Quotes about agent (515 quotes, page 4)

“As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", pp. 143-4.

Mathematics , Problem

“But whatever grounds I supposed there were for authorizing such expectations, I now find they were vain and nugatory. The cloud thickens, and the prospects are daily growing darker. There is now no hope of cash. The agents are loaded with heavy debts, and perplexed with half-finished contracts, and the people clamorous for their pay, refusing to proceed in the public business unless their present demands are discharged. The constant run of expenses, incident to the department, presses hard for further credit., or immediate supplies of money. To extend one, is impossible; to obtain the other, we have not the least prospect. I see nothing, therefore, but a general check, if not an absolute stop, to the progress of every branch of business in the whole department, I have little reason to hope that, with the most favorable disposition in the agents, it will be in our power to provide for the occasional demands of the army in their present cantonments; much less, to have in readiness the necessary apparatus, and supplies of different kinds, for putting the army in motion at the opening of the campaign. My apprehensions of a failure in these respects are so strong, and my anxiety for the consequences so great, that I feel it my duty once more to represent to your Excellency our circumstances and prospects. From such a view of our situation, you may be led not to expect more from us than we are able to perform, and may have time to take your measures consequent upon such information.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money , People , Hope , Feeling

“Our situations are arranged by higher agents to allow us to become tired of trying to manipulate the material energy. Due to not being properly appreciative of the beauty of relationship with the Lord, humankind is given a temporary arena in which to act out our desires. This environment is designed to frustrate, disgust, and disappoint us, to make us contemplative and introspective. Ultimately it is meant to drive us away from the temporary world in favor of that which is eternal. This is arranged for us to finally realize that our happiness lies not in dabbling with the material energy but in serving the Lord unconditionally, thus becoming whole again.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 4: Fire and Brimstone, Horns and Tail, p. 66

World , Beauty , Disappointment , Happiness

“You know, the media and the politicians would have us believe that there's something inherently immoral about terrorism. That is, they would have us believe that it's not immoral for us to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles, but it is immoral for someone like Bin Laden to blow up a government building in Washington with a truck bomb. It's okay for us to take out an air-raid shelter full of women and children in Baghdad with a smart bomb, but it's cowardly and immoral for an Iraqi or Iranian agent to pop a vial of sarin in a New York subway tunnel. Really, what should we expect? They don't have aircraft carriers and cruise missiles and stealth bombers. So should we expect them to just sit there and take their punishment when we wage war on them? I think that it is the most reasonable thing in the world for them to hit back at us in the only way they can. It actually takes more courage to be a terrorist behind enemy lines than it does to push the firing button for a cruise missile a hundred miles away from your target. And yet we certainly will see Bill Clinton and every other Jew-serving politician in our government on television denouncing as a "cowardly act" the first terrorist bomb which goes off in the United States as a result of a war against Iraq. And don't be surprised when the FBI and the CIA announce that they have studied the evidence carefully and have determined that it was Iranian terrorists who built the bomb, so that the Jews will have an excuse for expanding the war to take out Iran as well as Iraq.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts
1990s, 1990

Women , War , Children , World

“Mulder: Sorry, nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted.
Scully: Agent Mulder. I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you.
Mulder: Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded. So who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?
Scully: Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you.
Mulder: Oh, really… I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me.”

Chris Carter (1956) American television and film producer, director and writer

Pilot [1.1] (10 September 1993)
The X-Files (1993-2002)

“As economic libertarians, these people believe that markets should be free, formed by the rational actions of rational agents - who need only to be provided with perfect information about goods and services in order to build a stable economy. As technological utopians, they believe that everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if technology is modelled on the American dream and the American way. And as opinion formers, they claim no formal power base, operating instead by linking exhaustively to one another.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" Blog eats blog: The rise of the blogeoisie. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DDA4.htm" by Bill Thompson, May 15, 2003.

People , World , Dreams , Way

“I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. " You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.”

Aaron Sorkin (1961) American screenwriter, producer, playwright

The West Wing Script Book: Volume 1, Introduction.

Love , Hate , People , Fools

“Our careers aren't paths so much as landscapes that are navigated. We're free agents, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs -- each with our own unique brand.”

Keith Ferrazzi (1966) American businessman and writer

pg. 17
Never Eat Alone

“Mary? After all, what was she? Just another babe. True, I was disgusted with her for letting herself be used as bait. It was all right for her to use her femaleness as an agent; the Section had to have female operatives. There have always been female spies, and the young and pretty ones have always used the same tools.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 10 (p. 61)

“Macro rational expectations, as I have labeled the hypothesis, seems to say that expectations in an economist's model must be perfectly consistent with his model that embodies these expectations. In other words, the agents of his model must all share his views of the relevant economic mechanisms, as well as his data. Why? Because if he holds them they must believe they are God's truth and, if so, rational people can have no other views (and of course we should never ask how they would come by these views and data, that not even other specialists may have heard of yet, let alone accepted). I submit that this view is pretty absurd--I would almost say offensive! I certainly believe that I know more about economics and the economy than (almost) everybody else, and i can even prove it: If everybody shared my vies, then the economy could not be in today's troubles”

Franco Modigliani (1918–2003) Italian-American economist

though it might conceivably be in some different ones!
Conversations with Economists (1983)

God , People , Truth

“The measure of performance of any given agent is the amount of money it accumulates through its actions.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 2. Adaptive Systems, p. 86

Money

“Rankovich wants us to turn our borders into a roadhouse with two gates through which Yugoslav, Italian and Greek agents and weapons could go in and out freely, without visas, in order to bring us their "culture of cutthroats", so that Tito may realize his dream of turning Albania into the seventh republic of Yugoslavia, so that the reactionary Italian bourgeoisie may put into action for the third time their predatory intentions towards Albania, or so that the Greek monarcho-fascists may realize their crazy dream of grabbing southern Albania. Because we have not permitted and will never permit such a thing, we are "warmongers."”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

They know very well that if they violate our borders they will have to fight us and the whole socialist camp.
Speeches, Moscow Address

Dreams , Time , Fight

“I am honored and humbled to be nominated by the President to lead the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization in the world. From my earliest days working with agents as a line prosecutor to my time working with them at the Department of Justice in the aftermath of 9/11, I have been inspired by the men and women of the FBI – inspired by their professionalism, integrity, courage, and sacrifice for the public. If confirmed, it will be a privilege and honor to once again work with them. America faces grave threats both here and abroad, and the FBI, in concert with its federal, state, and local partners continues to work steadfastly to prevent and hold accountable those responsible for these threats. I look forward to the confirmation process, and pledge my complete commitment to fairly and honorably protecting our country and upholding our Constitution and laws.”

Christopher A. Wray (1966) American lawyer, and current director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation

Statement of Christopher A. Wray https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-christopher-wray (June 26, 2017)

Women , Men , World , Justice

“Protocols:
Number 17, paras. 7,8
Our kingdom will be an apologia of the divinity Vishnu, in whom is found its personification – in our hundred hands will be, one in each, the springs of the machinery of social life. We shall see everything without the aid of official police…. In our programs one-third of our subjects will keep the rest under observation….
Our agents will be taken from the higher as well as the lower raniks of society, from among the administrative class who spend their time in amusements, editors, printers, and publishers, booksellers, clerks, and salesmen, workmen, coachmen, lackeys, et cetera….”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life , Spring , Time

“Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's.”

Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) British writer and journalist

"Oscar Wilde's Fairy Godmother", The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1973) p. 278 (1948)

Life , World , Dreams , Imagination

“In hindsight, I have come to believe the discovery of the tapes may prove to be an historic event in more than one way. At a time when the United States government acknowledges that 2 million conversations were overheard by authorized eavesdroppers in a twelve month period, and at least an equal number were being recorded by private dectecies, suspicious spouses, corporate spies, special agents, and blackmailers; at a time when people like me conduct their lives under the assumption that their telephone lines are tapped; and at a time when devices such as the bug-in-the-martini-olive are proliferating, the disastrous consequences that flowed from Nixon’s fateful decision to record White House conversations may serve to awaken the nation to the threat posed to the little privacy that remains to us.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 92
At That Point in Time, Tapes and the threat of wiretapping

Fate , People , Way , Decision

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 264
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Nature , Change

“.. I also send the picture of the 'Trinity' [also called La Gloria].... in my wish to satisfy your C. M. [Caesarean Majesty] I have not spared myself the pains of striking out two or three times the work of many days to bring it to perfection and satisfy myself, whereby more time was wasted than I usually take to do such things.... the portrait of Signor Vargas [agent of Charles V, who was paying Titian for his works] introduced into the work [very probably in the 'La Gloria' / 'Trinity'] was done at his request. If it should not please your C. M. any painter can, with a couple of [brush] strokes, convert it into another person.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter from Venice to the Spanish emperor Charles V in Bruxelles, 10 Sept. 1554; original in the 'Appendix' of Titian: his life and times - With some account of his family... Vol. 2., J. A. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle, Publisher London, John Murray, 1877, p. 231-232
Titian is announcing in his letter the completion and the delivery of the paintings 'Trinity' and 'Addolorata' and probably a third painting 'Christ appearing to the Magdalen', for Mary of Hungary
1541-1576

Pain , Time , Personality , Perfection

“Perfect competition must hold in product and factor markets, and also (and importantly) in capital markets. The assumption has two essential features: economic agents must be price takers; and they must have equal power.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 4, State Intervention, p. 73

Perfection

“Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent.”

Saki book Beasts and Super-Beasts

"The Dreamer"
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)

Life , World , Boy , Housing

“When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

[Szent-Györgyi, Albert, The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young, 1970, 20-21, The Universal Library Crosset & Dunlap, A National General Company, New York, https://archive.org/details/isbn_0448002566, July 24, 2017, Internet Archive]

Money , War , World , Way

“The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found by a cruel slave code. Happily for both races, they are now free. They have from a standpoint of ignorance and poverty—which was our shame, not theirs—made remarkable advances in education and in the acquisition of property. They have as a people shown themselves to be friendly and faithful toward the white race under temptations of tremendous strength. They have their representatives in the national cemeteries, where a grateful Government has gathered the ashes of those who died in its defense. They have furnished to our Regular Army regiments that have won high praise from their commanding officers for courage and soldierly qualities and for fidelity to the enlistment oath. In civil life they are now the toilers of their communities, making their full contribution to the widening streams of prosperity which these communities are receiving. Their sudden withdrawal would stop production and bring disorder into the household as well as the shop. Generally they do not desire to quit their homes, and their employers resent the interference of the emigration agents who seek to stimulate such a desire.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

First State of the Union Address (1889)

Life , People , Education , Faith

“As technology advances the entire concept of authority in industry may have to change. In process firms the relationships between superior and subordinate was much more like that between a travel agent and his clients than that between a foreman and operators in mass production. The process foreman's job was to arrange things within limits, set by the plant, which both he and the operators accepted.”

Joan Woodward (1916–1971) British sociologist

Source: Management and technology, Problems of Progress Industry, 1958, p. 30

Travel , Change

“The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 31

Behavior

“England must…have the mask of Christian peaceableness torn publicly off her face…Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents, etc., must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying, conscienceless people of hagglers; for if we are to be bled to death, at least England shall lose India.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Marginal note in a telegram from the German ambassador in St Petersburg, Count Friedrich von Pourtalès (30 July 1914), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 121
1910s

Death , Hate , People , World

“According to each one of the different theories there are things which are impossible, whose existence cannot be admitted, and whose creation is excluded from the power of God, and the assumption that God does not change their nature does not imply weakness in God, or a limit to his power. Consequently things impossible remain impossible, and do not depend on the action of an agent. It is now clear that a difference of opinion exists only as to the question to which of the two classes anything belongs; whether to the class of the impossible, or to that of the possible. Note it.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.15

God , Question , Nature , Change

“He linked the notion of a spontaneous order that forms when agents follow (often simple) rules with the idea of complex systems in the 1950s. This was a critical breakthrough, for it allowed him to drop the old natural science-social science dichotomy …”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

Source: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004), Ch. 14 : Journey’s End—Hayek’s Multiple Legacies

Idea , Nature , Science

“At the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1990s, Ideology (1991), p. 136

“Religion can not be defined as belonging to any special faculty; and even reverence and worship are but local manifestations of the religious element, and can not be said to be true religion unless they extend through every department of the mind. Religion, properly considered, is that subtle agent of the soul which aspires to perfection in whatever way it is to be attained; and seeks to worship God because he is infinite, and is what man is for ever aspiring to become.”

Cora L. V. Scott (1840–1923) American spiritualist, writer

“The Religion of Life” (1858)

God , Religion , Way , Soul

“"Would you like to go to New Zealand to do a commercial?" That's the sort of question an actor likes to hear from his agent in freezing mid -January.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

Question

“Malema: So these popcorn and mushrooming political parties in Zimbabwe, they will never find friendship in us. They can insult us here from air-conditioned offices of Sandton, we are unshaken. They must stop shouting at us, they must go and fight with their battle in Zimbabwe and win. Even if they've got ground and they are formed on the basis of solid ground in Zim, why are they speaking in Sandton and not Mashonaland or Matabeleland? … Let them go back and go and fight there. Even when the ANC was underground in exile, we had our internal underground forces fighting for freedom.
Fisher: You live in Sandton.
Malema: And we have never spoken from … exile. Let me tell you before you are tjatjarag [i. e. chatty]. This is a building of a revolutionary party, and you know nothing about the revolution.
Fisher: So, so they are not welcome in Sandton but you are?
Malema: So here you behave or else you jump. [Fisher and others laugh. ] Don't laugh.
Fisher: You're joking.
Malema: Chief, can you get security to remove this thing here. If you are not going to behave … call security to take you out. This is not a news room this. This is a revolutionary house. And you don't come here with that tendency. Don't come here with that white tendency, not here. … If you've got a tendency of undermining blacks even while you work, you are in a wrong place …
Fisher: That's rubbish.
Malema: … and you can go out!
Fisher: Absolutely rubbish.
Malema: Rubbish is what you have covered in that trouser. … You are a small boy, you can't do anything. … Bastard! Go out! You bloody agent! … So we think that we need to ensure that we encourage Zanu PF comrades to engage in peaceful means.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

Outburst against reporter Jonah Fisher at Luthuli House on 8 April 2010, while president of the ANC youth league and after his return from Zimbabwe, ANC's Julius Malema lashes out at 'misbehaving' BBC journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/08/anc-julius-malema-bbc-journalist (8 April 2010)

Friendship , Peace , Boy , Thinking

“Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:
# Be as verbally explicit and universal as possible…. The effect is to make `proper' scientific statements seem to talk only about an unchanging universal realm….
# Avoid colloquial forms of language and use, even in speech, forms close to those of written language. Certain words mark language as colloquial…, as does use of first and second person…
# Use technical terms in place of colloquial synonyms or paraphrases….
# Avoid personification and use of specifically or usually human attributes or qualities…, human agents or actors, and human types of action or process…
# Avoid metaphoric and figurative language, especially those using emotional, colorful, or value laden words, hyperboles and exaggeration, irony, and humorous or comic expressions.
# Be serious and dignified in all expression of scientific content. Avoid sensationalism.
# Avoid personalities and reference to individual human beings and their actions, including (for the most part) historical figures and events….
# Avoid reference to fiction or fantasy.
# Use causal forms of explanation and avoid narrative and dramatic accounts…. Similarly forbidden are dramatic forms, including dialogue, the development of suspense or mystery, the element of surprise, dramatic action, and so on.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 133-134, as cited in: Mary U. Hanrahan, "Applying CDA to the analysis of productive hybrid discourses in science classrooms." (2002).

Color , Teachers , Universe , Parting

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Money , Feeling , Communication , Question

“And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199807172334.QAA18255@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Thinking

“Typically, "progressives" and change agents have demanded more money for social programs. But today it's clear that the way we do things needs to change – and that if things were done more appropriately, more humanely, more intelligently, we might end up spending less on social programs than we do now. Take education …. Over the last 10 years or so, a handful of education reformers have … come up with exciting new ideas for changing the ways our schools are administered, the ways our children are taught, and the kinds of things they're taught. And nearly all their ideas would cost no more than our current practices cost.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Some would actually save us money!
Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 11, "Our Schools Need Imagination More Than They Need Money," pp. 84–85.

Money , Children , Education , School

“The evil we previously objectified and assigned to exterior agents—devils, communists, capitalists, chauvinists, faithless lovers, the system—must be discovered within. We can no longer divide the world between good and evil. The line between saints and sinners runs down the middle of my being... I destroy my propaganda machine that automatically casts me in a favorable light and others in the shadow.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 146-147

World , Lovers , Light , Evil

“There is a reason that I require all new agents and analysts to study the FBI’s interaction with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to visit his memorial in Washington as part of their training. And there is a reason I keep on my desk a copy of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval of J. Edgar Hoover’s request to wiretap Dr. King. It is a single page. The entire application is five sentences long, it is without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is “communist influence in the racial situation.””

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

The reason I do those things is to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them.
2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Study , Learning , Memory , Parting

“Hitherto our principal difficulty has arose from a want of proper supplies of money, and from the inefficacy of that which we obtained; but now there appears a scene opening which will introduce new embarrassments. The Congress have recommended to the different States to take upon themselves the furnishing certain species of supplies for our department. The recommendation falls far short of the general detail of the business, the difficulty of ad justing which, between the different agents as well as the different authorities from which they derive their appointments, I am very apprehensive will introduce some jarring interests, many improper disputes, as well as dangerous delays. Few persons, who have not a competent knowledge of this employment, can form any tolerable idea of the arrangements necessary to give despatch and success in discharging the duties of the office, or see the necessity for certain relations and dependencies. The great exertions which are frequently necessary to be made, require the whole machine to be moved by one common interest, and directed to one general end. How far the present measures, recommended to the different States, are calculated to promote these desirable purposes, I cannot pretend to say; but there appears to me such a maze, from the mixed modes adopted by some States, and about to be adopted by others, that I cannot see the channels, through which the business may be conducted, free from disorder and confusion.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money , Idea , Business , Knowledge

“There seems to be little doubt that the factor of sheer size is a very important element in concrete bureaucratic structures. However, because of the patterns exhibited in the behavior of agents in small organized groups and because of the implications for greater generality, the formulation used here does not make the factor of size crucial for the existence of bureaucratic behavior patterns.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy," 1943, p. 50

Behavior

“Avoiding all control, I spread out sheets of white paper or canvas in the nature. For some time they stay in the grass, in the rushes of river, in the meadows or among the rocks. Nature registers its presence, covering the surface of the paper with colors, forms and tracks. This process is controlled by a number of agents; such as space and time, substance and causality. It is governed by nature's intensity. It does not, depend on man's interference. Nature is the greatest and most admirable creator, and unlike logic it doesn't fail. The artist obligation is not to shape - handicraft, but to understand the riddles of reality. In such conception of Art there lies, as in the Universe itself, an immense richness, and a countless variety of forms.”

Jacek Tylicki (1951) American artist

Catalogue to exhibition in Gallery 38 - Copenhagen, 1976, as cited in: Leszek Brogowski & Dorota Czerner (transl.). Jacek Tylicki: Art and Artworks. 2014

Art , Color , Understanding , Nature

“Strategic structuring, informal or formal, whereby social agents, including the state, establish a rule regime regulating market access and transactions…”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

The shaping of social organization (1987)

“I was born a vegetarian, I think. Since infancy I never liked meat, never ate it, never ate turkey, chicken, fish or eggs. … I'm so healthy it's embarrassing. If I felt any better I'd have to see a doctor. … I truly believe that fruit is the body's cleanser, vegetables are the body's healer, and meat is the body's premature aging agent and the cause of all diseases except virus disease.”

Roy Hilligenn (1922–2008) South African bodybuilder

Interview by Osmo Kiiha; quoted in Clarence Bass, Challenge Yourself: Leanness, Fitness & Health at Any Age https://books.google.it/books?id=FSfwAAAAMAAJ (C. Bass' Ripped Enterprises, 1999), p. 202.

Age , Disease , Thinking , Fish

“The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

God , People , Idea , Personality

“To the extent to which the pull that moves me really is irresistible, like an invincibly strong addiction, the normal procedures of evaluation, deliberation, choice, decision, etc. that constitute the substance of our political life are not operating. The same is true of overwhelming aversion. The person being tortured who simply wants it to stop, period, is also not a good model for an agent acting politically.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), Chapter 2.

Life , Decision , Strong , Personality

“Unlike Agents Vann and Shane here, who are being wholly disingenuous, you might be speaking out of genuine ignorance and not just your usual levels of casual obstructionism.”

John Scalzi book Lock In

Source: Lock In (2014), Chapter 3 (p. 40)

“If there was never any difference between the value of commodities someone desired to sell and buy on the market, then no-one would ever desire to accumulate wealth. But an essential feature of capitalism is the existence of a group of agents with precisely that intention.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 9, The Sum Of The Parts, p. 193

Wealth

“Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Address at Virginia Beach (2000), as quoted in The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000228/aponline165646_000.htm (28 February 2000).
2000s

“An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" The Non-Crime of Lying To The FBI, https://mises.org/wire/non-crime-lying-fbi" Mises.org, December 11, 2017
2010s, 2017

Lie , Way

“The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1988-08-18)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

World , History , Game , Nature

“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

“Valuing family more than job gives perspectives to politics. It puts the politician in the proper place, which is somewhere less than being the self-perceived agent of God. If family comes first, the politician needs to find ways to make that clear- by words, symbols and actions. The politician must make the effort. By its nature, the job will not do it for him.”

John Danforth (1936) American politician

Page 125
Faith and Politics (2006)

God , Family , Way , Nature

“No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' or 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them (or their agents, who often adopt similar titles for themselves).”

Desmond Morris (1928) English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter

Cited in: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (1985), Signs of the flesh: an essay on the evolution of hominid sexuality, p. 112

“With the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life, swarms and simulated societies, the concept of “collective intelligence” is coming more and more to the fore. The basic idea is that a group of individuals (e. g. people, insects, robots, or software agents) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web (1999), p.253

Life , People , Way , Behavior

“He (Mahmud) scattered the army of the Hindus in one attack and took Rai Jaipal prisoner. He carried him to the distant part of his kingdom of Ghazni and delivered him to an agent of the Slave Market (dalal-i-bazar). I heard that at the command of the king (Mahmud), the Brokers of the Market, (maqiman-i-bazar in the original) sold Jaipal as a slave for 80 Dinars and deposited the money realised by the sale in the Treasury.”

Jayapala (964–1001) Ruler of the Kabal Shabi

Hodivala, 192-93. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Money , Distant , Parting

“He awoke—and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"
The Phillip K. Dick Reader

World , Dreams , Feeling

“Ninety-nine percent of what my father ever wrote or said about himself to the press, the media, the public and the membership is totally and completely untrue and false. So therefore that old phrase "Consider the source" cannot just be applied to me but must be applied to him also. And this phrase, "Consider the source" is in itself totally and completely inaccurate and is only a statement to dead-agent both myself and my father— or anyone else for that matter. What is appropriate, true and accurate is: "Consider the facts and consider the truth."”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Taped Message (1984)

Truth , Falseness , Dead

“The war was a “tragic error,” but not “fundamentally wrong or immoral” (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the USA, or an ally or client. Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable. All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, p. 252.

War , People , Error , Idea

“Sociology is the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By "action" in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful […] the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the "meaning" to be thought of as somehow objectively "correct" or "true" by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter "correct" or "valid" meaning.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922

Way , History , Science

“While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

Is Iraq a True Threat to the US? http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0721-02.htm, Boston Globe, July 2002
2000

“Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence. Torture by rogue American troops or agents puts all Americans at risk, especially our rank-and-file soldiers stationed in dozens of dangerous places around the globe. God forbid terrorists take American soldiers or travelers hostage and torture them as some kind of sick retaliation for Abu Gharib.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Torture, War, and Presidential Powers, June 15, 2004 http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul185.html
2000s, 2001-2005

God , People , Travel , Intelligence

“Subject - (1) a person subject to political rule; (2) a free agent, instigator of its activity - subjects can realize themselves as free agents only by means of redoubling themselves as, only in so far as they project, transpose the pure form of their freedom into the very heart of the substance opposed to them; into the person of the subject-monarch as head of state.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

261
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Freedom , Heart , Personality

“As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Life

“Taking Iran's history as witness, I declare that we, the Pahlavi Dynasty, nurse no love but that for Iran, and no zeal but that for the dignity of Iranians; recognise no duty but that of serving our state and our nation.
As the commander of this monarchy, I make a covenant with Iran's history that this golden epic of modern Iran will be carried on to complete victory, and that no power on earth shall ever be able to stand against the bond of steel between the Shah and the nation. We shall never again be caught unawares. The nation and the Imperial Arrned Forces, which come from the ranks of the people and derive their power from our inexhaustible national resources, are alert day in and day out to protect their country. No foreigner or his agents will ever have the chance to penetrate the unshakable structure of our national sovereignty because Iran's destiny is now shaped by Iranians and for Iranians - and this shall always be the case.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Message of the Shahanshah of Iran, Now Rouz, 1976 http://members.cybertrails.com/~pahlavi/speech1.html
Speeches, 1976

Love , People , History , Chance

“Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not. From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made the demands of reason his own that the latter may give rise to, and possibly explain, specific behaviors. The assessment of the actor and that of the observer need not coincide.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Behavior

“He showed me that to rebel was right and just, when you considered what the agents of the Authority did in His name…. And I thought of the Bolvangar children, and the other terrible mutilitations I have seen in our own southlands; and he told me of many more hideous cruelties dealt out in the Authority’s name—of how they capture witches, in some worlds, and burn them alive, sisters. Yes, witches like ourselves…
He opened my eyes. He showed me things I had never seen, cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys and the truthfulness of life.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Ruta Skadi in Ch. 13 : Æsahættr
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)

Life , Children , Truth , World

“Police, federal agency and military operations are fraught with the potential for catastrophic disaster. The nature of operations routinely conducted by counter narcotic agents, special weapons and tactics units, special response teams, and mlitary special operations units leave no room for error. A drug bust in the wrong house or a botched hostage rescue situation will be on the evening news with some senior official hemming and hawing and wishing he'd planned better. Once that occurs there is no defense. The best that can happen is to convince everyone that it will not occur again because of all the "lessons learned, and hope that there is a crisis somewhere else that will take your place in the media's attention. THIS IS A LOSING STRATEGY.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 12

Hope , Error , Nature , Learning

“The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

"BBC photographer prevented from shooting St Paul's because he might be 'al Qaeda operative'" BoingBoing (30 November 2009) http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/30/bbc-photographer-pre.html

“Dad joined the US Army by this point [1964], and initially he was stationed in Texas and then South Carolina. But the Vietnam war brought our normal life to an end. Once again, Dad was gone. Communications were very basic back then: Dad couldn't just pick up a cellphone and let us know he was okay. Months would go by without a letter or anything. Eventually he bought two tape recorders -- one he kept with him and one for our house. Dad used to talk into the recorder and send the tapes home. Then we would gather round our machine and tell Dad stories. And I would sing. I still have all the tapes, but I can't listen to them. It hurts too much. After Dad came back from Nam, he wasn't well. He'd been poisoned by Agent Orange and needed quite a lot of looking after. Mum was busy trying to get her Cuban qualifications revalidated by a US university, so I had to take care of Dad and my little sister [Becky]. It was tough. Toward the end, Dad was too far gone and he didn't really know what was hapening around him. I joined Miami Sound Machine in 1975 and we were getting quite successful, but Dad didn't even know who I was. He had to be moved to the hospital. On my wedding day in 1978 [September 2] I went to visit him, still wearing my wedding dress. That was the last time that he said my name. Dad died in 1980, but he touches my life every day. On my last album [Unwrapped] I did a lot of writing while I was looking at a picture of him in his younger days -- so happy and in the prime of his life. I'm not sure if he sees me, but I can feel him all around me. I hope he knows that I am so very proud of him.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The [London] Sunday Times (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life , War , Hope , Feeling

“The "Democrats" have learned from the unlamented KGB, whose primary weapon of desinformatsiya, or disinformation, was a million agents whose job was to ruin the reputation of every key opponent of worldwide Communism by making up vicious rumors and peddling them via a plethora of front organizations. The left have done their best to trash my reputation because I have dared to question the climate scare with which they had hoped to bully the West into shutting itself down without a shot being fired. Just look at my CreepyMedia page. I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of artful lies told over and over again by a host of paid trolls and useful idiots.”

Christopher Monckton (1952) British public speaker and hereditary peer

7 steps that'll land Obama in jail http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/7-steps-thatll-land-obama-in-jail/ WorldNetDaily, December 31, 2013.

Hope , Art , Communication , Question

“The problem of method … includes four main issuesː the possibility of an alternative to logic and causation, capable of overcoming the inadequacies of both rationalism and historicism; the link between this third method and causality; the connection between the meaning of an act for its agent and its meaning for an observer; and the relationship of systematic theory to historical understanding.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 245

Understanding , Problem

“The phenomena of power and influence involve a dyadic relation between two agents which may be viewed from two points of view: (o) What determines the behavior of the agent who exerts power? (h) What determines the reactions of the recipient of this behavior? We take this second point of view and formulate our theory in terms of the life space of P, the person upon whom the power is exerted. In this way we hope to define basic concepts of power which will be adequate to explain many of the phenomena of social influence, including some which have been described in other less genotypic terms.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Source: "The bases of social power." 1959, p. 150

Life , Hope , Way , Behavior

“I chose to bomb a federal building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike; a counter attack, for the cumulative raids and subsequent violence and damage that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco.) From the formation of such units as the FBI's 'Hostage Rescue' and other assault teams amongst federal agencies during the '80s; culminating in the Waco incident, federal actions grew increasingly militaristic and violent, to the point where at Waco, our government - like the Chinese - was deploying tanks against its own citizens.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

2000s, Why I Bombed the Murrah Federal Building (2001)

“Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns — not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed — very foolishly, as it turned out — in their hands.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Murder by Gun Control".

Exercises , Teachers

“I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels from — from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

nbcnews.com http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/naive-gravely-mistaken-analysts-rebut-snowden-claims-n117101
2014

People , Way

“The preceding verse explained that together the three factors: 1) the knowledge (jnanam), 2) the known (jneyam), and 3) the knower (parijnata) motivate action. It was also stated that the organ (karanam), the action (karma), and the agent (karta) execute the action. In this verse the threefold distinction of knowledge, action, and the actor is explain according to the three gunas of Samkhya philosophy.”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Ch. XIII-XVIII, 2015

Motivation , Knowledge

“The PATRIOT Act allows Federal agents to look at public and university library patron circulation records, books checked out, magazines consulted, all subject to government scrutiny.There used to be a time in this country when we were worried whether our young people knew how to read. Now some in our government are more worried that government agents be able to find out what people are reading.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech from the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (15 June 2005) http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?position=all&page=H4540&dbname=2005_record.

People , Books , Universe , Time

“He was, however, speaking to a representative of government, the police. And it is to government that one goes 'for a redress of grievances,' to use an almost forgotten phrase of the First Amendment. But it is said that the purpose was 'to cause inconvenience and annoyance.' Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Colten v. Kentucky, 407 U.S. 104 (1972)
Judicial opinions

People

“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 30-1

Life , World , Democracy , Change

“My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. The approach to this problem has been blocked by a cost or labor theory of value, which assumes that prices are determined by the technical conditions of production only. The important question is to explain how the interaction of a great number of people, each possessing only limited knowledge, will bring about an order that could only be achieved by deliberate direction taken by somebody who has the combined knowledge of all these individuals. However, central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form. In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals.
Given this context, it is intellectually not satisfactory to attempt to establish causal relations between aggregates or averages in the manner in which the discipline of macroeconomics has attempted to do. Individuals do not make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge of magnitudes such as the total amount of production, or the total quantity of money. Aggregative theorizing leads nowhere.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Money , People , Idea , Question

“Now, gentlemen, there will be a beautiful story: what is the role, in the overall scheme of creation, of some of these little beings who are the agents of fermentation, the agents of putrefaction, of disorganization of everything that life has had in the surface of the globe. This role is immense, marvelous, really moving. Maybe one day maybe I will be given [the opportunity] to explain here some of these results. May God grant it to be still in the presence of such a brilliant assembly!”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Original in French: Maintenant, messieurs, il y aurait un beau sujet à traiter : c’est celui du rôle, dans l’économie générale de la création, de quelques-uns de ces petits êtres qui sont les agents de la fermentation, les agents de la putréfaction, de la désorganisation de tout ce qui a eu vie il la surface du globe. Ce rôle est immense, merveilleux, vraiment émouvant. Un jour peut-être me sera-t-il donné de vous exposer ici quelques-uns de ces résultats. Dieu veuille que ce soit encore en présence à une aussi brillante assemblée!
Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne (1864)

Life , God , Beauty

“[My] publicity agent … went to hear Father Divine and he had a sermon and his subject was 'you got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.' And I said 'Wow, that's a colorful phrase!”

Johnny Mercer (1909–1976) American lyricist, songwriter, singer and music professional

And I said 'Wow, that's a colorful phrase!'

Interviewed 1971 https://findingaids.library.unt.edu/?p=collections/findingaid&id=959&q=&rootcontentid=204947 by [Gilliland, John, Pop Chronicles the 40's: The Lively Story of Pop Music in the 40's, 978-1-55935-147-8, 31611854] Tape 1, side B.

Quoted by PDF, '40s Sounds Return to Radio, 1972-10-29, Oakland Tribune, Bob, MacKenzie, 2009-04-03, http://web.archive.org/web/20120209175145/http://www.sfradiomuseum.com/audio/ksfo/1972/Trib_Pop-Chronicles-Article-2_1972.pdf, 2012-02-09 http://www.bayarearadio.org/audio/ksfo/1972/Trib_Pop-Chronicles-Article-2_1972.pdf,

Color

“Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. […] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an acive agent, not merely a “reporter.””

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Introduction, p. 6
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

People , History , Study , Reading

“In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 4, Technology: The Engine of change, p. 85

Change

“The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy. The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond. In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors. And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.
This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.
So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html Aljazeera, (01 Nov 2004)
2000s, 2004

Death , Women , Children , World

“And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife's bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight
Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.
Translator unknown
Lot's Wife

God , Marriage , Mountain , Housing

“All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency—the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint—are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership—it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 5: 'Man exploits man; Private enterprise good, public enterprise bad?', The pitfalls of privatization, p. 116

Problem , Suffering

“By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 167.

Nature , Time , Personality

“Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

On Turner, in Ch. 1
Count Zero (1986)

“"The UN and its elitist masters don't want you on their property! And in case you do "trespass" and enter forbidden areas of these pristine UN lands, you might just be shot. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents and park personnel are now taught to love nature's Mother Earth and to despise and loathe human beings. They are being given firearms and instructed to use them. Meanwhile, foreign immigrants from India, China, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Russia and other nations are being recruited for this national park service police duty because, unlike U. S. nationals, non-English speaking foreigners will not hesitate to carry out orders and shoot American citizen "intruders"." (June 1997).”

Texe Marrs (1944–2019) American writer

citation needed

Love , Nature , Fish

“It will become an immediate certainty to the meditator that mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function. Nowhere, behind or within the function, can any individual agent or abiding entity be detected. By way of one’s own direct experience, one will this have arrived at the great truth of No-soul or Impersonality (anatta; Sanskrit anatma), showing that all existence is void of an abiding personality (self, soul, over-self, etc.) or an abiding substance of any description.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 38

Truth , Way , Soul , Personality

“Modern engineers, after having erected a viaduct, insist upon subjecting it to a severe strain by a formal trial trip, before allowing it to be opened for public traffic; and it would almost seem that God, in employing moral agents for the carrying out of His purposes, secures that they shall be tested by some dreadful ordeal, before He fully commits to them the work which He wishes them to perform.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 44.

God

“[On the attendees at the launch of Apollo 11] Those people were not a stampeding herd, nor a manipulated mob; they did not wreck the Florida communities, they did not devastate the countryside, they did not throw themselves, like whining thugs, at the mercy of their victims - they did not create any victims. They came as responsible individuals able to project the reality of two or three days ahead, and to provide for their own needs. There were people of every age, creed, color, educational level and economic status. They lived and slept in tents, or in their cars, some for several days, in great discomfort and unbearable heat; they did it gamely, cheerfully, gaily; they projected a general feeling of confident goodwill, the bond of a common enthusiasm; they created a public spectacle of responsible privacy - and they departed as they had come, without benefit of press agents.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

People , Age , Education , Cars

“It serves to remind us that, in trying to explain the globalization of economic activity, we are dealing with the workings of a dynamic capitalist market system, and not just individual agents within it.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 7, Transnational Corporations, p. 202

“No interviews. No panels. No speeches. No comments," he [Wasserman] ordered his agents. "Stay out of the spotlight. It fades your suit.”

Lew Wasserman (1913–2002) American studio executive and talent agent

Quoted by Kathleen Sharp, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003, ISBN 0-7867-1220-1

“The operations of commerce are not confined to the material ends; that there is no more powerful agent in consolidating and in knitting together the amity of nations; and that the great moral purpose of the repression of human passions, and those lusts and appetites which are the great cause of war, is in direct relation with the understanding and application of the science which you desire to propagate.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://archive.org/details/revisedreportofp00poli to the Political Economy Club (31 May 1876) upon the centenary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
1870s

War , Understanding , Passion , Science