Quotes about air
page 17

“Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature.”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 189

Law, Travel, Error, Nature

“Eventually the decision was reached to accept the armed chopper as an essential part of the air mobility concept but not to allow the Army to use the Mohawk as an attack aircraft, confining it to a reconnaissance role. Both were wise decisions. But prior to these decisions there were some hot and emotional sessions of the JCS. One concerned the armed Huey, which as then being used successfully in Vietnam to support ARVN operations, but which was considered by the Air Force as illegal poaching on their roles and missions. This was in the midsummer of 1964. General LeMay suddenly took his cigar out of his mouth and, gesticulating wildly, challenged General Johnson to an aerial duel. He screamed, "Johnson, you fly one of those damned Huey's and I'll fly an F-105, and we'll see who survives. I'll shoot you down and scatter your peashooter all over the goddamn ground." I was eager to defend my chief, both verbally and physically (LeMay would have made two Johnsons in body weight, if not in mental poundage) but Johnson motioned to me to keep quiet and responded quietly: "I'm not a flier, but I will be happy to get qualified and take you on- we can agree on a time and place later. But let's not waste the valuable time of our colleagues on such a trivial matter."”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 27

Happiness, Support, Decision, Time

“Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World, Beauty, Hope, Home

“But the room seemed so poor, pleading for warmth and joy. Vera Rivken's room. She had been nice to Arturo Bandini, and she was poor. I took the small roll from my pocket, peeled off two one dollar bills, and laid them on the table. Then I walked down the stairs, my lungs full of air, elated, my muscles so much stronger than ever before.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Joy

“I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

" I Stood Tiptoe http://www.bartleby.com/126/2.html", l. 1 Poems (1817)

“There is a major country in the world - G7 Country - that has decided to do this with us and has invited us to become the primary contactee to precipitate an event with these extraterrestrial vehicles with the full support of their air force, space command, everything, land and meet the leadership of this country with us facilitating this so that this can than be proximally disclosed to the world, and thats what we are doing eminent - what we are working on eminently. (February 11, 2007)”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

2007 Source: [Steven M. Greer, Steven M. Greer and G7 Country announce disclosure of ET http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7755523912473399345, Recorded Conference, Disclosure Project, Los Angeles, California, 2007-02-11]

World, Support, Country

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955)

God, Knowledge, Time

“I disagree with him on some of the issues. But when he came out and said he’s willing to audit the Federal Reserve, I said, "He’s worth supporting," especially since he’s not afraid to be politically incorrect. That’s a huge breath of fresh air, I wish he would renounce his support for the NSA.”

Ben Garrison American political cartoonist

Lakeside Cartoonist a Player on the Political World Stage http://www.dailyinterlake.com/archive/article-c3636174-3b30-11e6-8943-1f17ebd0c321.html (June 25, 2016)

Support

“In rose with petals soft as air
I bind for you the tides and fire —
the death that lives within the flower,
oh, gladly love, for you I bear.”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Poem Envoi

Love, Death, Flowers

“The rights of the poor majority are pure air and pure water, and sufficient space to walk about in, when the rich minority are befouling the air with manufactories, poisoning the rivers, and as in the neighborhood of Foots Cray and St. Mary's, adding "field to field, till there be no place" left, and the villagers cannot step out of the dusty high-road without a trespass..”

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker

Letter to the Rev. J.P. Wright (1879), from The Life and letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (AH Palmer, London, 1892)

Water

“The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 17
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Bone House (2011), p. 163

“If the methods you employ are good, then what’s the point of all this reasoning and argument? A few drops of credendium, a single squirt in the eyes, and I applaud your every word with enthusiasm, you have my full approval, my esteem. If those methods are good. Yet apparently you yourself are not convinced of their worth, preferring simple, old-fashioned hot air and rhetoric, wasting words on me instead of reaching for the atomizer! Apparently you’re well aware that the triumph of psychem is a sham, and that you will be standing on the field alone, a conqueror with a bad case of heartburn.”

Stanisław Lem book The Futurological Congress

The Futurological Congress (1971)

Fashion

“If I, so close to the peak, could glean no joy from that rarefied air, the air I was told, as soon as I’d acquired language, would absolve me, if in fact all I gleaned was the view from that peak, the vista true, that the whole climb had been a spellbound clamber up an edifice of foolishness, then what possible salvation can there be for those at the foothills or dying on the slopes or those for whom the climb is not even an option? What is their solution? Well, it’s the same solution that’s available to me, the only solution that will make any of us free. To detach the harness and fall within. Now that’s what I call an extended metaphor. In Fairfield, Iowa, then, there could be the solution. But none of us want a boring solution. The Revolution cannot be boring.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Joy

“And o'er them lowers destruction, high in air,
Upon those jutting crags, whose rugged sides,
Riven in fragments, and like ruins pil'd,
Seem as that giants of those ancient days
When earthborn creatures braved th' Olympic Gods,
Those of whom fable tells, had torn away
Rocks from their solid base, and with strong arm,
Parted the mountains: there the avalanche hangs,
Mighty, but tremulous; just a light breath
Will loosen it from off its airy throne;
Then down it hurls in wrath, like to the sound
Of thunder amid storms, or as the voice
Of rushing waters—death in its career.”

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

Canto I, I
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Death, God, Mountain, Light

“In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

According to Frederic Prokosch, in his Voices: A Memoir (1983), this was once said to him by Housman.
Attributed

“They knew now that they could never accomplish that long carpet-journey with anything like Cutflower’s air, but he reminded them at every footstep, every inclination of the head, that the whole point of life was to be happy.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 34 (p. 570)

Life, Happiness

“In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to come across by air and am ready to start tomorrow.
Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place of meeting. I should be grateful for a very early reply.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

At eleven o'clock that same night Neville Chamberlain got off an urgent message to Hitler
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Peace, Time

“The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset — that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.”

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866) Scottish writer

Letter to Miss Barnes http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/carlyle/jwclam/lam301.html#LM3-207 (24 August 1859).

Marriage, Singing

“Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Tilbury / Gravesend to London Bridge
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men, Hope, Way, Soul

“We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier…
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 3

Men, War, Age, World

“The world's a rollercoaster,
And I am not strapped in.
Maybe I should hold with care,
But my hands are busy in the air!”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Morning View (2001)

World, Business

“The days were long and lonely. The sudden and total deprivation of such basic human necessities as exercise and fresh air, association with other people, my own clothes and things like newspapers, radio, cigarettes books and a host of other things, made my life very hard.”

Bobby Sands (1954–1981) Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

On his experience in solitary confinement in prison, in An Phoblacht/Republican News (1978), under the pseudonym "Marcella."
Other writings

Life, People, Books, Exercises

“Through all these researches into an art that would lead to immaterialisation, Werner Ruhnau [German architect] and I came together in the architecture of the air. He was hindered by the last obstacle that even a w:Mies van der Rohe [also a German architect, famous for his reflecting glass skyscrapers in the U. S. ] hadn’t been able to overcome: the roof, the screen that separates us from the sky, from the blue sky. And I was hindered by the screen that the tangible blue on the canvas constitutes, which deprives man of a constant vision of the horizon.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1958; p. 45
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Art

“We must not despair, we must not for a moment pretend that we cannot face these things. Dangers come upon the world; other nations face them. When, in old days, the sea gave access to this island, it was a danger to this island, it made it the most invadable place at any point, but by taking proper measures our ancestors gained the command of the sea, and, consequently, what had been a means of inroad upon us became our sure shield and protection; and there is not the slightest reason why, with our ability and our resources, and our peaceful intentions, our desire only to live quietly here in our island, we should not raise up for ourselves a security in the air above us which will make us as free from serious molestation as did our control of blue water through bygone centuries.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1934/mar/08/air-estimates-1934#column_2071 in the House of Commons (8 March 1934) during the debate on the Government's White Paper on Defence that announced an increase in the Royal Air Force The 1930s

World, Peace, Water, Sea

“There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Tree, Light

“Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.”

Julian May (1931–2017) American science fiction, fantasy, horror, science and children's writer

The Adversary (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), ISBN 0-395-34410-7, p. 19 (opening lines of chapter 1)

Death, World, Color, Fashion

“Nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression, that Saddam Hussein committed aggression. We attribute to them rational goals, maybe they wanted to control the energy of the Middle East or something. With regard to ourselves, it's impossible… We just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily, in fact reflexively, when others commit crimes… And if anyone says it, educated people, liberal intellectuals, are infuriated. Because it suggests that we could do something that's not noble. We can make mistakes, that's easy. You can criticize mistakes. You can criticize low-level crimes, like Abu-Ghraib, you can criticize that. You can criticize My Lai. But not the educated, civilized people, the kind of people we have dinner with, see at concerts, sitting in air-conditioned offices planning mass-murder. So that's beyond criticism. On the other hand, if it's half-crazed G. I. s in the field, uneducated, don't know who's going to shoot at them next, you can blame them, you can say how awful they are. You can criticize Lynndie England, disadvantaged young woman, very different from us. But how about the guys who organized and planned it? No.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2006, Discussion with Robert Trivers, 2006

People, Education, Guy

“In the past decade the distinction between connotation and denotation has been blurred by politics. The definitions of words should not change with every shift in the winds of public sentiment. Our society has already suffered from four decades of Situational Ethics. Heaven help us in this new era of Situational Definitions. A rocket scientist or military engineer can teach you about Sympathetic Detonations, but it is 21st Century television commentators who have introduced us to the era of Sympathetic Denotations. We now live in an Orwellian world where a semi-auto rifle is arbitrarily called an "assault rifle" if it has black plastic furniture, where a standard capacity magazine is called a "high capacity" magazine, where the confiscation and redistribution of wealth is dubbed "fairness." This also a new age when folks who are given free health care, HD televisions, free cell phones, and enough money to be able to afford air conditioning are deemed to be "living in poverty."”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

The fluidity of our language is evidence that America is sliding into oblivion. Hold fast to the true meaning of words and phrases, or we are doomed. Incendiary Words: Of Detonations and Denotations https://survivalblog.com/incendiary_words_of_detonations_and_denotations/ Survivalblog, 27 May 2013

Money, Health, Age, World

“Neil [Cavuto] [a Fox News Senior Vice President (and anchor)], I'm not the one using profanity on the air. I'm not the one interrupting the guest to show incredible rudeness on the air. I'm simply the one trying to answer your questions and make America a better place.”

Alan Grayson (1958) American politician

March 31, 2009; reported in "Rep. Alan Grayson Hates Me, Not Fox" by Neil Cavuto, Fox News, October 28, 2009 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,570150,00.html. 2009, Regarding others

Question

“But the spirit which they so nobly represented two generations ago has not departed from the land. It was resurgent in the days of 1898 and in 1917, and finds a lineal succession in the three branches which make up the land and sea forces of the present day and in the public opinion of the people. Our country has never had a better-equipped army or a more efficient navy in time of peace than it has at the present time. The Air Service is being perfected, better quarters are being provided, and our whole Military Establishment is being made worthy of the power and dignity of this great Nation. We realize that national security and national defense can not be safely neglected. To do so is to put in peril our domestic tranquility and jeopardize our respect and standing among the other nations.”

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

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

People, Peace, Time, Success

“Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 41: Mirage

Flowers, Thinking, Loss

“While all bodies are composed of the four elements, that is, of heat, moisture, the earthy, and air, yet there are mixtures according to natural temperament which make up the natures of all the different animals of the world, each after its kind.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter IV, Sec. 5

World, Nature, Animals

“I do not believe that the President was in any way directly involved in the leaking of her identity, but that was a very disillusioning moment for me when I found out when it initially hit the press, and I was in North Carolina, if I remember correctly, and a reporter shouted out to the President, "Is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this classified information?" We walked onto Air Force One, and the Presidents asks, "What was the reporter asking?", and I said, "He asserted that you were the one who authorized Scooty Libby leaking this information," and he said, "Yeah, I did."”

Scott McClellan (1968) Former White House press secretary

Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, on illegal leaking of counter-terrorist CIA agent identity; May 29, 2008; Countdown http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3719710/

Secret, Way

“One is led to conclude that economics as a scientific discipline is still somewhat hanging in the air.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Source: Three Essays (1957), p. 141

“Barça wanted to get rid of him [Guardiola]. They considered him scrawny, bad defensively and ineffective in the air. What nobody saw was that he had the basic qualities to go far: he had game intelligence, speed in his execution, technique. If I hadn't been at Barcelona, for sure he would have been sold to a Segunda Division club.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

Goal.com, 3 October 2016 http://www.goal.com/en/news/1862/premier-league/2016/10/03/28138802/how-cruyff-saved-guardiola-from-barcelona-axe.

Game, Intelligence, Speed

“In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

GameSpy interview, Pt. I (15 August 2004)

Death, Children, Way, Game

“Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 254

Nature, Country

“It is dark in my favorite dream. Someone is following me. I don't know why. I'm scared. Then suddenly I lift off. Far away. How do I feel? As if I am swimming in the air. Free. Weightless. Nobody can reach me. Nobody can touch me. It's a wonderful feeling.”

Aaliyah (1979–2001) American singer, actress and model

Interview in Die Zeit newspaper (2001) http://www.eonline.com/news/42093/aaliyah-funeral-set-pilot-probed

Dreams, Feeling

“On the other hand, I am accused of not finishing my paintings, no matter how much time I spent to my airs. Well, 'finished' in the common sense of the word, they are certainly not! Finishing in that sense would drag the life out of it.”

Jacob Maris (1837–1899) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jacob Maris, in het Nederlands: Daarentegen wordt mij verweten dat mijn schilderijen niet af zijn, hoe ik mijn lucht ook doorwerkt heb. Nu, 'af' in de gewone beteekenis van het woord is mijn werk zeker niet. Door in dien zin het af te maken, zou ik er het leven uithalen.
in Jacob Maris (1837-1899), M. van Heteren and others; as cited in 'Ik denk in mijn materie', in exhibition catalog of Teylers Museum / Museum Jan Cunen), Zwolle 2003, p. 76

Life, Sense, Time, Painting

“Pope Pius XII was meant to go and castigate Hitler for being a [air quotes] "Genocidal Fuckhead … [air quotes again] with bunny rabbit ears". But he didn't, he wimped out, and for that history has renamed that Pope as "Pope Gutless Bastard I."”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Circle (2000)

Quotes, History

“As an introduction to America, my ten months in Baltimore were superb. I find it difficult to find words to convey the feeling of decompression, of freedom, of being caught in a sweep of unimagined and unimaginable grandeur. It was a life on a different scale with more of everything - more air to breathe, more things to see, more people to know.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Enigmas Of Chance (1985), Chapter 4, On Toast!, p. 85.

Life, People, Feeling, Freedom

“All, wherein I have part,
All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart,
Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? I am bare
As a new-born soul, — I am naught:
My deeds are dust in air,
My words are ghosts of thought.
I ride through the night alone,
Detached from the life that seemed,
And the best I have felt or known
Is less than the least I dreamed.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

The Guests of Night (1871), st. 3 - 4, in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 314.

Life, Dreams, Soul, Loss

“Dear Habicht, / Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble… / What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul…?”

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

Lieber Habicht! / Es herrscht ein weihevolles Stillschweigen zwischen uns, so daß es mir fast wie eine sündige Entweihung vorkommt, wenn ich es jetzt durch ein wenig bedeutsames Gepappel unterbreche... / Was machen Sie denn, Sie eingefrorener Walfisch, Sie getrocknetes, eingebüchstes Stück Seele...? Opening of a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht in which he describes his four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers (18 or 25 May 1905) Doc. 27 http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-doc/81?ajax 1900s

Feeling, Soul, Silence

“When I was a boy no one seemed to ask where the energies come from. Land, oil, coal, air seemed inexhaustible. Now we are realizing how our very life depends upon restoring not only our balance with nature, but also that balance within ourselves. We are depleting our reserves of spirit, health, courage and faith at an alarming rate. The quiet practice of yoga is, in its humble yet effective way, an antidote.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Sushama Londhe in “A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture”, p. 341

Life, Health, Faith, Way

“Will ye believe
The wonders of the ocean? how its shoals
Sprang from the wave, like flashing light;.. took wing,
And, twinkling with a silver glitterance,
Flew through the air and sunshine? yet were they
To sight less wondrous than the tribe who swam,
Following like fowlers, with uplifted eye,
Their falling quarry:.. language cannot paint
Their splendid tints! though in blue ocean seen,
Blue, darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,
In all its rich variety of shades,
Suffus'd with glowing gold.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Madoc in Wales http://olivercowdery.com/texts/1805sout.htm#pg001, Part I, Sec. V - 48 (1805). Compare: "'Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,' As some one somewhere sings about the sky", Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto iv. stanza 110.

Light, Painting

“Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

The Mother (1945)

Children, Silence, Forgetting

“That famous trick, related by nearly every writer on Hindu jugglery, of youths tossing balls of twine in the air and climbing up on them out of sight, I did not see, nor could I find during my visit any well-authenticated evidence that it was ever done. The tricks I saw I could have imitated with little preparation. I would not presume to introduce them upon the stage.”

Alexander Herrmann (1844–1896) French magician

The Art of Magic (1891)

Youth

“I fear I shall never be…good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon.”

William Beckford (1760–1844) English novelist

Letter to Catherine, Lady Hamilton, April 1781; cited from Lewis Melville The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: William Heinemann, 1910) p. 92.

World, Fear

“I realized I was fulfilling mankind’s greatest dream—to fly like a bird, as naturally and as joyously as if the air were our familiar habitat.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 419)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Dreams, Nature, Bird, Flying

“If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.”

William J. Brennan (1906–1997) American judge

Writing in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence (1997).

Freedom

“In an old Chronicle of Norway, we find it recorded of Olaf Tryggeson, a king of that country, that he was stronger and more nimble than any man in his dominions. He could climb up the rock Smalserhorn, and fix his shield upon the top of it; he could walk round the outside of a boat upon the oars, while the men were rowing; he could play with three darts, alternately throwing them in the air, and always kept two of them up, while he held the third in one of his hands; he was ambidexter, and could cast two darts at once; he excelled all the men of his time in shooting with the bow; and he had no equal in swimming.”

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

pg. xix
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Olaf Tryggeson

Men, Time, Country

“I am trying to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Marc's letter to the publisher Reinhard Piper, 1908, as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, ed. Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 207
1905 - 1910

Feeling, Nature, Animals, Painting

“As quoted in Aire puro para el amor y la amistad Betancourt, Luis Fernando 7a. reim., p. 165.”

Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284) King of Castile

Quemad viejos leños, leed viejos libros, bebed viejos vinos, tened viejos amigos.
Burn old wood, read old books, drink old wines, have old friends.
Literal translation.
Variant translations:
Old wood to burn! Old wine to drink! Old friends to trust! Old authors to read! —Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appeared to be best in these four things.
As quoted in Floresta Española de Apothegmas o Sentencias, by Melchior de Santa Cruz (1576), ii. 1. 20.
Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things, — old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
As quoted in Apothegms (1624) by Francis Bacon, 97.

Quotes

“Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"The Devil’s Advice to Story-tellers," lines 19–22, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

Motivation, Reading, Despair

“That's a 7.76mm round, you idiots, if you fire it into the air it comes to earth you know not where, like on some little kid's soft-skulled head, and that's the end of the kid. They're too stupid to even figure that much out.”

John Dolan (1955) American journalist

Gary Brecher at exile.ru/authors, 2002

Stupidity

“The right hon. Gentleman's statement was that Germany has already at this moment a military air force which is approaching equality with our own, and that by this time next year, if Germany continues to execute her programme without acceleration and if we continue to carry out the increase announced to Parliament in July last, the German military air force will be at least as strong as, and may be stronger than, our own…It is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us…Even if we confine the comparison to the German air strength and the strength of the Royal Air Force immediately available in Europe, Germany is actively engaged in the production of service aircraft, but her real strength is not 50 per cent. of our strength in Europe to-day. As for the position this time next year, if she continues to execute her air programme without acceleration and if we continue to carry out at the present approved rate the expansion announced to Parliament in July…so far from the German military air force being at least as strong as and probably stronger than our own, we estimate that we shall still have in Europe a margin—in Europe alone—of nearly 50 per cent.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/nov/28/debate-on-the-address in the House of Commons (28 November 1934). 1934

Strong, Time

“The need of the hour is to get people to talk to each other and to clear the air. I don't approve of fusion in art, but I definitely approve of it in the field of politics.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall

People, Art

“You have seen bigger horses than his thirteen and a half, perhaps fourteen hands, his nine hundred pounds. You have seen handsomer profiles than this Roman nose, slightly convex. Burrs cling to his long sweeping tail. His coat is dark and unglossed. Yet look again, while he is still, for he will not be still long. Sense the vitality in those muscles, trembling beneath the skin; see the pride in that high head, hear the haughty command to his voice. For this is a wild horse, my friend. Once he claimed the western range. Then they took his range away from him. But nothing, no one claims him. He feels the wind and the air with his nose, with his ears, with his very soul, and what he feels is good. He tosses his head, once, quickly, and behind him his harem of six mares trot up to join him, and behind them, a yearling colt, a filly and two stork-legged foals. Coats dusty and chewed, tails spiked with bits of the desert, sage and nettle and leftover pine needles from winter climbs down from timberland. The Barb-nosed stallion led his family down to the waterhole. Not Barb from barbed wire, though perhaps the chewed skin was from barbed wire, but Barb from the Spanish horses from which he descended, brought to the New World over four hundred years ago, from the Barbary states of North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Fez, Tripoli. Indians stole them from the Spaniards; the Barbs stole themselves free from the Indians. Running wild, a few still run free.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From Running Wild (1973) by Hano, p. 10
Other Topics

World, Family, Feeling, Soul

“If you chasing popularity, you're chasing a moment, you're chasing a puff of air.”

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

Interview with Matt Lauer http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/40073863#40074095 (2010), aired 8 November 2010. 2010s, 2010, Interview with Matt Lauer (November 2010)

“[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at first amused myself with making experiments on the fixed air [carbon dioxide] which I found ready made in the process of fermentation. When I removed from that house I was under the necessity of making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind.”

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) English theologian, chemist, educator, and political theorist

Letter to Dr. Price (Oct. 19, 1771) as quoted in John Towill Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley http://books.google.com/books?id=psMGAAAAQAAJ (1831)

Housing

“Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx (18 March 1968)

Life, Wisdom, Marriage, Children

“When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London's streets, cold and dank in the night air. Think — what have I got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this; early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, how ridiculous — a bullet may just as well have done the job five years ago.”

Michael Collins (Irish leader) (1890–1922) Irish revolutionary leader

Liam, Cathal (2006). Blood on the Shamrock: A Novel of Ireland's Continued Struggle for Freedom 1921-1924. St. Padraic Press, p. 194.

Death, Dreams, Thinking, Time

“Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air,
Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile,
Come to me out of the past, and I see her there
As I saw her once for a while.”

Arthur Symons (1865–1945) British poet

Emmy, st. 1.

Youth, Smile, Music, Past

“William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right-eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Death

“There various news I heard of love and strife,
Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,
Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,
Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,
Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,
Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,
Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,
The fall of favourites, projects of the great,
Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Temple of Fame (1711), Lines 449-458.

Love, Life, Death, War

“The summer day was spoiled with fitful storm;
At night the wind died and the soft rain dropped;
With lulling murmur, and the air was warm,
And all the tumult and the trouble stopped.”

Celia Thaxter (1835–1894) American writer

The Nestling Swallows, in Drift-Weed (1878), p. 20.

Summer, Night

“The girls always think we're going to throw them over a table or toss them in the air. Their muscles tense up right away. So Fred and I go and sit in a corner and pretend we're talking business.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Gene Kelly on the subject of social dancing, in Lawrenson, Helen. "It's Better to Remember Fred." Esquire, August 1976, pp92-96, 106, 109-110. (M).

Girl, Business, Thinking

“The supporting powers of time air and of the wind depend on the shape of the surfaces used, and the best forms can only be evolved by free flight through the air.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

The Romance of Aeronautics (1912)

Support, Time, Dependency

“The advantage of pure, and the disadvantage of impure air are experienced each time we breathe, and all who understand the causes of disease know that an impure atmosphere is most unfavourable to the enjoyment of health, and an efficient cause to shorten human existence within the natural life of man. It is therefore most desirable that decisive measures should be devised and generally adopted to ensure to all a pure atmosphere, in which to live during their lives.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

3rd Part
The Book of the New Moral World (1836-1844)

Life, Health, Disease, Understanding

“He can only be defined by his contradictions: a patriot whose ultimate allegiance was not to Ireland but to the Cayman Islands; a preacher of family values who kept an expensive mistress; a lover of power who allowed himself to become a kept man; a product of the Catholic lower middle class who spent millions of pounds of other people's money in affecting the style of an Ascendancy gent; a man of the people who secretly sniggered at the people's credulity; a charmer who liked to cultivate an air of menace and warned his own bank that he could be a very troublesome adversary.”

Charles Haughey (1925–2006) Irish politician

Fintan O'Toole, "A Life and Legacy". Irish Times, 14th June 2006.
About

Money, People, Family, Lovers

“Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe http://www.bartleby.com/122/37.html", lines 1-8 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Life, World, Home

“This year, ladies and gentlemen, I was cool for 2 seconds of my life. I got to fly with the Air Force Thunderbirds. (Audience hoots and hollers) You betcha! They called me up out of the blue, and they go, "Hey, we want you to fly with us." And I'm like, "You got the right number?" They said, "Yeah, Bill Engvall, comedian. You stand for what America stands for. Be an honor to have you fly with us." I'm like, (dork voice) "Be an honor to fly with 'ya." He goes, "Well, we gotta get you clearance from the Pentagon."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

I go, "Well, you're screwed."
15 Degrees Off Cool (2007)
15° Off Cool (2007)

Life, Flying

“All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Asia, Act II, sc. v, l. 39
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love, God, Feeling, Light

“For the image possesses qualities which, under certain circumstances, can make it much more interesting than the object which inspired it. The portrait of a commonplace person can astound us with an air of distinction, reminding us that the best portrait is that which resembles the painter, not the model.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Personality

“The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Tree By Tolkien (1974), p. 32

Life, Happiness, Reality

“• The use of the Special Vehicle Pollution Control Fund under DOTC-OSEC, particularly the amount of P2.532 billion for air pollution control of LTO as well as the repair, rehabilitation and maintenance of the Metro Rail Transit which is considered as a pollution-free transportation system;”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

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

“Trapped in the blood, athirst for air,
Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God
Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion
Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
and walk them everywhere
Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

God, Christ

“Aside from the wisdom of going to war as Bush wants, I am troubled by who pays for his capricious adventure into world domination. The administration admits to a cost of around $200 billion! Now, wealthy individuals won't pay. They've got big tax cuts already. Corporations won't pay. They'll cook the books and move overseas and then send their contributions to the Republicans. Rich kids won't pay. Their daddies will get them deferments as Big George did for George W. Well then, who will pay? School kids will pay. There'll be no money to keep them from being left behind -- way behind. Seniors will pay. They'll pay big time as the Republicans privatize Social Security and rob the Trust Fund to pay for the capricious war. Medicare will be curtailed and drugs will be more unaffordable. And there won't be any money for a drug benefit because Bush will spend it all on the war. Working folks will pay through loss of job security and bargaining rights. Our grandchildren will pay through the degradation of our air and water quality. And the entire nation will pay as Bush continues to destroy civil rights, women's rights and religious freedom in a rush to phony patriotism and to courting the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.”

Pete Stark (1931–2020) American politician

Statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, October 8, 2002, in opposition to the resolution authorizing military force against Iraq

Wisdom, Women, Money, War

“Pure air and water, cleanliness, a proper diet, purity of life, and a firm trust in God are remedies for the want of which thousands are dying; yet these remedies are going out of date because their skillful use requires work that the people do not appreciate.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Book II, Ch. 29, p. 287
Selected Messages (1958 - 1980)

Life, God, People, Water

“You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

British Union Quarterly, 1937.

Business, Effort, Personality

“I will say to you and to the colored race that men who bore arms and followed the flag of the Confederacy are, with very few exceptions, your friends. I have an opportunity of saying what I have always felt - that I am your friend, for my interests are your interests, and your interests are my interests. We were born on the same soil, breathe the same air, and live in the same land. Why, then, can we not live as brothers? I will say that when the war broke out I felt it my duty to stand by my people. When the time came I did the best I could, and I don't believe I flickered. I came here with the jeers of some white people, who think that I am doing wrong. I believe that I can exert some influence, and do much to assist the people in strengthening fraternal relations, and shall do all in my power to bring about peace. It has always been my motto to elevate every man- to depress none.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) Confederate Army general

1870s, Speech before the Pole-Bearers Association (1875)

Men, War, People, Peace

“On board was a crew of seven: Colonel Rick Husband; Lt. Colonel Michael Anderson; Commander Laurel Clark; Captain David Brown; Commander William McCool; Dr. Kalpana Chawla; and Ilan Ramon, a Colonel in the Israeli Air Force. These men and women assumed great risk in the service to all humanity.
In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket, and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the Earth. These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.
All Americans today are thinking, as well, of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You're not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.
The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.
In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.
The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.
May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.”

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

2000s, 2003, Remarks after Columbia space shuttle disaster (February 2003)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Then come the clamour and the blare,
And shouts and clarions rend the air.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book II, p. 52

“His love was like the liberal air,—
Embracing all, to cheer and bless;
And every grief that mortals share
Found pity in his tenderness.”

William Winter (1836–1917) American writer

I. H. Bromley, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is with no ordinary feelings, I assure you, that I rise on this occasion to thank you for the very flattering manner in which you have received the last toast, and for the good wishes expressed therein. I cannot look around me, and see this vast assemblage of my friends and workpeople, without being moved. I feel gratified at this day's proceedings; I also feel greatly honoured by the presence of the nobleman at my side. I am more than all delighted at the presence of this vast assemblage of my workpeople. Perhaps it may be permitted me to remark that ten or twelve years ago I was looking forward to this day (on which I complete my his fiftieth year) as the period when I hoped to retire from business and enjoy myself in agricultural pursuits, which would be quite congenial to my mind and inclination. As the time drew near, looking at my large family (five of them being sons) I reversed that decision, and resolved to proceed a little longer and remain at the head of the firm. Having thus determined, I at once made up my mind to leave Bradford. I did not like to be a party to increasing that already overcrowded borough, but I looked around for a site suitable for a large manufacturing establishment, and I fixed upon this, as offering every capability for a first rate manufacturing and commercial establishment. It is also, from the beauty of its situation, and the salubrity of the air, a most desirable place for the erection of dwellings. Far be it from me to do anything to pollute the air or the water of the district. I shall do my utmost to avoid these evils, and I have no doubt of being successful. I hope to draw around me a population that will enjoy the beauties of this neighbourhood—a population of well paid, contented, happy operatives. I have given instructions to my architects (who are competent to carry them out) that nothing shall be spared to render the dwellings of the operatives a pattern to the country, and if my life is spared by Divine Providence, I hope to see satisfaction, contentment, and happiness around me.”

Titus Salt (1803–1876) English industrialist and philanthropist

The speech he made to the 3,500 guests (including his workers) at the banquet on 1853-09-20, which he held to celebrate both his fiftieth birthday and the opening of his new factory at Saltaire. [Inauguration of the works at Saltaire, The Bradford Observer, 1853-09-22, 8, http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&orientation=&scale=0.33&sort=DateAscend&docLevel=FASCIMILE&prodId=BNCN&tabID=T012&subjectParam=Locale%2528en%252C%252C%2529%253ALQE%253D%2528jn%252CNone%252C17%2529Bradford%2BObserver%253AAnd%253ALQE%253D%2528da%252CNone%252C10%252909%252F22%252F1853%2524&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchId=R2&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=11&qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3ALQE%3D%28jn%2CNone%2C17%29Bradford+Observer%3AAnd%3ALQE%3D%28da%2CNone%2C10%2909%2F22%2F1853%24&subjectAction=DISPLAY_SUBJECTS&retrieveFormat=MULTIPAGE_DOCUMENT&enlarge=&bucketSubId=&inPS=true&userGroupName=brad&hilite=y&docPage=article&nav=prev&sgCurrentPosition=0&docId=R3207957429, 2012-06-07 (subscription site)]
A slightly edited version (in the third person) appears in [Holroyd, Abraham, 1873, 2000, Saltaire and its Founder, Piroisms Press, ISBN 0-9538601-0-8, 14-15]

Life, Happiness, Family, Beauty

“To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

This appears in what could be either a paraphrase, a quote, or a re-translation of Pirsig in My Mercedes Is Not for Sale : From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou : An Auto-misadventure Across the Sahara (2006) by Jeroen van Bergeijk, in a 2008 translation books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=pIOcbS2Pl8kC&pg=PA26; Dutch original: books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=4zIzAgAAQBAJ&q=geoefende. Disputed

Water

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Death, People, World, Feeling

“Those who urge an alliance with Assad cite the example of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot who became an ally of Western democracies against Nazi Germany. I never liked historical comparisons and like this one even less. To start with, the Western democracies did not choose Stalin as an ally; he was thrusted upon them by the turn of events. When the Second World War started Stalin was an ally of Hitler thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union actively participated in the opening phase of the war by invading Poland from the east as the Germans came in from the West. Before that, Stalin had rendered Hitler a big service by eliminating thousands of Polish army officers in The Katyn massacre. Between September 1939 and June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was an objective ally of Hitler. Stalin switched sides when he had no choice if he wanted to save his skin. The situation in Syria today is different. There is no alliance of democracies which, thanks to Obama’s enigmatic behavior, lack any strategy in the Middle East. Unlike Stalin, Assad has not switched sides if only because there is no side to switch to. Assad regards ISIS as a tactical ally against other armed opposition groups. This is why Russia is now focusing its air strikes against non-ISIS armed groups opposed to Assad. More importantly, Assad has none of the things that Stalin had to offer the Allies. To start with Stalin could offer the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Soviet Union and capable of swallowing countless German divisions without belching. Field Marshal von Paulus’ one-million man invasion force was but a drop in the ocean of the Soviet landmass. In contrast, Assad has no territorial depth to offer. According to the Iranian General Hossein Hamadani, who was killed in Aleppo, Assad is in nominal control of around 20 percent of the country. Stalin also had an endless supply of cannon fodder, able to ship in millions from the depths of the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. In contrast, Assad has publicly declared he is running out of soldiers, relying on Hezbollah cannon fodder sent to him by Tehran. If Assad has managed to hang on to part of Syria, it is partly because he has an air force while his opponents do not. But even that advantage has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Four years of bombing defenseless villages and towns has not changed the balance of power in Assad’s favor. This may be why his Russian backers decided to come and do the bombing themselves. Before, the planes were Russian, the pilots Syrian. Now both planes and pilots are Russian, underlining Assad’s increasing irrelevance. Stalin’s other card, which Assad lacks, consisted of the USSR’s immense natural resources, especially the Azerbaijan oilfields which made sure the Soviet tanks could continue to roll without running out of petrol. Assad in contrast has lost control of Syria’s oilfields and is forced to buy supplies from ISIS or smugglers operating from Turkey. There are other differences between Stalin then and Assad now. Adulated as “the Father of the Nation” Stalin had the last word on all issues. Assad is not in that position. In fact, again according to the late Hamadani in his last interview published by Iranian media, what is left of the Syrian Ba’athist regime is run by a star chamber of shadowy characters who regard Assad as nothing but a figurehead.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: No, Bashar Al-Assad is no Joseph Stalin http://english.aawsat.com/2015/10/article55345413/opinion-no-bashar-al-assad-is-no-joseph-stalin, Ashraq Al-Awsat (16 Oct, 2015).

War, World, Law, Behavior

“A lot of people are not familiar with the fact that when Lincoln Lab grew out of the Project Whirlwind (which were just names to me at that point) for the purpose of looking into radar air defense -- processing radar signals with the computer and then using radio controls to defend with fighters and so forth -- Whirlwind had been originally designed as an aircraft simulator for individual airplanes.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 22.

People

“Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.”

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

2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)

Water

“From the top of the campanile, or Giotto's bell tower, in Florence, one can look out over the city in all directions, past the stone banking houses where the rich Medici lived, past the art galleries they patronized, past the magnificent cathedral and churches their money helped to build, and on to the Tuscan vineyards where the contadino works the soil as hard and efficiently as he probably ever did. The city below is busy with life. The university halls, the shops, the restaurants are crowded. The sound of Vespas, the "wasps" of the machine age, fills the air, but Florence is not today what it once was, the center in the 15th century of a great civilization, one of the most extraordinary the world has ever known. Why? What produced the Renaissance in Italy, of which Florence was the center? How did it happen that such a small population base could produce, in the short span of a few generations, great historical figures first in commerce and literature, then in architecture, sculpture and painting, and finally in science and music? Why subsequently did Northern Italy decline in importance both commercially and artistically until at the present time it is not particularly distinguished as compared with many other regions of the world? Certainly the people appear to be working as hard and energetically as ever. Was it just luck or a peculiar combination of circumstances? Historians have been fascinated by such questions ever since they began writing history, because the rise and fall of Florence or the whole of Northern Italy is by no means an isolated phenomenon.”

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

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 1; lead paragraph, about the problem

Life, Money, People, Age

“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back a wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik, whose untimely death was one of the greatest losses Cambridge has suffered in years. When he was engaged on a warjob for the Government, he came to get the help of an automatic analyzer with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before the home study was turned into a workshop, the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82.

Death, Error, Home, Idea

“There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming small Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say, Noew York, Geneva or Washington, which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the "temporary center of international peace". The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, aying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed "candles of peace" in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a "peace chain", although it was not large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base. Ohio's famous ethnic diversity was only on display. We did everything possible to emphasize the fact that in the American heartland people from every part of southeastern Europe lived together in peace, their competition restricted to softball games, church rivalries, and the occasional barroom fight. (…)”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 234

People, Family, Peace, History

“On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support -- from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense.”

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

2000s, 2003, Invasion of Iraq (March 2003)

War, Intelligence, Support, Help

“This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was almost terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent, the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms. Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men crave: equipoise.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 11 (p. 441)

Men, Nature, Passion

“Market-Garden was the biggest airborne operation of World War II, which is to say of all time. The D-day assault included 20,000 parachutists, some 1,500 transport planes, and about 500 gliders, and was protected by over 1,000 Allied fighters. In this D-day landing the 101st had over 400 C-47 transport aircraft and 70 gliders carrying nearly 7,000 officers and men. The remainder of the division arrived progressively by air and ship over the next six days. Our initial mission was to secure fifteen miles of highway extending from Eindhoven to Veghel and to seize and hold the bridges in the area for use of the spearhead units of the British Second Army advancing from the south. Although our objectives were scattered, I insisted on putting all the troops arriving the first day into a compact area between Zon and Veghel in order to have them within supporting distance of each other at the outset.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 87

Men, War, World, Support

“In the West our hand of peace has reached out into empty air. The responsibility there falls on our enemies. If we have to continue the struggle, then the hearts of the people will be where the flags of the country are flying, and we hope and pray for a German victory that will bring us the peace that has been denied to us…We thank Secretary of State von Kuehlmann and his collaborators for the tenacity and diplomatic skill with which they represented our German interests at the negotiations in Brest…I now come to the question of the strategic demarcation of frontiers, the possible allocation of Polish territories to Germany and Prussia. My political friends are of the opinion that in the question of the strategic safeguarding of frontiers decisive importance should be attached to the voice of the Supreme Command. From our own national point of view we are not at all interested in having Polish territory added to Germany in any way…It will be a matter for our military leaders to examine the question to what extent strategic security of our frontiers is a vital necessity to Germany. If so, we shall accept it because there is a national need for it.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Speech in the Reichstag (19 February 1918), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 149-150.
1910s

People, Peace, Hope, Way

“You must let your poems ride their luck
On the back of the sharp morning air
Touched with the fragrance of mint and thyme…
And everything else is LIT-RIT-CHER.”

Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) French poet

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…
Et tout le reste est littérature.
Source: "Art poétique", from Jadis et naguère (1884), Line 33, Sorrell p. 125

“Building castles in the air, 36 and making yourself a laughing-stock.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 31.

Quotes about air page 17

Quotes about air
page 17