Quotes about accord
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“His meaning is to fasten it faithfully in our heart: for He willeth that it dwell with us in faith to our life’s end, and after in fulness of joy, desiring that we have ever steadfast trust in His blissful behest — knowing His Goodness.
For our faith is contraried in diverse manners by our own blindness, and our spiritual enemy, within and without; and therefore our precious Lover helpeth us with spiritual sight and true teaching in sundry manners within and without, whereby that we may know Him. And therefore in whatsoever manner He teacheth us, He willeth that we perceive Him wisely, receive Him sweetly, and keep us in Him faithfully. For above the Faith is no goodness kept in this life, as to my sight, and beneath the Faith is no help of soul; but in the Faith, there willeth the Lord that we keep us. For we have by His goodness and His own working to keep us in the Faith; and by His sufferance through ghostly enmity we are assayed in the Faith and made mighty. For if our faith had none enmity, it should deserve no meed, according to the understanding that I have in all our Lord’s teaching.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 70

Life, Faith, Soul, Lovers

“Some of the bravest people in Australia are the men and women, mostly volunteers, who take on one of the deadliest enemies on this planet — bushfires. Even the word spells fear. It's only October, early for bushfires, and yet already firefighters have risked their lives in several states. And that's why I regard arsonists among the lowest of the low. Human rejects, cowards who deliberately light fires, that tear apart this tenderbox country, and put lives at risk. I want you to meet one of these serious criminals, because that's what they are. His name is Alex Gordon Noble. He lit at least ten fires, probably more, in country New South Wales over the past two months. Why did he do it? Because he was bored. And to make it even worse, he is a traitor, he was a volunteer firefighter, what firemen call the ultimate betrayal. Light a fire, sound the alarm, be a hero, helping to put it out. According to police, the 21-year-old crane driver called triple-0 seventeen times. One of his fires closed the Pacific Highway, and tied the helicopters, police and firemen for hours. He has pleaded guilty in court after turning himself into a Tronoto police station. But don't be impressed — he only did it after police visited him to question him about a fire he denied lighting. Alex Gordon Noble has been granted bail. He should not be out, he is a menace to society. I believe that fire bugs should have heavy jail sentences. They are sick, but give them treatment inside prison. This country is too vulnerable at this time of year for leniency. Ask any firefighter.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 4 October 2013.

Women, Men, People, Fear

“Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn—and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness—all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do—that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself—from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1850s, Practice in Christianity (September 1850), p. 157

God, Pleasure, Truth, Light

“We are now Courts of equity, and must decide the thing according to all the rights.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Cooper v. Griffin (1892), 61 L. J. Rep. Q. B. 566.

“We try to transform our spirits using nonviolent means towards everybody; and this love and sacrifice gives us the guarantee that what we cannot change with our own human strength will be changed by the future, by the infinite, by nature, by God (according to the various faiths, it doesn’t matter; what matters is this opening beyond our actual forces, in the name of love for everybody, of the honesty, of the purity of the values on which conscience feeds).”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Love, God, Faith, Nature

“Many definitions have been given of the word “education,” but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Education http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Education" (1911) in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911. United States.

Life, Education, Sense, Parting

“It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)
1790s

Law

“The resurrection. I want to speak about it as we would about any ordinary transaction. In the first place, I do not believe that any miracle was ever performed, and if there was, you cannot prove it. Why? Because it is altogether more reasonable to believe that the people were mistaken about it than that it happened. And why? Because, according to human experience, we know that people will not always tell the truth, and we never saw a miracle ourselves, and we must be governed by our experience; and if we go by our experience, we must say that the miracle never happened—that the witnesses were mistaken.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

People, Truth

“The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.”

Jacques Maritain book The Range of Reason

The Range of Reason (1952), p. 137.

Men

“Time ‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line malfunction.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011) (original emphasis)

Time

“Translates to: Add four to 100, multiply by eight, and then add 62,000. By this rule the circumference of a circle with a diameter of 20,000 can be approached. Thus according to the rule ((4 + 100) × 8 + 62000)/20000 = 62832/20000 = 3.1416, which is accurate to five significant figures.”

Aryabhata (476–550) Indian mathematician-astronomer

The irrationality of pi was proved by Lambert in Europe in the year 1761. Source: Arijit Roy The Enigma of Creation and Destruction http://books.google.co.in/books?id=JFmUQqYzA7wC&pg=PA27, Author House, 28 October 2011, p. 27

“According to Biblical history and all of the history of the world, the blues was built in man from the beginning. The first thing that came out of man is the blues because, according to the Scriptures, when God made man, man was lonesome and blue.”

Willie Dixon (1915–1992) American blues musician

I am the Blues: the Willie Dixon Story‎ (with Don Snowden, 1990), p. 2.

God, World, History

“Social Darwinism and eugenics are unscientific in two aspects. First, they commit the naturalistic fallacy, which is the assumption that what is, must be. The fact that the natural environment selects for reproductive advantage does not mean that we, as humans, should be forcibly selecting people according to some preconceived notions. The second nonscientific aspect of these movements was their narrow interpretation of the meaning of fitness. In evolution, this simply means fitness to survive and reproduce, not fitness according to some externally imposed criteria.
Darwin himself never engaged in these speculations, nor did he support these perversions of his theory.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 58)

People, Support, Nature

“The large benefits which the divine liberality is constantly bestowing on the wicked are preparing them for heavier judgment. As they neither think that these proceed from the hand of the Lord, nor acknowledge them as his, or if they do so acknowledge them, never regard them as proofs of his favor, they are in no respect more instructed thereby in his mercy than brute beasts, which, according to their condition, enjoy the same liberality, and yet never look beyond it.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 32, p. 484
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

Thinking

“All presentation, all demonstration—and the presentation of thought is demonstration—has, according to its original determination—and this is all that matters to us—the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

Personality

“As immigration trends suggest, anti-Americanism is not deeply rooted as a popular prejudice. In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. According to a SOFRES survey of May 2000, only 10 percent of French feel dislike for the U. S. After September 11, according to another poll, 52 percent of French people interviewed said they had always felt warmly toward the U. S., against 32 percent who said the opposite. Historian Michel Winock concludes that "anti-Americanism is not an attitude of the average French person; it is typical of a certain segment of the elites."”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

People, Feeling, Personality

“Tarzan of the Apes was no sentimentalist. He knew nothing of the brotherhood of man. All things outside his own tribe were his deadly enemies, with the few exceptions of which Tantor, the elephant, was a marked example.
And he realized all this without malice or hatred. To kill was the law of the wild world he knew. Few were his primitive pleasures, but the greatest of these was to hunt and kill, and so he accorded to others the right to cherish the same desires as he, even though he himself might be the object of their hunt.
His strange life had left him neither morose nor bloodthirsty. That he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a joyous laugh upon his handsome lips betokened no innate cruelty. He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.
And when he killed for revenge, or in self-defense, he did that also without hysteria, for it was a very businesslike proceeding which admitted of no levity.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 10 : The Fear-Phantom

Life, Death, Pleasure, World

“With respect to the homosocial/homosexual style, it seems to be possible to divide Victorian men among three rough categories according to class. The first includes aristocratic men and small groups of their friends and dependents, including bohemians and prostitutes; for these people, by 1865, a distinct homosexual role and culture seem already to have been in existence in England… It seems to have constituted a genuine subculture, facilitated in the face of an ideologically hostile dominant culture by money, privilege, internationalism, and for the most part, the ability to command secrecy… This role is closely related to — is in fact, through Oscar Wilde, the antecedent of — the particular stereotype that at least until recently has characterized American middle-class gay homosexuality; its strongest associations, as we have noted, are with effeminacy, transvestism, promiscuity, prostitution, continental European culture, and the arts.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) American academic

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 172-173

Men, Money, Hostility, People

“I thought you meant that religious belief involved the substitution of the ordinances for the moral law. That no doubt came to be true in a degree with certain of the pharisees, may be true in a degree with some Christians. But it is not true with the Xtianity in which I was brought up. To Xtians of that kind God's law and the moral law are and must be identical. Hence if it could be shewn that Pacifism was in accordance with the moral law I should have to hold that all war was prohibited by Xtianity. If on the other hand, it can be shewn as I think it can that there is no such prohibition by the Xtian law I cannot admit that the moral law forbids me to support my country in a just war.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Gilbert Murray (1943), quoted in Gilbert Murray : An Unfinished Autobiography (1960) edited by Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, pp. 179-180

God, War, Law, Support

“It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 65

Idea, Understanding, Thinking

“In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detenction camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (…) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (…) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (…) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation.”

Mirjana Markovic (1942–2019) Serbian politician

In her newspaper column, on 20 January 1993, cited in Night and Day: A Diary, 1995, pp.17-18

Women, War, Children, World

“According to Qazvini, Shahjahan’s orders in this regard were that captives were not to be sold to Hindus as slaves, and under Muslim customers they could only become Musalman.”

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Amin Qazvini, Badshah Nama, Ms. Raza Library, Rampur. p.405. cited by Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they.

“Mr. Owen looked upon men through the spectacles of his own good-nature. He seldom took Lord Brougham's advice "to pick his men." He never acted on the maxim that the working class are as jealous of each other as the upper classes are of them. The resolution he displayed as a manufacturer he was wanting in as a founder of communities…. No leader ever took so little care as Mr, Owen in guarding his own reputation. He scarcely protested when others attached his name to schemes which were not his. The failure of Queenwood was not chargeable to him. When his advice was not followed he would say : "Well, gentlemen, I tell you what you ought to do. You differ from me. Carry out your own plans. Experience will show you who is right." When the affair went wrong then it was ascribed to him. Whatever failed under his name the public inferred failed through him. Mr. Owen was a general who never provided himself with a rear guard. While he was fighting in the front ranks priests might come up and cut off his commissariat. His own troops fell into pits against which he had warned them. Yet he would write his next dispatch without it occurring to him to mention his own defeat, and he would return to his camp without missing his army. Yet society is not so well served that it need hesitate to forgive the omissions of its generous friends. To Mr. Owen will be accorded the distinction of being a philosopher who devoted himself to founding a Science of Social Improvement and a philanthropist who gave his fortune to advance it. Association, which was but casual before his day, he converted into a policy and taught it as an art. He substituted Co-operation for coercion in the conduct ot industry and the willing co-operation of intelligence certain of its own reward, for sullen labour enforced by the necessity of subsistence, seldom to be relied on and never satisfied.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Men, Art, Intelligence, Communication

“The reciprocal relation of color to color produces a phenomenon of a more mysterious order. This new phenomenon is psychological. A high sensitivity is necessary in order to expand color into the sphere of the surreal without losing creative ground. Color stimulates certain moods in us. It awakens joy or fear in accordance with its figuration. In fact, the whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 45
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

World, Fear, Art, Color

“The social action approach, assumes there is a disadvantaged (often oppressed) segment of the population that needs to be organized, perhaps in alliance with others, in order to pressure the power structure for increased resources or for treatment more in accordance with democracy or social justice.”

Charles Zastrow (1942) American sociologist

Source: The practice of social work. (1995), p. 315; partly cited in: Lupe Alle-Corliss, ‎Randy Alle-Corliss (1999) Advanced practice in human service agencies. p. 233

Justice, Democracy

“What is needed then? Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve? It would suffice to establish society on new bases where everything would be in common and each, producing according to their aptitudes and strengths, could consume according to their needs. Then we would no longer see people like the hermit of Notre-Dame-de-Grace and others crave a metal of which they become the slaves and the victims! We would no longer see women flaunt their charms, like a vulgar merchandise, in exchange for this same metal that so often prevents us from recognising if the affection is truly sincere.”

Ravachol (1859–1892) French anarchist

Que faut-il alors ? Détruire la misère, ce germe de crime, en assurant à chacun la satisfaction de tous les besoins ! Et combien cela est difficile à réaliser ! Il suffirait d'établir la société sur de nouvelles bases où tout serait en commun, et où chacun, produisant selon ses aptitudes et ses forces, pourrait consommer selon ses besoins. Alors on ne verra plus des gens comme l'ermite de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce et autres mendier un métal dont ils deviennent les esclaves et les victimes ! On ne verra plus les femmes céder leurs appâts, comme une vulgaire marchandise, en échange de ce même métal qui nous empêche bien souvent de reconnaître si l'affection est vraiment sincère.
Trial statement

Women, People, Sincerity

“This Court, limited in function in accordance with that premise, does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its authority, even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow workings of the political process. For when, in the name of constitutional interpretation, the Court adds something to the Constitution that was deliberately excluded from it, the Court, in reality, substitutes its view of what should be so for the amending process.”

John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971) American judge and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1899-1971)

Dissenting in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 624-25 (1964).

Reality

“The Socialistic schools, prescinding from the barbarous multitudes which follow them, and considered in their doctors and masters, are far superior to the Liberal school, just because they go straight to all the great problems and questions, and because they always propose a peremptory and decisive solution. Socialism is strong, only because it is a theology; and it is destructive, only because it is a satanic theology. The Socialistic schools, in as much as they are theological, will prevail over the Liberal school, in as much as it is anti-theological and sceptical; and inasmuch as they are satanic, they will succumb before the Catholic school, which is at once theological and divine. Their instincts must be in accord with our assertions, if we consider that they treasure up their hatred for Catholicism, while they have only contempt for Liberalism.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

School, Question, Problem, Decision

“The skirmishes with the theologians had had their charm, but he knew well that no lasting accord exists between those who seek, ponder, and dissect and pride themselves on being capable of thinking tomorrow other than they do today, and those who accept the Faith, or declare that they do, and oblige their fellow men to do the same, on pain of death.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

il [Zénon] savait fort bien qu'il n'existe aucun accommodement durable entre ceux qui cherchent, pèsent, dissèquent, et s'honorent d'être capables de penser demain autrement qu'aujourd'hui, et ceux qui croient ou affirment croire, et obligent sous peine de mort leurs semblables à en faire autant.
The Indictment, p. 317
The Abyss (1968)

Death, Men, Pain, Faith

“Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. …The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher was to… decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, God, Behavior, Mathematics

“Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves... He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood... His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118-119

Men, Beauty, Star, Mood

“If you should have visits here from those professing to be Christians, and they intimate a desire to preach to you, by all means invite them to do so. Accord to every reputable person who may visit you, and who may wish to occupy the stands of your meeting houses to preach to you, the privilege of doing so, no matter whether he be a Catholic, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Free-will Baptist, Methodist, or whatever he may be; and if he wishes to speak to your children let him do so. Of course you have the power to correct whatever false teachings or impressions, if any, your children may hear or receive.”

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

Journal of Discourses 14:195 (June 3, 1871)
1870s

Children, Housing, Personality, Falseness

“He ventured to enter his most earnest protest against the mode in which several Members of that House were inclined to treat anything that ran out of the common ruck—and introduced them to schemes and ideas which former debates had not reached. The scheme of the hon. Gentleman was not new—he should not have thought that it was new to many Members of that House; the literature of the country had been full of it for three or four years. They all instinctively felt that it was a scheme that had no chance of success. It was not of our atmosphere—it was not in accordance with our habits; it did not belong to us. They all knew that it could not pass. Whether that was creditable to the House or not was a question into which he would not inquire; but every Member of the House the moment he saw the scheme upon the Paper saw that it belonged to the class of impracticable things.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/may/30/committee-progress-may-28 in the House of Commons (30 May 1867) against John Stuart Mill's proposal for electing MPs by proportional representation 1860s

Literature, Idea, Question, Chance

“According to mead, the primary phenomenon out of which language in the full human sense emerges is the gesture, especially the vocal gesture. The gesture sign (such as a dog's snarl) differs from such a nongestural sign as thunder in the fact that the sign vehicle is an early phase of a social act and the designatum a later phase of this act (in this case the attack by the dog). Here one organism prepares itself for what another organism - the dog - is to do by responding to certain acts of the latter organism as signs; in the case in question the snarl is the sign, the attack is the designatum, the animal being attacked is the interpreter, and the preparatory response of the interpreter is the interpretant.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 36

Dogs, Question, Sense, Animals

“Mary Parker Follett was a prominent business philosopher of the period, who agreed with Sheldon about the need to emphasize human factors in management, but placing greater stress on the need to develop a science of cooperation. According to Follett, what she called her 'Law of the Situation' could be a means for bridging the gap between an ideal of scientific management and the unilateral position that it seemed to involve in practice. In effect she was proposing the same collaboration between leaders and subordinates that was usually to be found between leaders of the same rank.”

Henry C. Metcalf (1867–1942) American business theorist

Book abstract
Dynamic administration, 1942

Law, Business, Science

“Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

Food

“When you look and see what the left is trying to do in America today, progressives are trying to shutter faith, privatize it, push it out of the public square, oppress people of faith, strip their charitable deductions away from them, trying to weaken them, churches — trying to say that anybody who believes in the value of Judeo-Christian principles, as we saw in the Ninth Circuit just this week, that if you believe that — this is what the court said — that if believe that, if believe what's taught in Genesis, if you believe what's practiced Biblically and in generations since, then you are irrational. The only possible reason you could believe this, according to the Ninth Circuit, is that you are a bigot, and that you are a hater. Because you can't possibly think differently, you can't possibly think differently unless you are a bigot or a hater, cause there's no rational reason not to see marriage as the way the Ninth Circuit does. They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what's left is the. What's left is a government that gives you rights. What's left are no unalienable rights. What's left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you'll do and when you'll do it. What's left, in France, became the guillotine.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're a long way from that, but if we do, and follow the path of President Obama, and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

referring to Ninth Circuit ruling unconstitutional , which banned same-sex marriage

God, Hostility, Marriage, People

“One demand for a concept of need arises because the concept of demand itself has serious weaknesses and limitations. It assumes away, for instance, a serious epistemological problem. The very idea of autonomous choice implies first that the chooser knows the real alternatives which are open to him, and second that he makes the choice according to value criteria or a utility function which he will not later regret. Both the image of the field of choice and the utility function have a learning problem which, by and large, economists have neglected. This problem is particularly acute in the case of medical care, where the demander is usually a layman faced with professional suppliers who know very much more than he does. The demand for medical care, indeed, is primarily a demand for knowledge or at least the results of knowledge…”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1967) "The Concept of Need for Health Services" as cited in: Gregory Parston (1980) Planners, Politics, and Health Services. p. 99
1960s

Idea, Knowledge, Problem, Learning

“It [variation and natural selection] would explain, says Mr. Darwin, the unity of type which runs through the whole organic world, and why there is sometimes a fundamental agreement in structure in the same class of beings which is quite independent of their habits of life, for such structure, derived by inheritance from a remote progenitor, has been modified, in the course of ages, in different ways, according to the conditions of existence. It would also explain why all living and extinct beings are united, by complex radiating and circuitous lines of affinity with one another, into one grand system; also, there having been a continued extinction of old races and species in progress, and a formation of new ones by variation, why in some genera which are largely represented, or to which a great many species belong, many of these are closely but unequally related; also, why there are distinct geographical provinces of species of animals and plants, for, after long isolation by physical barriers, each fauna and flora, by varying continually, must become distinct from its ancestral type, and from the new forms assumed by other descendants which have diverged from the same stock.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 413

Life, Age, World, Way

“To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.”
“What about?”
“Free will.”
“Free will?”
“Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.”
“You need to get some sleep, Spider.”
“No, no, I feel okay, more or less.”
“Free will,” she said, shaking her head.
“It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.”
Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?”
“I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.”
“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?”
“Maybe not crazy enough,” he said.
Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—”
“No. You just think you have free will.”
“So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.”
“From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.”
“There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.”
“I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.”
“It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said.
“I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.””

K. A. Bedford book Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

“Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile.
Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 22 (pp. 271-272)

People, Books, Smile, Way

“Through the constant revolution of the fifth element, with all contained therein, the four elements are forced to move and to change their respective positions, so that fire and air are driven into the water, and again these three elements enter the depth of the earth. Thus are the elements mixed together; and when they return to their respective places, parts of the earth, in quitting their places, move together with the water, the air and the fire. In this whole process the elements act and react upon each other. The elements intermixed, are then combined, and form at first various kinds of vapours; afterwards the several kinds of minerals, every species of plants, and many species of living beings, according to the relative proportion of the constituent parts. All transient beings have their origin in the elements, into which again they resolve when their existence comes to an end. The elements themselves are subject to being transformed from one into another; for although one substance is common to all, substance without form is in reality impossible, just as the physical form of these transient beings cannot exist without substance.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part I, pp.294-295 (1881) Tr. Friedlander

Reality, Water, Change, Parting

“Newton supposed that all matter attracted other matter inversely according to the square of the distance; and the hypothesis was found to account for the whole movements of the heavenly bodies; which all became verifications of what Newton supposed to be the law of the solar system. Adopt the hypothesis that Jesus was what He is represented, and the whole of the books and the history becomes a verification.”

James McCosh (1811–1894) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 58.

Books, Law, History

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

People, Way, Behavior, Nature

“According to our investigation, this emphasis on revenue generation through policing has fostered unconstitutional practices – or practices that contribute to constitutional violations – at nearly every level of Ferguson’s law enforcement system. Ferguson police officers issued nearly 50 percent more citations in the last year than they did in 2010 – an increase that has not been driven, or even accompanied, by a rise in crime.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Law

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to 2nd edition, Tr. F. Max Müller (1905)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Happiness, Law, Question, Nature

“But on what basis should the three branches of government be divided? It came down to two dueling ideas: Madison's proposal of an executive, judicial and legislative branch, and Georgia's Joseph Morton's proposal to dole out power according to, "The presence, forbearance, rectictude and largeosity of one's 'Plums and Carrot'." After much deliberation, it was decided Madison's proposal would be accepted, Morton only relenting after the Constitutional Convention agreed to proclaim him "impressive."”

Jon Stewart book America

America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004)

Idea

“The negro. These developments have brought about a very remarkable improvement in the condition of the negro race. Gradually, but surely, with the almost universal sympathy of those among whom they live, the colored people are working out their own destiny. I firmly believe that it is better for all concerned that they should be cheerfully accorded their full constitutional rights, that they should be protected from all of those impositions to which, from their position, they naturally fall a prey, especially from the crime of lynching and that they should receive every encouragement to become full partakers in all the blessings of our common American citizenship.”

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

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

People, Color, Nature, Universe

“Every situation that Indian person finds himself in is extremely complex. We have to deal with the red lights. As young leaders here have to deal with senior leaders, suddenly someone disrupts your entire life. Everything happens, sort of, according to your karma; it’s all random.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

Rahul Gandhi says 'Stop asking politicians, do things on your own', Rahul Gandhi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWw86SJj_SQ

Life, Light, Personality

“Poverty of body in itself mattered nothing; what Francis wanted was poverty of pride, and the external robe or the bare feet were outward and necessary forms of protection against its outward display. Against riches or against all external and visible vanity, rules and laws could be easily enforced if it were worth while, although the purest humility would be reached only by those who were indifferent and unconscious of their external dress; but against spiritual pride the soul is defenceless, and of all its forms the subtlest and the meanest is pride of intellect. […] Lord Bacon held much the same opinion. [..:] "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain:— that, as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind … cannot be trusted …"”

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

Bacon's first object was the same as that of Francis, to humiliate and if possible destroy the pride of human reason; both of them knew that this was their most difficult task.
The Bacon quote is from the Preface to The Great Instauration (1620).
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Men, Law, Soul, Indifference

“According to Muslim cannon Law the world is divided into two camps, Dar-ul-Islam (abode of Islam) and Dar-ul-Harb (abode of war). A country is Dar-ul-Islam when it is ruled by Muslims. A country is Dar-ul-Harb when Muslims only reside in it but are not rulers of it. That being the Cannon Law of the Muslims, India cannot be the common motherland of the Hindus and the Musalmans-but it cannot be the land of the ‘ Hindus and Musalmans living as equals’. Further, it can be the land of the Musalmans only when it is governed by the Muslims. The moment the land become subject to the authority of a non-Muslims power, it ceases to be the land of the Muslims. Instead of being Dar-ul-Islam it becomes Dar-ul-Harb.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

294
Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

War, World, Law, Country

“.. art and life are no longer separate domains… The word 'art' no longer has anything to say to us. In place of that, we [=De Stijl-artists ] insist upon the construction of our surroundings according to creative laws, deriving from a fixed principle.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

quote of 1918
quoted in Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 85
1912 – 1919

Life, Law, Art, Quotes

“Late in the war, General Marshall, while returning from an Allied conference between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at Tehran, stopped over a day in the Southwest Pacific Area. We had a long and frank discussion. I called attention to the paucity of men and materiel that I was receiving as compared with all other theaters of war. He said he realized the imbalance and regretted it, but could do little to alter the low priority accorded the area. He said:
Admiral King claimed the Pacific as the rightful domain of the Navy; he seemed to regard the operations there as almost his own private war; he apparently felt that the only way to remove the blot on the Navy disaster at Pearl Harbor was to have the Navy command a great victory over Japan; he was adamant in his refusal to allow any major fleet to be under other command than that of naval officers although maintaining that naval officers were competent to command ground or air forces; he resented the prominent part I had in the Pacific War; he was vehement in his personal criticism of me and encouraged Navy propaganda to that end; he had the complete support of President Roosevelt and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, and in many cases of General Arnold, the head of the Air Force.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 183

Men, War, Way, Support

“According to the Quran, Companions were the exemplary Muslims.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

“Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On civil rights and the Global War on Terrorism: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) (dissenting).
2000s

War, Law, Way, Thinking

“By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

§ 8.23
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

“In accordance with the foregoing investigations on mathematical principles, let bronze vessels be made, proportionate to the size of the theatre, and let them be so fashioned that, when touched, they may produce with one another the notes of the fourth, the fifth, and so on up the double octave.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book V, Chapter V, Sec. 1

Mathematics, Fashion

“The stereotyped style of cultic representations was well known as early as the Neolithic age, but the stiffly ceremonial forms of courtly art are absolutely new and come into prominence here for the first time in the history of human culture. They reflect the rule of a higher, superindividual social order, of a world which owes its greatness and splendour to the favour of the king. They are anti-individualistic, static and conventional… All the good things and the charms of life are connected, for the privileged members of this society, with their separation from the other classes, and all the maxims which they follow assume more or less the character of rules of decorum and etiquette. This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter II. Ancient Oriental Urban cultures

Life, God, Age, World

“Freedom and determinism are only the obverse and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self, defining its specific identity, and determinism means nothing but the definite character which the rational nature of the action involves. Thus freedom, far from disjoining and isolating each self from other selves, especially the Supreme Self, or God, in fact defines the inner life of each, in its determining whole, in harmony with theirs, and so, instead of concealing, opens it to their knowledge — to God, with absolute completeness eternally, in virtue of his perfect vision into all possible emergencies, all possible alternatives; to the others, with an increasing fulness, more or less retarded, but advancing toward completeness as the Rational Ideal guiding each advances in its work of bringing the phenomenal or natural life into accord with it. For our freedom, in its most significant aspect, means just our secure possession, each in virtue of his self-defining act, of this common Ideal, whose intimate nature it is to unite us, not to divide us; to unite us while it preserves us each in his own identity, harmonising each with all by harmonising all with God, but quenching none in any extinguishing Unit. Freedom, in short, means first our self-direction by this eternal Ideal and toward it, and then our power, from this eternal choice, to bring our temporal life into conformity with it, step by step, more and more.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.375-6

Life, God, Nature, Knowledge

“According to interviews Goyette gave to Leamer for his book "Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger," the two had a brief fling in 1975 when she was a teenager.”

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

Amy Argetsinger 13 August 2005 article by Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201651.html?noredirect=on referencing Gigi Goyette About

Life, Books

“Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law's need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest. … Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest.”

Archibald Cox (1912–2004) American prosecutor

Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts (1967: Harvard University Press), pp. 22–23 (40 N.Y. State B.J. 161, 169 (1968)).

Justice, Law, Reality, Change

“Mattei was convinced that Italy, a poor and defeated country, nonetheless possessed notable energy deposits of petroleum in its subsoil, and he was also aware that the oil business, even if there were not really resources inside the country, was an important business which one could not stay out of and in which one could not be at the mercy of the big guys. So Mattei's program was to try to use all available means to exploit the country's energy resources, and if this were not possible, to seek international accords with coun¬tries which had these energy resources, so that they could be used by Italy in order to become a partner of the major pow¬ers, and not be at their mercy”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The Strategic Stakes in Mattei's Flight, p. 23

Guy, Business, Country

“We plan alone but we fulfill our plans together with the enemy, as it were, in accordance with his opposition.”

Ivan Konev (1897–1973) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "How Wars End: Eye-witness Accounts of the Fall of Berlin" - by Vladimir Sevruk - History - 1974 - Page 27.

“I don’t like the system of Moot-Courts these days, in law schools. My grand-daughter participates in these Moot-Courts, but I don’t like the idea of saying, in A vs. B it was said etc. It makes no difference to what was said. According to Halsbury’s, it was said in Queen vs. Latham that it makes no difference what was said in a given case because by and large all of it depends on the facts of the case, except for constitutional matters.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

Conversation with the living legend of law - Fali Sam Nariman

School, Law, Idea, Dependency

“The influence of Christianity in taming selfishness and stimulating the sympathetic affections, in creating a resolute sense of duty, a stanch love of liberty and independence, an irrepressible hunger for justice and a belief in the rights of the poor, has been so subtle and penetrating that no one can possibly trace its effects. …And yet human society has not been reconstituted in accordance with the principles of Jesus Christ.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 147-148

Love, Hunger, Justice, Sense

“Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and this book on genocide and government mass murder—what I call democide—in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), pp. 1-2

War, Books

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

and may Allah bless you and grant you success in these examinations – but even in the Akhirah we ask Allah to bless you, to open your doors. To prepare for the Akhirah, it's not an easy task, but with the hope in the mercy of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala things will be made easy, and at the same time, with the constant preparation, without giving up hope – never ever giving up, never saying no, never just throwing the towel – by the will of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala we will achieve, and we will achieve great heights. "Exams in Life - Never Give Up - Mufti Menk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4w4pak66V0, YouTube (2013) Lectures

Life, Death, Happiness, People

“In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

God

“Truly to be free, my choices must truly be mine—must accord with the “me” with which I associate my core identity. I must make them in keeping with rational life plans. They cannot be triggered by invisible external or covert influences; they must make manifest a will that is unfettered yet rationally informed by life plans.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), p. 26

Life

“…grandees pay for a work of art considerably under its value, and according to their own caprice. … When an Omrah or Mansabdar requires the services of an artisan, he sends to the bazar for him, employing force, if necessary, to make the poor man work; and after the task is finished, the unfeeling lord pays, not according to the value- of the labour, but agreeably to his own standard of fair remuneration; the artisan having reason to congratulate himself if the Korrah has not been given in part payment.”

François Bernier (1620–1688) French physician and traveller

François Bernier, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7
Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668)

Art, Parting

“We do not wish to “judge” or assess out surrounding merely as a kind of expressive activity carelessly projected onto the world, but we wish to evaluate the world “correctly,” i. e., in according with that it truly is, and the desire to know is directed at determining what the world truly is.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 40.

World

“On occasion I came to exaggerate certain forms, in violation of scientific proportion but in accordance with the balance of their spiritual relationships to each other. I made heads vastly oversized in relation to other parts of the body, because the head is the point of concentration of all the psyche, all expression.”

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) German artist

In Gerhard Wietek, Schmidt-Rottluff: Graphik, Verlag Karl Thiemig, Munich, 1971, p. 100; as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 111

Parting

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Beauty, Art, Music, Soul

“He burned six mounds (1 mound is 37 kilos) of sacred threads worn by Hindus after massacring them (Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He killed the Hindus who put a tilak-mark on their forehead ( Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He burnt many of the books of the Hindus. Srivara wrote: "Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay". Srivara also recorded: "All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter." (Srivara, Zaina Rajtarangini). Sikandar drowned many Hindus in the Dal Lake (Jonraj, Kings of Kashmir). According to some sources only eleven families of Brahmins were left in Kashmir due to Sikandar's policies.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Cambridge History of India, III, p.281

Books, Family, Flowers, Winter

“Muslims had destroyed and looted the temples. The British did not do that but they took over a good deal of the temple lands as a 'revenue measure'; they did not use the word 'confiscation' and, in fact, converted some of these lands into 'monetary remuneration'. As a result, according to the Government of India's own comprehensive study beginning in 1962 and lasting for over ten years, the ten thousand five hundred and odd temples of Tamilnadu have a total annual income of only rupees twenty-seven million, from all their moveable and immoveable properties I Over 5,000 temples have only an annual income of Rs.500/- each! There is almost no money for the pujas, and the priests also hardly get anything. The only people who get proper remunerations are the Government functionaries employed to overseer the working of the temples. The 14,000 priests in Madhya Pradesh got five naya paisa per month at the time of Independence; now they get six naya paisa according to the Madhya Pradesh Pujaris Mahasangh!”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Money, People, Study, Time

“There is such a thing as a worldly spirit, and there is such a thing as an unworldly spirit — and according as we partake of the one or the other, the savor of the sacrifice of our lives is ordinary, common-place, poor, and base; or elevating, invigorating, useful, noble, and holy.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 621.

“Our primary concern has been U. S. global policy and propaganda, and the filtering and distorting effect of Western ideology, not the problems of reconstruction and modernization in societies that have been victimized by Western imperialism. Correspondingly, we have not developed or expressed our views here on the nature of the Indochinese regimes. To assess the contemporary situation in Indochina and the programs of the current ruling groups is a worthwhile endeavor, but it has not been our current objective. […] The success of the Free Press in reconstructing imperial ideology since the U. S. withdrawal has been spectacular. The shift of the United States from causal agent to bystander – and even to leader of the struggle for human rights – in the face of its empire of client fascism and long, vicious assault on the peasant societies of Indochina, is a remarkable achievement. The system of brainwashing under freedom, with mass media voluntary self-censorship in accord with the larger interests of the state, has worked brilliantly.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Chomsky and Herman (1979), After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, p. 299.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

Nature, Problem, Freedom, Success

“Correctly understood, the phrase “tyranny of values” may supply the key to the understanding that all thinking about values only foments and intensifies the old and endless struggle between convictions and interests. Not much is gained by what the modern philosophy of values acknowledges as the “fundamental relationship,” according to which, occasionally the lower value may be preferred to the higher value, because that is the prerequisite of the higher value. All that points only to the confusion that affects the whole argumentation about values, which continually gives rise to new relations and points of view, thereby the position is always maintained from which the opponent is reproached that he does not heed the manifest values; or, in other words, he is disqualified as value-blind. The polemical utilization of the word “blind” is adequate to the logic of values as long as it is concerned with the systems of reference that it will build up out of viewpoints, standpoints, and vantage-points.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

Understanding, Thinking

“Perhaps 'tis not strictly in accordance with the evidence … but even the damned may salute the eloquence of Mr. Webster.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book The Devil and Daniel Webster

Mr. Scratch
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)

“To me this question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, In what cases is liberty good and in what cases is it bad? would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer.”

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) Indian judge

Source: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873-1874), Ch. 2

History, Question, Problem, Universe

“So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.”

Jean Genet The Balcony

The Balcony (1956)

Law

“Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

On bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam war. From an interview with the Atlantic magazine - "The Lessons of Henry Kissinger" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/the-lessons-of-henry-kissinger/505868/ (10 November 2016) 2010s

Peace, Country

“According to some of the pious writers of antiquity, they made large fires, which might be seen at a great distance, upon the vigil of this saint [John], in token that he was said in holy writ to be "a shining light." Others, agreeing with this, add also, these fires were made to drive away the dragons and evil spirits hovering in the air; and one of them gravely says, in some countries they burned bones, which was called a bone-fire; for "the dragons hattyd nothyng mor than the styncke of brenyng bonys." This, says another, habent ex gentilibus, they have from the heathens. The author last cited laments the abuses committed upon thes occasions. "this vigil," says he, "ought to be held with cheerfulness and piety, but not with such merriment as is shewn by the profane lovers of this world, who make great fires in the streets, and indulge themselves with filthy and unlawful games, to which they add glotony and drunkenness, and the commission of many other shameful indecencies."”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 360
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Bonfires

World, Game, Lovers, Light

“Hasan Nizami writes that after the suppression of a Hindu revolt at Kol (Aligarh) in 1193 AD, Aibak raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and their carcases became food for beasts of prey. The tract was freed from idols and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.” In 1194 AD Aibak destroyed 27 Hindu temples at Delhi and built the Quwwat-ul-Islãm mosque with their debris. According to Nizami, Aibak “adorned it with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had been demolished by elephants”. In 1195 AD the Mher tribe of Ajmer rose in revolt, and the Chaulukyas of Gujarat came to their assistance. Aibak had to invite re-inforcements from Ghazni before he could meet the challenge. In 1196 AD he advanced against Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. Nizami writes that after Raja Karan was defeated and forced to flee, “fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword” and “more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into the hands of the victors”. The city was sacked, its temples demolished, and its palaces plundered. On his return to Ajmer, Aibak destroyed the Sanskrit College of Visaladeva, and laid the foundations of a mosque which came to be known as ADhãî Din kã JhoMpaDã. Conquest of Kalinjar in 1202 AD was Aibak’s crowning achievement. Nizami concludes: “The temples were converted into mosques… Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””

Qutb al-Din Aibak (1150–1210) Turkic peoples king of Northwest India

Hasan Nizami, quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231 Ch. 6

Men, Food, Hell

“We have all the essential elements of a high national career. The idea has been given out at the North, and even in the border States, that we are too small and too weak to maintain a separate nationality. This is a great mistake. In extent of territory we embrace five hundred and sixty-four thousand square miles and upward. This is upward of two hundred thousand square miles more than was included within the limits of the original thirteen States. It is an area of country more than double the territory of France or the Austrian empire. France, in round numbers, has but two hundred and twelve thousand square miles. Austria, in round numbers, has two hundred and forty-eight thousand square miles. Ours is greater than both combined. It is greater than all France, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain, including England, Ireland, and Scotland, together. In population we have upward of five millions, according to the census of 1860; this includes white and black. The entire population, including white and black, of the original thirteen States, was less than four millions in 1790, and still less in 76, when the independence of our fathers was achieved. If they, with a less population, dared maintain their independence against the greatest power on earth, shall we have any apprehension of maintaining ours now?”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Idea, Country

“According to a new study, women in satisfying marriages are less likely to develop cardiovascular diseases than unmarried women. So don't worry, lonely women, you'll be dead soon.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Women, Marriage, Disease, Study

“Moreover, according to Alexander, the “troubled mathematical martyr,” exemplified not only by Galois but also by Abel, János Bolyai, Riemann, Cantor, Gödel, Turing, John Nash, Grothendieck, Perelman, and even, in a certain sense, Cauchy, remains to this day the dominant image of the “ideal mathematician,” long after the romantic paradigm was exhausted in the arts.”

Michael Harris (1954) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, pp. 147-148

Art, Mathematics, Sense

“We can see that canonic status is accorded to the works of a composer not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought; nor does it depend very much on whether the works are frequently performed for the public in every important musical center. To a certain extent, canonic status is actually built into some new works, partly by the way they impose themselves on an already substantial musical tradition. This may explain why it is so difficult to alter a firmly installed canon in any radical way, or to dislodge works that have been an integral part of it for some time.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Music, Way, Distant, Time

“Worry for others— it does no good in the end.
The great Dao, all amid joy, is reborn.
In a joyous state, ruler and subject accord,
In a joyous home, father and son get along.
If brothers increase their joy, the world will flourish.
If husband and wife have joy, it's worthy of song.
What guest and host can bear a lack of joy?
Both high and low, in joy, lose their woe before long.
Ha ha ha.”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Translated by Mary Jacob[citation needed]
It is unlikely that this poem, translated by Mary Jacob, is authored by Han-shan. In comparing it with every poem in the corpus it will be found that there is not a close match. Moreover, neither the language nor the content of this poem is that of Han-shan. Most importantly, this poem does not have the appropriate number of lines for a Han-shan poem. Jacob's poem has 9 lines; there is not a single example of a 9 line poem in all of Han-shan's poetry. All of Han-shan's poems are 4, 8, 10 or 14 lines, with a few that have more than 14. Further, Jacob's poem has an odd number of lines; there is not a single example of a poem with an odd number of lines in all of Han-shan's poetry. Finally, the 9th and final line in Jacob's poem has the words “ha ha ha.” Not a single Han-shan poem has those words as a final line. Perhaps someone is having a joke?
Disputed

World, Home, Joy

“According to Davis it did not require a Galileo or a Harvey (or a Darwin) to discover the natural inferiority of the Negro. All that was necessary was a visit to the District of Columbia jail!”

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

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 226

Nature

“It's all for the planned redistribution of wealth which is also stated in this document, the redistribution of wealth which is based on a new concept called equity. And it says this: we must not lose sight of equity, or fairness based on need. Where have you heard that here, today? From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Edwatch conference, October 10-11, 2003
on Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's "Tax-Free Zones" initiative
2000s

Wealth

“Firishta' attributes to Sikandar the demolition of all the Kashmirian temples save one, which was dedicated to Mahadeva, and which only escaped ' in consequence of its foundation being below the surface of the neighbouring water.'. (…) He most likely gave orders that they should all be overturned; and I have no doubt that many of the principal temples were thrown down during his reign. For instance, the tomb of his own Queen in Srinagur is built upon the foundation, and with the materials of a Hindu temple; likewise the wall which surrounds the tomb of his son Zeinu-1 Abidin was once the inclosure of a Hindu temple; and lastly the entrance of a masjid in Nowa-Shehra of Srinagur, which, according to its inscription, was built during the reign of his son Zeinu-1 Abidin, is formed of two fluted pillars of a Hindu peristyle. These instances prove that at least three different temples in the capital alone must have been overthrown either by Sikandar or by one of his predecessors. But as the demolition of idol-temples is not attributed to any one of the earlier kings, we may safely ascribe the destruction of the three above mentioned to Sikandar himself.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Elliot, H. M. (Henry Miers), Sir; Ed. John Dowson (1871). The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. The Muhammadan Period. London : Trübner & Co. Vol VI. Appendix, Note A. ON THE EARLY USE OF GUNPOWDER IN INDIA.

Water

“Anybody can reduce taxes, but it is not so easy to stand in the gap and resist the passage of increasing appropriation bills which would make tax reduction impossible. It will be very easy to measure the strength of the attachment to reduced taxation by the power with which increased appropriations are resisted. If at the close of the present session the Congress has kept within the budget which I propose to present, it will then be possible to have a moderate amount of tax reduction and all the tax reform that the Congress may wish for during the next fiscal year. The country is now feeling the direct stimulus which came from the passage of the last revenue bill, and under the assurance of a reasonable system of taxation there is every prospect of an era of prosperity of unprecedented proportions. But it would be idle to expect any such results unless business can continue free from excess profits taxation and be accorded a system of surtaxes at rates which have for their object not the punishment of success or the discouragement of business, but the production of the greatest amount of revenue from large incomes. I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the Government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward. Moreover the effect of the present method of this taxation is to increase the cost of interest. on productive enterprise and to increase the burden of rent. It is altogether likely that such reduction would so encourage and stimulate investment that it would firmly establish our country in the economic leadership of the world.”

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

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

World, Feeling, Business, Success