35

Education, Exercises, Learning, Country

“To talk about sensemaking is to talk about reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves and their creations. There is a strong reflexive quality to this process. People make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe. In other words, people discover their own inventions. This is why sensemaking can be understood as invention and interpretations understood as discovery. These are complementary ideas. If sensemaking is viewed as an act of invention, then it is also possible to argue that the artifacts it produces include language games and texts.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 15

People, World, Game, Idea

“With the capture of Saddam Hussein the Administration's stated goal of removing him from power has been accomplished. Now the focus must be on ending the occupation. International law must be followed and Saddam Hussein must be held accountable for his actions.The United States must seize this moment and end the occupation of Iraq. The United States must reach out to the world community with a new plan to stabilize Iraq, bring UN peacekeepers in, and bring US troops home.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Official press release, Washington, D.C. (14 December 2003), printed on Kucinich's website http://kucinich.house.gov/news/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=28638.

World, Law, Home, Communication

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kid's hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were. Next to impossible, in most cases.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 12

Children, Way, Sense, Effort

“For every day that God gives us, we thank the Lord of Hosts and His friend the Prophet, the latter of whom instituted here on earth a life of loveliness without envy or jealousy... We shall not give up this our life of loveliness, as long as we live, however much we are oppressed by the Government and its troops and policemen, its Congress and Senate, orators, newspaper scribes and authors, professors and paltry bishops, and even the antichrist himself, the Pope. No power on earth will succeed in preventing us from accomplishing God's sacred ordinances, as regards polygamy no less than all the other aspects that God has revealed to us. Polygamy as long as we live, say we women of Latter-Day Saints; polygamy or death!”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

the women of Spanish Fork
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Life, Jealousy, God, Envy

“What is striking here is the degree to which the Russians were willing to undertake such an audacious and risky action against the most powerful nation on earth. That ought to be a warning to us, that if we thought that the Russians would not dare to so blatantly interfere in our affairs, we were wrong. And if we do not do our very best to understand how the Russians accomplished this unprecedented attack on our democracy and what we need to do to protect ourselves in the future, we will have only ourselves to blame.”

Adam Schiff (1960) American politician

Open Letter to the Committee Hearing Re: FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers

Democracy, Understanding, Future

“Let me tell you about what we call our field trips. It may surprise you to know, that I have personally visited, with many of my associates, practically every city in the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. If any of you has done this, you realize what big a country it is. It has taken me weeks and weeks of the hardest kind of work and continual travel to accomplish this. I which that my duties were such that I could do more of it; and I am trying to arrange my affairs so that I can. On these trips I visit from five to ten dealers a day. I meet them in their own places of business, talk with them across their own desks and solicit from them suggestions and criticisms as to their relations with the Corporation; the character of the product; the Corporation's policies; the trend of consumer demand; their viewpoint as to the future, and many other things that such contact makes possible. I solicit criticism of anything and everything.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 343

Travel, Business, Future, Personality

“Logic should no longer be considered an elegant and learned accomplishment; it should take its place as an indispensable study for every well-informed person.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Preface.
Elementary Lessons on Logic (1870)

Study, Learning, Personality

“Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation.This natural organization is called society.The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 17-18

Communication, Nature, Suffering, Dependency

“Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i. e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Stealth jihad: how radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs, 2008, ISBN 9781596985568, pp. 270-273 http://books.google.com/books?id=3eLfhvNQBkgC&pg=PA270 … France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.

Travel

“Roderick has been known to have titles and estates granted to those in his circle for accomplishing nothing more than constant agreement with his opinions, but those he has not befriended could save the kingdom and hardly receive a note of thanks. It is the way of the court and courtiers. But not everyone is so blind.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 4 (p. 51)

Way

“And he (Andy Van Dam) put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it's such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word "you're being a jerk." [laughter] Right? He doesn't say you're a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture (2008)
Variant: And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.

Life, People, Jerk, Way

“Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”

Timothy Leary book Flashbacks

Flashbacks (1983)

World, Way, Change, Personality

“And may the gods accomplish your desire:
a home, a husband, and harmonious
converse with him – the best thing in the world
being a strong house held in serenity
where man and wife agree. Woe to their enemies,
joy to their friends! But all this they know best.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

VI. 180–185 (tr. Robert Fitzgerald); Odysseus to Nausicaa.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

God, World, Home, Strong

“It is important, therefore, to understand at the outset the simplicity of this book - what it can accomplish and what it cannot. What it does try to do is to isolate certain psychological factors and to demonstrate rigorously by quantitative scientific methods that these factors are generally important in economic development.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. ix

Books, Understanding

“The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends.”

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist

George Herbert Mead (1926). "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jul., 1926), pp. 382-393; p. 382

World, Reality

“The indrawing attraction drags us out of ourselves, And calls us to be melted away and naughted in the Unity. And in this indrawing attraction we feel that God wills that we should be His, And for this we must abnegate ourselves and let our beatitude be accomplished in Him. But when He attracts us by flowing out towards us, He gives us over to ourselves and makes us free, And sets us in Time.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

From Evelyn Underhill Ruysbroeck (1915), p. 182 & 183
The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

God, Feeling, Time

“The use of means ought not to lessen our faith in GOD; and our faith in GOD ought not to hinder our using whatever means He has given us for the accomplishment of His own purposes.”

James Hudson Taylor A Retrospect

(J. Hudson Taylor. A Retrospect. Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, n.d., 41).

God, Faith

“In sports, you learn competition means go after it, win it. And not to let anything else interfere. It's something you learn, and it sticks with you. I consider myself an expert in looking into a particular idea or goal and then going after it without anything else in mind… It's always the same kind of thing. You pick a goal, and then you just go after it, accomplish it, and get satisfaction out of that.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

From Cowboys & Indians, the "magazine of the west" (September 2004).
When asked if big-screen success could bring him as much satisfaction as body-building victories
2000s

Idea, Sport, Learning

“In the years to come, I also hope that both sides (Taiwan and Mainland China) can work to facilitate policy communications, reinforce their economic cooperation, push ahead with cross-strait negotiations, accomplish more achievements beneficial to the public, expand their scope of amicable interactions, cement the ‘family bond’ between the people on both sides and jointly build a better home for Chinese.”

Zhang Zhijun (1953) Chinese politician

Zhang Zhijun (2014) cited in " Jiang says no ‘three noes’ set for Wang-Zhang talks http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/01/28/2003582310/2" on Taipei Times, 28 January 2014.

People, Family, Hope, Home

“Mr. Trump genuinely has nothing to lose. He doesn’t need the money, he doesn’t need the power and he certainly doesn’t need the fame. It seems that Donald Trump genuinely thinks the country is “going to hell” and simply doesn’t want to wait on the sidelines as it happens. Can he win? Who knows. One thing’s for sure; if Barack Obama makes this into another election that places personality over substance, celebrity over accomplishments, I can see only one outcome… Mr. President, you’re fired.”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

Why 'The Donald' Trumps Obama's Cult of Celebrity http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/13/donald-trumps-obamas-cult-celebrity.html (April 13, 2011)

Money, Hell, Thinking, Waiting

“He Robert Rauschenberg was a kind of enfant terrible at the time [around 1960] and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He’d already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to Black Mountain College in South Carolina, working with all those avant-garde people.... Rauschenberg focused very much on working. I was prepared to do that, too. He was also involved with Merce Cunningham dance group and totally unconcerned with his success, in the cliché term. All of the activity had a lively quality, quite separate from any commercial situation.... [Rauschenberg moved into a loft in Jaser John's building and they very closely worked together for a couple of years]. You get a lot by doing. It's very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Once Established, says Jasper Johns...,Grace Glueck, New York Times, 16 October 1977, sec. 2 pp. 1-31
1970s

People, Mountain, Time, Success

“Women understand that men must often be kept from soiling themselves with the dirty little details of life in order to accomplish the big shinny jobs unimpeded.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 3, The truth squad, p. 36

Life, Women, Men, Understanding

“[A]fter I got evicted from the Republican Party, I began reading considerably more of the works of American anarchists, thanks largely to Murray Rothbard…and I was just amazed.When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised. It was a magnificently clear statement. And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand. She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation. Emma Goldman understands that there’s a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I’d always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they’re not illuminated by anything more than statement. They just are good statements. But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison…it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

People, Hope, History, Understanding

“I'm dedicating my little story to you; doubtless you will be among the very few who will ever read it. It seems war stories aren't very well received at this point. I'm told they're out-dated, untimely and as might be expected - make some unpleasant reading. And, as you have no doubt already perceived, human beings don't like to remember unpleasant things. They gird themselves with the armor of wishful thinking, protect themselves with a shield of impenetrable optimism, and, with a few exceptions, seem to accomplish their "forgetting" quite admirably. But you, my children, I don't want you to be among those who choose to forget. I want you to read my stories and a lot of others like them. I want you to fill your heads with Remarque and Tolstoy and Ernie Pyle. I want you to know what shrapnel, and "88's" and mortar shells and mustard gas mean. I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh, the crippling, numbing sensation of fear, the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complimentary to the province of war and they should be taught and demonstrated in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms, and flags, and honor and patriotism. I have no idea what your generation will be like. In mine we were to enjoy "Peace in our time". A very well meaning gentleman waved his umbrella and shouted those very words… less than a year before the whole world went to war. But this gentleman was suffering the worldly disease of insufferable optimism. He and his fellow humans kept polishing the rose colored glasses when actually they should have taken them off. They were sacrificing reason and reality for a brief and temporal peace of mind, the same peace of mind that many of my contemporaries derive by steadfastly refraining from remembering the war that came before.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Excerpt from a dedication to an unpublished short story, "First Squad, First Platoon"; from Serling to his as yet unborn children.
Other

War, Children, World, Fear

“Success is the accomplishment of any number of possible aims, dreams, aspirations or goals. It’s very personal and unique to you. Your greatest desire could be someone else’s idea of hell; you might want to be an award-winning chef while your best friend hates cooking.”

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

Hate, Dreams, Idea, Hell

“A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

The Dover Math and Science Newsletter http://www.doverpublications.com/mathsci/0516/d/ May 16, 2011

Beauty, Music, Mathematics

“Independent Slovakia came into being one year ago. […] More has been gained than the late, great leader of the Slovak nation, Father Hlinka would have dared to dream. The Slovak people have accomplished more than they ever hoped in their long struggle to free themselves from the Czech yoke.”

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

About establishment of the First Slovak Republic (1939-1945), 1940.
Relationship to Czechoslovakia
Source: Gábor Szent-Ivány: Count János Esterházy, Danubian Press, 1989

People, Dreams, Hope

“So there is little cause for the fear that our journalism, merely because it is prosperous, is likely to betray us. But it calls for additional effort to avoid even the appearance of the evil of selfishness. In every worthy profession, of course, there will always be a minority who will appeal to the baser instinct. There always have been, and probably always will be some who will feel that their own temporary interest may be furthered by betraying the interest of others. But these are becoming constantly a less numerous and less potential element in the community. Their influence, whatever it may seem at a particular moment, is always ephemeral. They will not long interfere with the progress of the race which is determined to go its own forward and upward way. They may at times somewhat retard and delay its progress, but in the end their opposition will be overcome. They have no permanent effect. They accomplish no permanent result. The race is not traveling in that direction. The power of the spirit always prevails over the power of the flesh. These furnish us no justification for interfering with the freedom of the press, because all freedom, though it may sometime tend toward excesses, bears within it those remedies which will finally effect a cure for its own disorders.”

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

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Fear, Way, Travel, Feeling

“The staff came to enquire after my needs. They were revolting in their obsequiousness.
A disgusting little part of me gobbled it up. A part just big enough to show why some men lust after power. But not for me, thank you. I am too lazy. And I am, I fear, the unfortunate victim of a sense of responsibility. Put me in charge and I try to accomplish the ends to which the office was allegedly created. I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 6, “Opal” (p. 34)

Men, Fear, Sense, Suffering

“You gotta understand that people attach me and Jim Steinman. But you really have to attach Todd Rundgren to that. … you really have to credit Todd Rundgren for the initial mark. Yes, Steinman had things in his head. And, yes, I had some things in my head; I had how “All Revved Up with No Place to Go” should sound in my head. Jim had how “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)” should sound in his head. But pulling things out of your head and accomplishing them, and somebody else trying to accomplish them, is a remarkable feat. … So not taking anything away from Jim, ‘cause Jim is an absolute genius and one of the smartest people that I’ve ever known, and I consider him one of my best friends. But, y’know, sometimes, people just… they pigeonhole things, and they go, “Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf.” And my thing is, no, stop it! Because the Bat Out of Hell records are this: it’s a big wheel, and everybody is a spoke in that wheel… and, at different times as that wheel’s turning, different people have more input than others. It’s, like, as a wheel turns, the bottom spokes take more than the top spokes…but, pretty soon, those are gonna be the bottom spokes, and their import is more. And, so, that’s how that goes with the Bat Out of Hell records… and that’s exactly Bat Out of Hell III.”

Meat Loaf (1947) American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor

On credit for the Bat out of Hell albums.
A chat with Meat Loaf (2006)

People, Hell, Understanding, Time

“There is but one alternative for Turkey. Either African barbarism, under Arabian direction, will burst around its head like an avalanche, or else it must re-establish strong leadership, thus putting twenty million heroes between itself and Africa and gaining a breathing spell for the accomplishment of its social regeneration.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As said during the EU-Turkey Summit

Strong

“SPAN ID=Language_that_is> Language, that is to say, is the indispensable mechanism of human life -- of life such as ours that is molded, guided, enriched, and made possible by the accumulation of the past experience of members of our own species. Dogs and cats and chimpanzees do not, so far as we can tell, increase their wisdom, their information, or their control over their environment from one generation to the next. But human beings do. The cultural accomplishment of the ages, the invention of cooking, […] and the discovery of all the arts and sciences come to us as free gifts from the dead. These gifts, which none of us has done anything to earn, offer us not only the opportunity for a richer life than our forebears enjoyed but also the opportunity to add to the sum total of human achievement by our own contributions, however small they may be.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pooling of Knowledge, p. 13

Life, Wisdom, Age, Dogs

“We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

"American Facts" in Life Without and Life Within (1860) edited by Arthur Buckminster Fuller, p. 108.

World, Way, Nature, Falseness

“You can do as much as you think you can,
But you'll never accomplish more;
If you're afraid of yourself, young man,
There's little for you in store.
For failure comes from the inside first,
It's there if we only knew it,
And you can win, though you face the worst,
If you feel that you're going to do it.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

A Heap o' Livin' (1916)
Source: How Do You Tackle Your Work, stanza 2, p. 63.

Feeling, Failure, Thinking

“Conflict is necessary for growth. But too often conflict becomes a haven for the soul. Until one day, the soul can no longer free itself. In real growth the soul learns to fly rather than having the ego inflated with praise from accomplishments as if it were a balloon. Only because it buys time, do we develop a strong and protective ego. This is the early stage in the soul’s evolution, until such time when the soul hatches out of its shell, which is the ego, into a new world in which there is incomparable beauty.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

World, Beauty, Soul, Strong

“At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things. He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God's involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re-interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination. Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph. D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D. http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm

Life, God, World, Imagination

“But what is meant by “flesh” (σάρξ)? It is not what is corporal or sensual but rather the whole sphere of what is visible, available, disposable, and measurable, and as such the sphere of what is transient. This sphere becomes a power over us insofar as we make it the foundation of our lives by living “according to it,” that is, by succumbing to the temptation to live out of what is visible and disposable instead of out of what is invisible and nondisposable—regardless of whether we give ourselves to the alluring possibilities of such a life imprudently and with desire or whether we lead our lives reflectively and with calculation on the basis of our own accomplishments, “the works of the law.” “Flesh” embraces not only material things but also all of our creating and accomplishing insofar as it is concerned with achieving something demonstrable such as fulfilling the demands of the law (Gal. 3:3); to “flesh” belongs every achieved quality and every advantage that we can have within the sphere of what can be seen and disposed of”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Phil. 3:4ff.
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 16

Life, Law

“History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.”

Warren E. Burger (1907–1995) Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986

Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 432 (1971).

Women, Men, History, Reality

“From the beginning, I knew the public reaction to my decisions would be colored by whether there was another attack. If none happened, whatever I did would probably look like an overreaction. If we were attacked again, people would demand to know why I hadn't done more. That is the nature of the presidency. Perceptions are shaped by the clarity of hindsight. In the moment of decision, you don't have that advantage. On 9/11, I vowed that I would do what it took to protect America, within the Constitution and laws of our nation. History can debate the decisions I made, the policies I chose, and the tools I left behind. But there can be no debate about one fact: After the nightmare of September 11, America went seven and a half years without another successful terrorist attack on our soil. If I had to summarize my most meaningful accomplishment as president in one sentence, that would be it.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Source: 2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010), p. 181

People, Law, Color, History

“The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. Her thoughts enter my bloodstream and make me very sad. I say as she doers: if only I could accomplish something! My existence seems humiliating to me. We don't have the right to strut around, not until we've made something of ourselves.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 193
w:Marie Bashkirtseff was a woman-painter born in the Ukraine, who died very young; her Journal was published c. 1895
1897

Sadness

“Xiaomi, founded in Beijing in 2010 by Lei Jun, a computer scientist and charismatic serial entrepreneur now in his mid-forties, has accomplished a lot in half a decade. Even just looking at its sales figures, the superlatives pile up. In its short life, it has gone from a startup focused on making a new mobile phone interface to beating Samsung as the number one phone vendor in the largest market in the world in 2014. Its products are so popular in China that it has become the third largest ecommerce firm there just selling its own products, after the general marketplace sites Alibaba and JD. com, and ahead of Amazon. cn.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (2015)

Life, World

“With respect to the present expedition, it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become the enemy of England…the law of nature is stronger than even the law of nations. It is to the law of self-preservation that England appeals for justification of her proceedings. It is admitted…that if Denmark had evidenced any hostility towards this country, then we should have been justified in measures of retaliation. How then is the case altered, when we find Denmark acting under the coercion of a power notoriously hostile to us? Knowing, as we do, that Denmark is under the influence of France, can there be the shadow of a doubt that the object of our enemy would have been accomplished? Denmark coerced into hostility stands in the same position as Denmark voluntarily hostile, when the law of self-preservation comes into play…England, according to that law of self-preservation which is a fundamental principle of the law of nations, is justified in securing, and therefore enforcing, from Denmark a neutrality which France would by compulsion have converted into an active hostility.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 February 1808) on the British bombardment of Copenhagen, quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 1-3.
1800s

Hostility, Law, Nature, Country

“Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why do any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 12 Father, p. 698.

Love, Children, Books, Angels

“It's not as simple as that. Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's life, however, where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why, but one must accept intuition as a fact.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

In response to statement "You once told me that progress is made only by intuition, and not by the accumulation of knowledge."
Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "It is not quite so simple. Knowledge is necessary too. A child with great intuition could not grow up to become something worthwhile in life without some knowledge. However there comes a point in everyone's life where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without knowing precisely how.":
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 137

Life, Knowledge

“To draw a bright line from the founders to the Civil War has become one of the most difficult interpretative tasks confronting American historians, if only because we confront, on the one hand, truculent bands of neo-Confederates who struggle to disguise the fatal corruption of the Confederate rebellion in modern libertarian garb, and, on the other, the brigades of neo-Progressives who have been only too happy to sunder the founders from emancipation in order to subvert any notion that an 18th-century Constitution still has viability after being crisped up in the flames of the Civil War. What both neo- camps ignore is how hugely the accomplishment of the founders—whether in the secular language of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton or the sacred language of the Awakeners—represented a decisive break with all previous notions of human political organization. The achievement of Lincoln was to carry that break relentlessly forward against its oldest foe. The achievement of our times—if there will be one to write about—will depend largely on how we resist the newer, more subtle, forms of dehumanization which now, like the tireless tide, creep all around us again.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, The Logic of Liberty (2014)

War, Decision, Time, Drawing

“Now shall the promises made to Christ by God the Father before the foundation of the world, the promises of the covenant of redemption, be fully accomplished. Christ shall now have perfectly obtained the joy set before Him, for which He undertook those great sufferings in His state of humiliation. Now shall all the hopes and expectations of the saints be fulfilled. The state of the church before was progressive and preparatory; but now she is arrived at her most perfect state of glory. All the glory of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

A History of the Work of Redemption including a View of Church History (1839).

God, World, Hope, Suffering

“I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ….. but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister.”

Dennis Overbye (1944) American writer

On Albert Einstein, in Sex and Physics : A Talk with Dennis Overbye (2001) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/overbye/overbye_print.html

Love, Life, People, Way

“Work on what was to become “structured design” began in the early 1960s. Structured design, as a well-defined and named concept, did not achieve appreciable visibility until the publication of an article in the IBM Systems Journal in 1974 (Stevens et al., 1974). There is more than one way to accomplish a “structured design.””

Edward V. Berard

Abstract
Object‐Oriented Design (2002)

Way

“A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.”
Et pro virtutum habitu quilibet et liber est, et, quatenus est liber, eatenus virtutibus pollet.

John of Salisbury Policraticus

Bk. 7, ch. 25
Policraticus (1159)

“The Latin American player doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Neither does the Negro player, unless he does something spectacular, like Willie Mays. We have self-satisfaction, yes. But after the season is over, nobody cares about us. Zoilo Versalles was the Most Valuable Player in the American League, but how many times has he been asked to make appearances at dinners or meetings during the winter? Juan Marichal is one of the greatest pitchers in the game, but does he get invited to banquets? … I am an American citizen … but some people act like they think I live in the jungle someplace. This is a matter of sports, of a man’s ability and his accomplishments. What matters what language he speaks best?”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Clemente Waves Banner for Spanish-Speaking Players: Don't Get Due Recognition" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KyMhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1mUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4684%2C5055151 by Dick Couch (AP), in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Tuesday, August 23, 1966), p. 15 Other, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1966</big>

People, Game, Thinking, Sport

“The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VIII : The Machine Begins To Self-Destruct, p. 189-190

“The aim of Satanic power is to cut off communication with God. To accomplish this aim he deludes the soul with a sense of defeat, covers him with a thick cloud of darkness, depresses and oppresses the spirit, which in turn hinders prayer and leads to unbelief – thus destroying all power.”

James O. Fraser (1886–1938) missionary to China, inventor of Tibeto-Burman Nosu alphabet

20 March 1916 Source: Geraldine Taylor. Behind the Ranges: The Life-changing Story of J.O. Fraser. Singapore: OMF International (IHQ) Ltd., 1998, 157.

God, Soul, Communication, Sense

“At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Men, Mountain, Star, Parting

“A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves" (March 1975), p. 173
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Stupidity

“An ill husband may deprive a wife of the comfort and quiet of her life, give occasion of exercising her virtue, try her patience and fortitude to the utmost, which is all he can do; it is herself only that can accomplish her ruin.”

Mary Astell (1666–1731) English feminist writer

As quoted in The Whole duty of a woman: female writers in seventeenth century England, p. 157, by Angeline Goreau. Editorial Dial Press, 1985. ISBN 0385278780.

Life, Exercises, Patience

“The song's about coming together as one in an ideal world. And we might not be able to accomplish that, but tonight we can start by making it a better place.”

Blake Lewis (1981) American musician

Commenting on his take of Imagine by John Lennon in the Inspirational week in his pre-performance clip on April 24, 2007.
Attributed, On American Idol

World

“You have by this time surely seen with your own eyes what your iron ships, with which you think you can accomplish wonders and on which you boast so much, can do against my junks; how one of them has been burned by one of my junks and has disappeared in smoke; how the others would have met with the same doom had they not taken to flight and gone out to sea.”

Koxinga (1624–1662) Chinese military leader

Formosa under the Dutch: described from contemporary records, with explanatory notes and a bibliography of the island, 1903, William Campbell, Kegan Paul, 424, Dec. 20 2011 http://books.google.com/books?id=OpdMq-YJoeoC&pg=PA423&dq=koxinga+formosa+always+belonged+to+china&hl=en&ei=vsjiTergDM3TgAekqbzKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=same%20doom%20had%20they%20not%20taken%20to%20flight%20and%20gone%20out%20to%20sea.&f=false, Original from the University of Michigan(LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO MDCCCCIII Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty)

Thinking, Time, Sea

“At one time, I was an actor in the conduct of foreign policy. I became convinced that I was accomplishing nothing in that capacity, that the problems were deeper, that the answer lay in a direct approach to the public and in an effort to explain to the public what it was really about. Today, even that seems futile. Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. There is nothing that can be done about it. To correct this, you would have to educate the educators. I must say that I have lost all confidence in the freedom of the mass media. The fact of the matter is that in this country McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

April 17, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

Education, Error, Confidence, Intelligence

“The will of Zeus was accomplished.”

Homér Iliad

I. 5 (tr. Richmond Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

“As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Way, Sense, Change

““Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Malcolm Gladwell (2010) in: " Q and A with Malcolm http://gladwell.com/outliers/outliers-q-and-a-with-malcolm/," at gladwell.com, quoted in: Kate Vitasek (2011). The Vested Outsourcing Manual, p. 364

Women, Men, People, Lie

“He revolutionised cricket. He turned it from an accomplishment into a science.”

K. S. Ranjitsinhji book The Jubilee Book of Cricket

Of W. G. Grace
The Jubilee Book of Cricket (1897)

Science

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1| Quotes as an apostle

Love, Men, God, Lie

“The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.”

James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 278.

Men, Time

“Biographies smack of the end, the final utterances. Mission accomplished. I, by contrast, am always at the start of some new path or other. I want more. More, more. I am given to excess. It would be awkward to talk about myself: in what I do, the important thing is the deed, not the doer. When all is said and done, who am I? What use am I?”

Augusto Boal (1931–2009) Brazilian writer

Hamlet and the Baker's Son (2001)

“Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, al-though words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

People, History, Learning

“The ultimate end of education is not a perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but fitness for life; not the acquirement of habits of blind obedience, and of prescribed diligence, but a preparation for independent action. We must bear in mind that whatever class of society a pupil may belong to, whatever calling he may be intended for, there are certain faculties in human nature common to all, which constitute the stock of the fundamental energies of man. We have no right to withhold from any one the opportunities for developing all their faculties. It may be judicious to treat some of them with marked attention, and to give up the idea of bringing others to high perfection. The diversity of talent and inclination, of plans and pursuits, is a sufficient proof of the necessity for such a distinction. But I repeat that we have no right to shut out the child from the development of those faculties also, which we may not for the present conceive to be very essential for his future calling or station in life.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer

Letters on Infants' Education (1819)

Life, Education, School, Idea

“Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind….. The greater the destruction, the freer the chances of creation; but the destruction is often long, slow and oppressive, the creation tardy in its coming or interrupted in its triumph. The night returns again and again and the day lingers or seems even to have been a false dawning. Despair not therefore but watch and work. Those who hope violently, despair swiftly: neither hope nor fear, but be sure of God's purpose and thy will to accomplish.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

August, 1917
India's Rebirth

God, Pain, Fear, Hope

“The rapid establishment of Christianity must therefore have been from the conviction which those who embraced it, had of its "Truth and power unto salvation." Christianity at first spread itself amongst the most enlightened nations of the earth - in those places where human learning was in its greatest perfection; and, by the force of the evidence which attended it, amongst such men it gained an establishment. It has been justly observed, that "it happened very providentially to the honour of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were t their height, and when there were men who made it the business of their lives to search after truth and lift the several opinions of the philosophers and wise men, concerning the duty, the end, and chief happiness of reasonable creatures." Both the learned and the ignorant alike embraced its doctrines; the learned were not likely to be deceived in the proofs which were offered; and the same cause undoubtedly operated to produce the effect upon each. But an immediate conversion of the bulk of mankind, can arise only from some proofs of a ddivine authority offering themselves immediately to the senses; the preaching of any new doctrine, if lest to operate only by its own force, would go but a very little way towards the immediate conversion of the gnorant, who have no principle of action but what arises from habit, and whose powers of reasoning are insufficient to correct their errors. When Mahomet was required by his followers to work a miracle for their conviction, he always declined it; he was too cautious to trust to an experiment, the success of which was scarcely whithin the bounds of probablity; he amused his followers with prtended visions, which with the aid afterwards of the civil and military powr; and as the accomplishment of that event was by a few obscure persons, who founded their pretentions upon authority from heaven, we are next to consider, what kind of proofs of their divine commission they offered to the world; and whether they themselves could have been deceived, or mankind could have been deludded by them.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 20; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 261-262

Men, Truth, Age, World

“I am now engaged on the refutation of Luther's book, which refutation you will see about September 1st. I am indeed wholly averse to this kind of fighting; but what do they think is to be done by him who is attacked with edge and point? Do not all believe that in repelling an enemy he is to be kept away, and if this is to be accomplished in no other way, he is to be cut down? And must we not oppose engines to those battering-rams which caus enot theology but faith adn truth to be overthrown, friendship to perish, and whatever is sacred and in moderation to be held in contempt among mortals? That book of Luther's, what else is it than an example of denying what you a little while ago? or a fog through which you cannot see rightly the mystery of Christ? I shall put forth nothing wild against Luther - a thing hehimself ought not to have done. Since he has done it I shall remember piety and Christian decorum.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, July 21, ibid, p.288

Friendship, Truth, Books, Faith

“…by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, proved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Way, Science, Help

“Haiti is a purely Negro Republic, and offers a good illustration of what the Negro accomplishes if left to himself, even though given all the advantages of easy access to European civilization. The republic of Santo Domingo occupies the other part of the same island; its hybrid population has more Spanish and less Negro blood but it is not by any means civilized.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Parting

“And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

Life, Death, Men, Pain

“The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 37

History

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 52
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Men, Understanding, Knowledge, Science

“Life has a meaning, a motive. There is nothing greater than life itself. Yet what is the purpose of life? What do we actually do with it? What have we understood? When we accomplish and realize who we are—not in theory, but in reality—it is gorgeous. Concepts stop. Our expressions are accurate. The love is real. It is as though the whole rose blooms-—not one petal, not two petals—but the whole rose opens up. All of a sudden, in the darkness there is light.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Denver, Colorado February 24, 1979
1970s

Love, Life, Motivation, Reality

“One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow. There are people—I categorize them as life's losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I'm concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn't be fighting me, they'd be doing something constructive themselves.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 59

Life, People, Jealousy, Problem

“When you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

As quoted in Fortune (February 17, 2016), "Bernie Sanders Was Right: Denmark Is the Best Nation for Working People" http://fortune.com/2016/02/17/denmark-workplace-benefits/ 2010s, 2016

People, Health, World, Family

“As soon as I hit it, I knew it was gone. I was happy to move on. It was great. I've been trying so hard the past three weeks just to get it done. It finally came, and I'm happy. I'm proud of myself and all the things that I accomplished. So now I can go and have fun.”

Manny Ramirez (1972) Dominican-American baseball player

In Ian Browne, "Manny cements his place in history" Attributed Source: Manny cements his place in history, MLB.com, June 1, 2008, 2008-11-20 http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080531&content_id=2810427&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb,

Past, Happiness

“The Government as Substitute Husband did for women what labor unions still have not accomplished for men. And men pay dues for labor unions; the taxpayer pays the dues for feminism. Feminism and government soon become taxpayer-supported women’s unions.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 344.

Women, Men, Support

“"If you want to do something great in the world, do not get married, remain single… One may get married after he had accomplished something great in this world." Yet this great man who advised against marriage, was the happiest of men at the fireside of his family.”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

Views on marriage in The Manila Tribune. April 19, 1928.
BALIW

Men, Marriage, World, Family

“And a blade twitched into his heart, beginning the slow, massive bleeding he would never be able to stop, no matter what else he might accomplish. He was surprised and puzzled as he walked with that mortal wound in him, for it occurred to him that, although the wound would be the death of him, it would be the life of him too.”

Edward Lewis Wallant (1926–1962) American writer

Children at the Gate (1962)

Life, Death, Heart

“Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Time, Dependency

“Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Formulation of the principle of least action, as stated in Mémoires de l'académie royale des sciences (Accord between different laws of Nature that seemed incompatible), 1748, 417-426 (15 April 1744).

Nature

“As long as men will not be freed from their errors and delusions, humanity will not be able to go towards ("marcher vers", Fr.) the accomplishment of its true destinies.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 60.

Men, Error

“At some point I thought that, as I got older, I’d come to terms with a lot of things. I’d solve some big problems, and eventually I’d become content. It’s almost more depressing to think that the older you get, the more your problems multiply. When I’m old, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not really do anything — just be happy to exist. I’d like to look at my accomplishments and sit back and revel in my own achievement. But I don’t think that’ll ever happen.
Before I made a living playing music, I used to work shitty job after shitty job and think “Man, as soon as I’m able to make a living in music, it’s really going to come together then, it’s really going be amazing.” I remember hoping there’d be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don’t want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show. I remember what it was like, and it was shitty.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, II

People, Hope, Music, Problem

“Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

World, Light

“Each one gave the other the only assistance one man can expect from another: that his friend support him and ask only that he remain himself. It is no great accomplishment to take people as they are, and we must always do so eventually, but to wish them to be as they are, that is a genuine love.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

Poets
Alain On Happiness (1928)

Love, People, Support

“I'm torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. […] And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, "There's just no way." And so what you do is you say, "You move things along the best way you can." You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

on the
2012

Peace, Hope, Way, Problem

“Everybody wants to know about it. Even now. But look at what else I have accomplished since then which must have taken courage. Far more than what it took to streak. But because it's more immediate you think you could even do this. But you can't build a dance institute out of barren land.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

On her steaking and the Nritygarma, the dance institute she established in Bangalore quoted in I have been a hippie all my life, 22 August 1998, 14 january 2014, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/aug/22bedi.htm,

Courage, Thinking, Dance

“We see here the essence of the southern understanding of equality, why it was so highly prized, and why so resolutely defended. Every white man can be proud of himself, can consider himself an aristocrat, not because of his virtues or accomplishments, but simply because he is not black! By rejecting the principle that all men are created equal, by keeping "the degenerate sons of Ham" under foot, and under the lash, one need never do anything to become important, like members of the royal family. It is not without reason that Lincoln compared slavery to the divine right of kings! Calhoun demanded equality no less than Lincoln. But his equality required a "cornerstone" of slavery.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

Men, Family, Understanding

“A matter which would be easily accomplished, as the best men of that State have already offered themselves to me.”

Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) Duke of Romagna and former Catholic cardinal

Cesare threatening Vitelli that he will deprive him of his state, of Citta di Castello, if he is disobedient. (July, 1502), as quoted by Rafael Sabatini, 'The Life of Cesare Borgia', Chapter XIV: The Revolt of the Condottieri

Men

“What has taken place is a shift of business from one manufacturer to another, and the announcements in the press as well as the general publicity of those manufacturers who have succeeded in increasing their business give, I think, the impression that this is true of the whole industry. If we could assume, for the sake of argument, that we will reach the point at which twenty-five million cars and trucks will be registered in the United States an assumption that from what we have accomplished so far is certainly perfectly reasonable then I think we could safely say that the replacement demand, plus the export demand which will increase for many years yet, plus the normal growth, would amount to something like four to four and one half million vehicles a year and would require the manufacture of a number of cars equal to or greater than has yet been produced in any year in the history of the industry…
I am sure that I do not need to elaborate what the automotive industry consists of, its influence on the prosperity of the United States, the influence that it has had in many other industries which contribute to its production necessities. General Motors is an important part of this great industry of ours and as my contribution to your visit with us I would like to tell you in a brief way something about General Motors; how we are thinking, what we are doing, and our ambitions for the future.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 332-3: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., 1927 (II)

Cars, Way, History, Business

“Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?”

William Stanley Jevons book The Coal Question

The Coal Question (1865)

Law, Literature, Wealth

“The more jealousy one has in his nature the more critical he is of those who have accomplished things.
If you are critical and mouthing negativisms it could be that your own failures are caused by a mixed-up, hate-filled mind. A sign of mental health is to be glad when others achieve, and to rejoice with them. Never compare yourself or your achievements with others, but make your comparisons only with yourself. Maintain a constant competition with yourself This will force you to attain higher standards and achievements. do not defeat yourself by holding spiteful or jealous thoughts. Think straight, with love, hope and optimism and you will attain victory in life.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Stay Alive All Your Life (1957)

Love, Life, Hate, Health

“It is my considered opinion that the so called Kashmir problem, we have been facing, since 1947 has never been viewed in a historical perspective. That is why it has defied solution so far, and its end is not in sight in the near future. Politicians at the helm of affairs during this nearly half a century have been living from hand to mouth and are waiting for Pakistan to face them with a fait accompli. Once againg they are out to hand over Kashmir and its people to be butchers who have devastated this fair land and destroyed its rich eulture. … It is therefore high time that we renounce this ritual and have a look at the problem in a historical perspective. I should like to warn that histories of Kashmir written by Kashmiri Hindus in modern times are worse than useless for this purpose. I have read almost all of them, only to be left wondering at the piteous state to which the Hindu mind in Kashmir has been reduced. I am not taking these histories into account except for bits and pieces which fall into the broad pattern. … What distinguishes the Hindu rulers of Kashmir from Hindu rulers elsewhere is that they continued to recruit in their army Turks from Central Asia without realizing that the Turks had become Islamicized and as such were no longer mere wage earners. One of Kashmir's Hindu rulers Harsha (1089-1101 CE) was persuaded by his Muslim favourites to plunder temple properties and melt down icons made of precious metal. Apologists of Islam have been highlighting this isolated incident in order to cover up the iconoclastic record of Islam not only in Kashmir but also in the rest of Bharatvarsha. At the same time they conceal the fact that Kashmir passed under the heel of Islam not as a result of the labours of its missionaries but due to a coup staged by an Islamicised army. … Small wonder that balance of farces in Kashmir should have continued to tilt in favour of Islamic imperialism till the last Hindu has been hounded out of his ancestral homeland. Small wonder that the hoodlums strut around not only in the valley but in the capital city of Delhi with airs of injured innocence. Small wonder that the Marxist-Muslim combine of scribes who dominate the media blame Jagmohan for arranging an overnight and enmasse exodus of the Hindus from the valley. (They cannot forgive Jagmohan for bringing back Kashmir to India at a time when the combine was hoping that Pakistan would face India with an accomplished fact.) Small wonder that what Arun Shourie has aptly described as the "Formula Factory"”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

the Nayars, the Puris, the Kotharis, the Dhars, the Haksars, the Tarkundes - should be busy devising ways for handing over the Kashmir Hindus to their age-old oppressors. Kashmir: The Problem is Muslim Extremism by Sita Ram Goel https://web.archive.org/web/20080220033606/http://www.kashmir-information.com/Miscellaneous/Goel1.html

People, Age, Hope, Way