Quotes about amount
page 8

“No amount of legislation can guarantee lasting peace and stability if the people it is supposed to serve are not spiritually and emotionally prepared to live by them (moral values) and where necessary defend them with their lives when it is breached.”

Taito Waradi Fijian businessman

18 May 2000
Comments on the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission

People, Peace

“They haven't seen anything like what's coming at us in 25, 30 years. Maybe ever. It's tremendously big and tremendously wet. Tremendous amounts of water.”

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

2010s, 2018, September Source: Trump Says Hurricane Florence Is 'Tremendously Big And Tremendously Wet' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqHwQhZC8jQ

Water

“It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life, God, Feeling

“There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets.”

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

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

Idea

“If we don't show ourselves the same amount of compassion we show others, we'll eventually come to resent the compassion we have for others. I think there's little enough compassion in the world right now, so we need to grow our own to compensate for that.”

Kate Bornstein (1948) American author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist

My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity (2013), p. 6

World, Thinking

“[The] amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 122.

Search, Intelligence, Problem

“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

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

Remark in 1923 after rejoining the Conservatives, having left them earlier to join the Liberals; reported in Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill (1966), p. 52–53. Other sources say this remark was made in 1924.
Early career years (1898–1929)

“Mr. President, your committee is essentially proposing Supplemental Appropriations amounting to P22,467,608,000 for Fiscal Year 2014, which shall be available for release and obligation within one (1) year after the date of effectivity of this act.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

“Income No. 3 must be deﬁned as the maximum amount of money which the individual can spend this week, and still be able to spend the same amount in real terms in each ensuing week.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Value and capital, (1939), p. 174

Money

“The messages of the prophets are essentially indictments of Israel for breach of covenant. They preserved some memory of the old traditions, but were not so naive as to think that the literal demands of the old law would be adequate in their own times. There is no condemnation of the stratification of society as such, rather a condemnation of the injustice and extortion which was done by the powerful. To take a specific example, the old law knew as security for a loan only the pledge (Exod. 22:26). In a simple economy, loans were evidently of an amount which would usually be adequately secured by giving to the creditor some property to hold until the loan was repaid. In case of default, the debtor's property simply reverted to the creditor. No other form of security is presupposed in the Covenant Code, and it is specifically forbidden that an Israelite be a "creditor" to one of his fellows. Already in the reign of Saul the situation had changed, Those who gathered about David as outlaws included those who had "creditors" (I Sam. 22:2), and who therefore had to flee. Under the old pledge system of security there would be no possible occasion for flight from the community in case of default. A totally different legal doctrine had come into practice whereby the person of the debtor was security for a loan. Upon default the creditor could seize him (or his family) as a slave, possibly without any legal action at all. The only alternative to slavery would have been flight. This doctrine is identical to that of Babylonian law, and no doubt of the Canaanites as well. It is in the law of the monarchy that Canaanite influence is doubtless to be posited, but it is a legal tradition in total contradiction to the customs and morality of early Israel. Amos protested violently against the way the legal doctrine was practiced, as did most of the prophets (Am. 2:6; Hos. 12:8-9; Mic. 2:1-2). The later lawcodes illustrate beautifully the way in which the early traditions, and the needs of business were brought into harmony. The older pledge system was simply inadequate for a commercial economy; and if the person of the debtor was to be protected, so also must the rights of the creditor to some security for his loan to be guaranteed. Therefore, Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code (Lv. 17-26) accept the doctrine of bodily liability, but place restrictions upon the powers of the creditor over the defaulting debtor. In the Holiness Code he is not to be treated as a slave, nor given the legal status of a slave, but rather to be as a hired laborer.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Law and Convenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1954)

Family, Law, Way, Communication

“I have been opposed to vivisection for many years; not just because it is unbelievably barbaric and unforgivably cruel but also because it is worthless, wasteful, inaccurate, uninformative and dangerously misleading. The cruelty is indefensible and an affront to human dignity, but in a desperate attempt to justify their evil practices many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are lying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year; they are also directly responsible for a massive amount of human suffering.”

Vernon Coleman (1946) British doctor

"Why Animal Experiments Must Stop" (1991), in animalliberationfront.com http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/Vivisection/waems.htm.

Death, Women, Men, Children

“I know this in no way alleviates the enormous amounts of pain and loss experienced by those who have suffered from the tsunami, but I hope it can make a difference.”

Sandra Bullock (1964) American actress and producer

In a brief statement (4 January 2005), upon donating one million dollars to the relief efforts of the American Red Cross http://www.redcross.org/ in response to the tsunamis at the end of 2004. This was her second million dollar gift to the American Red Cross; she had also donated a million dollars after the terrorists attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Pain, Hope, Way, Suffering

“A man should not love the moon.
An ax should not lose weight in his hand.
His garden should smell of rotting apples
And grow a fair amount of nettles.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Should, Should Not" (1961), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
King Popeil and Other Poems (1962)

Love

“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

“As far too many know, it is the small, loving acts that help an enormous amount in times of grief. My father is good with advice, as you might guess, but he keeps it short, and the takeaway is usually the same: to help us find our own way, and our own gifts. If you do what you love, hold nothing back, and never let fear of failure get in the way, then you've pretty much figured out the Trump formula.”

Tiffany Trump (1993) American Internet personality and daughter of Donald Trump and Marla Maples

Speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention (July 19, 2016)

Love, Fear, Way, Failure

“Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of it’s own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Angry Years (2007), p. 214

Question, Freedom

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

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

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

Education, Feeling, Exercises, Boy

“The Sultan summoned the most religiously disposed of his followers, and ordered them to attack the enemy immediately. Many infidels were consequently slain or taken prisoners in this sudden attack, and the Musulmans paid no regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels and worshippers of the sun and fire. The friends of Allah searched the bodies of the slain for three whole days, in order to obtain booty… The booty amounted in gold and silver, rubies and pearls, nearly to three thousand thousand dirhams, and the number of prisoners may be conceived from the fact, that each was sold for from two to ten dirhams. These were afterwards taken to Ghazna, and merchants came from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Mawarau-n nahr, Irak and Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were commingled in one common slavery.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Siraswa, town near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 49-50
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

Search, Distant, Sun, Country

“The central idea of quantum theory is that energy, like matter, is not continuous but it exists only in discrete packets. Discreteness of matter and charge on the microscopic scale seems entirely reasonable and familiar to us, based on the modern picture of atomic structure. But, the idea that energy also exists only in discrete chunks is contrary to our experience of the macroscopic world. The motions of a soccer ball rolling up and down the sides of a gully involve arbitrary amounts of kinetic and potential energy; nothing in ordinary human experience suggests that the energy of a system should change abruptly by “jumps.” Understanding quantum mechanics requires that we develop a new kind of physical intuition, based on the results of experiments that are impossible to understand using classical mechanics. These results are completely divorced from ordinary human experience in the macroscopic world around us, and our physical intuition from the macroscopic world cannot be transferred to the quantum domain. We must resist the urge to interpret these quantum results in terms of ordinary experience.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 4 : Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

World, Idea, Understanding, Change

“People sometimes forget that there are vegetables and vegetables. There are vegetables that have not so much nutriment in them; but there are others – all the farinaceous foods such as wheat and barley – which contain a greater amount of nutriment than beef or any other animal meat.”

Francis William Newman

Essays on Diet (1883); quoted in Prof. Francis William Newman http://www.ivu.org/history/europe19b/newman.html at the International Vegetarian Union website.

People, Food, Animals, Forgetting

“There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

Introduction; Republished in: " The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris https://books.google.nl/books?id=a0oEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA95," LIFE, Vol. 63, Nr. 25 (22 Dec. 1967), p. 95 The Naked Ape (1967)

Motivation, Time, Success

“The second point which must be part of the national goal, is caste less society. The constitution very clearly differentiates between Schedule Castes and Backward Classes. Why did out our Constitution makers make this distinction? They had something in their mind. Why have we lost that distinction today? I agree with you that reality is that caste accounts for a tremendous amount in this country. I do not disagree with that. But what is our goal? Is our goal a castless society? If out goal, is a casteless society, surely every step that we take must be towards that objective.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In Parliamemt in 1992, p. 31
Quote, Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi

Reality, Parting, Country

“Working on GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN was easier for me. The Godzilla costume that was built for the movie was made to fit me, whereas the one that had been built for GODZILLA - KING OF THE MONSTERS had not been made to fit me. The most difficult aspect of working on GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN for me was shooting the ending. I had to stand in the middle of the set while a large amount of crushed ice came tumbling down on me.”

Haruo Nakajima (1929–2017) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Haruo Nakajima Interview" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/nakajima.htm, Kaiju Conversations (March 1995)

“I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it. And there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance I keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Quote of de Kooning, in: Modern Artists in America, First Series, R. Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and B. Karpel eds., 1952 p. 12.
1950's

Time

“Living a plant based life isn’t just about your food choices nor is it a “diet”; it is about living a healthy life while causing the least amount of harm to animals and our environment. You need to find your reasons for choosing this lifestyle and remember them if and when you think you might stray. Once you learn the real affects animal products have on your health and the environment, it will be an easy choice.”

Jayde Nicole (1986) Canadian model, Playboy's Playmate of the Month January 2007 and Playmate of the Year 2008

"Starting Your Plant Based Lifestyle", in her official website JaydeNicole.com (30 November 2017) https://jaydenicole.com/blog-1/2017/11/30/starting-your-plant-based-lifestyle.

Life, Health, Food, Thinking

“The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is "the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.””

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Life

“One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

J.D. Bernal (1937) "Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science" in: Science and Society, Volume II, No. 1, Winter 1937; Online ( here http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/dsams.htm) on Marxists Internet Archive (2002).

Question, Thinking, Science

“This country has been so rich in human and material resources that it is only recently that the importance of waste elimination has come to be realized. The material element received the first consideration, and in the comparatively few years during which the subject has received attention, an enormous amount has been done to conserve natural resources, to economize in the use.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: "Motion Study as an Increase of National Wealth," 1915, p. 96

Nature, Country

“It has been observed here this morning that we are called fanatics. Bless me! That is nothing. Who has not been called a fanatic who has discovered anything new in philosophy or science? We have all read of Galileo the astronomer who, contrary to the system of astronomy that had been received for ages before his day, taught that the sun, and not the earth, was the centre of our planetary system? For this the learned astronomer was called "fanatic," and subjected to persecution and imprisonment of the most rigorous character. So it has been with others who have discovered and explained new truths in science and philosophy which have been in opposition to long-established theories; and the opposition they have encountered has endured until the truth of their discoveries has been demonstrated by time. The term "fanatic" is not applied to professors of religion only…I will tell you who the real fanatics are: they are they who adopt false principles and ideas as facts, and try to establish a superstructure upon a false foundation. They are the fanatics; and however ardent and zealous they may be, they may reason or argue on false premises till doomsday, and the result will be false. If our religion is of this character we want to know it; we would like to find a philosopher who can prove it to us. We are called ignorant; so we are: but what of it? Are not all ignorant? I rather think so. Who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines of an evening, called the moon? When we view its face we may see what is termed "the man in the moon," and what some philosophers declare are the shadows of mountains. But these sayings are very vague, and amount to nothing; and when you inquire about the inhabitants of that sphere you find that the most learned are as ignorant in regard to them as the most ignorant of their fellows. So it is with regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain. It was made to give light to those who dwell upon it, and to other planets; and so will this earth when it is celestialized. Every planet in its first rude, organic state receives not the glory of God upon it, but is opaque; but when celestialized, every planet that God brings into existence is a body of light, but not till then. Christ is the light of this planet. God gives light to our eyes.”

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

Journal of Discourses, 13:271 (July 24, 1870)
1870s

Life, God, Truth, Age

“Corporate inversion, they're leaving the United States, we have almost $5 trillion sitting out there, where they can't get the money back, they can't bring it in because there's no mechanism to bring it back in and the tax is so high. I'm going to bring tremendous amounts of money, tremendous amounts of jobs, tremendous numbers of companies, and yes the tax is going to be cut from the highest tax nation anywhere in the world to a fairly low tax. Not the lowest in the world, but to a fairly low tax.”

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

2010s, 2016, June

Money, World

“Those who always take the same paths, usually see the same objects; it is rare that upon following different routes, one won't discover new topics worthy of our most serious attention. Similarly, various attempts give us a greater amount of knowledge. By trying different keys, we can hope to finally find some that open secure paths, short and easy, leading to the wealth of physics.”

Pierre Polinière (1671–1734) French physicist

Ceux qui passent toujours par les mêmes chemins, voyent ordinairement toujours les mêmes objets; il est rare qu'à force de suivre différentes routes, on ne découvre de nouveaux sujets dignes de nos attentions les plus sérieuses. De même les différentes tentatives nous font avoir un plus grand nombre de connaissances. En essayant donc différentes clefs, on peut espérer d'en rencontrer enfin qui nous ouvriront les passages assurés, courts et faciles pour arriver aux richesses de la Physique.
[Pierre Polinière, Expériences de physique, Charles Moette, 1728, http://books.google.com/books?id=phE5AAAAcAAJ&pg=PR7#v=onepage&q=&f=false, vii]

Hope, Knowledge, Wealth

“In fact, in the plantation areas conditions amounting to slavery were re‑established by the planters with the acquiescence of the Government. Some idea of the misery to which the population of these areas was reduced by this system of merciless exploitation in the interests of British capital may be gained from the Bengal Indigo Commission's Report and from some of the literature of the period. Nil Darpan or the Mirror of Indigo, a Bengali drama, created a sensation by throwing a little light on this dark corner of Britain's action in India, and the reaction in official circles was so great that a European missionary, Mr Long, who translated and published it in English, was fined and imprisoned. During the whole of this period, in fact till the rise of nationalism after the Great War, conditions in plantations were of a kind which showed the worst features of European relations with Asia.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

War, Literature, Idea, Light

“I started looking into nutrition and alternative medicine because I obviously didn’t want to take any drugs or anything like that. I actually found out that what I was eating could actually affect the way I felt. … You can train as hard as you want but if you’re not training the right thing, it won’t help you out. Half of that is doing your homework at home. If you work your bones off in the gym and then you go home and don’t get a good amount of sleep and don’t eat good, you won’t get good results. … One of the reasons why I love the martial arts so much is because of the discipline. It makes me do things I should be doing anyway, like eating right and not partying.”

Luke Cummo (1980) American mixed martial artist

"TUF 2 welterweight finalist Luke Cummo" https://www.mmaweekly.com/tuf-2-welterweight-finalist-luke-cummo, interview with MMAWeekly.com (November 2, 2005).

Love, Art, Way, Home

“Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. … when nonvegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 6: Speciesism Today

Money, People, Support, Problem

“To physicists such as myself, the huge amount of invisible dark matter needed to make Einstein's theory fit the astrophysical data is reason enough for exploring modified gravity theories.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 9, Other Alternative Gravity Theories, p. 143

“The most successful behaviour-liars are those who, instead of consciously concentrating on modifying specific signals, think themselves into the basic mood they wish to convey and then let the small details take care of themselves. This method is frequently used with great success by professional liars, such as actors and actresses. Their entire working lives are spent performing behavioural lies, a process which can sometimes be extremely damaging to their private lives. Politicians and diplomats are also required to perform an undue amount of behavioural lying, but unlike the actors they are not socially 'licensed to lie', and the resultant guilt feelings tend to interfere with their performances. Also, unlike the actors, they do not undergo prolonged training courses.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2000), p. 116
The Naked Ape (1967)

Lie, Feeling, Lying, Mood

“How nauseating in view of all this to see Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, reduce this to a game of scrabble... to a matter of finding the right words. We now know that Fianna Fáil ministers see nothing wrong with a Minister for Finance taking large amounts of money for personal use from business interests as long as there is no proof that any specific favours were done.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

Irish Independent http://www.independent.ie/national-news/higgins-lashes-nauseating-backtrack-by-pds-71587.html

Money, Game, Business, Personality

“The affair simply amounted to this, that they were to eat their dinner uncomfortably in a field instead of comfortably in the dining room.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

On a picnic, in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Ch. 78

“They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes, 'more than the pen can enumerate'… In short, the Muhammadan army brought the country to utter ruin, and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants, and plundered the cities, and captured their offspring, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was one called Somnat, fixed upon stone, polished like a mirror of charming shape and admirable workmanship' Its head was adorned with a crown set with gold and rubies and pearls and other precious stones' and a necklace of large shining pearls, like the belt of Orion, depended from the shoulder towards the side of the body….
'The Muhammadan soldiers plundered all these jewels and rapidly set themselves to demolish the idol. The surviving infidels were deeply affected with grief, and they engaged 'to pay a thousand pieces of gold' as ransom for the idol, but they were indignantly rejected, and the idol was destroyed, and 'its limbs, which were anointed with ambergris and perfumed, were cut off. The fragments were conveyed to Delhi, and the entrance of the Jami' Masjid was paved with them, that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory.' Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds. Amen! After some time, among the ruins of the temples, a most beautiful jasper-coloured stone was discovered, on which one of the merchants had designed some beautiful figures of fighting men and other ornamental figures of globes, lamps, etc., and on the margin of it were sculptured verses from the Kurdn. This stone was sent as an offering to the shrine of the pole of saints… At that time they were building a lofty octagonal dome to the tomb. The stone was placed at the right of the entrance. "At this time, that is, in the year 707 h. (1307 a. d.), 'Alau-d din is the acknowledged Sultan of this country. On all its borders there are infidels, whom it is his duty to attack in the prosecution of a holy war, and return laden with countless booty."”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Somnath. Abdu’llah ibn Fazlu’llah of Shiraz (Wassaf) : Tarikh-i-Wassaf (Tazjiyatu’l Amsar Wa Tajriyatu’l Ãsar), in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 43-44. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men, God, War, Children

“The gravitational repulsion created by this small patch of repulsive gravity material would be, then, the driving force of the Big Bang and it would cause the region to undergo exponential expansion… there is a certain doubling time, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again, and if you wait the same amount of time it doubles again… and it's because these doublings build up so dramatically, it doesn't take very much time to build the whole universe. In about 100 doublings this tiny patch of 10-28 cm can become large enough, not to be the universe, but to be a small marble-sized region which will then ultimately become the observed universe, as it continues to coast outward after inflation ends.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I
The Early Universe (2012)

Universe, Time, Waiting

“The number of one's possible fantasies is inversely proportional to the amount of one's liquid assets. For him who has everything dreams are no longer possible.”

Stanisław Lem book Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth (1987), tr. Elinor Ford (1994) from Pokój na Ziemi, Ch. 4

Dreams

“Algebra in the Renaissance period received its first serious consideration in Pacioli's Sūma (1494)… which characterized in a careless way the knowledge… thus far accumulated. By the aid of the crude symbolism then in use it gave a considerable amount of work in equations.
The noteworthy work… and the first to be devoted entirely to the subject, was Rudolff's Coss (1525). This work made no decided advance in the theory, but it improved the symbolism for radicals and made the science better known in Germany. Stiffel's edition of this work (1553-1554) gave the subject still more prominence.
The first epoch-making algebra to appear in print was the Ars Magna of Cardan (1545). The next great work… to appear in print was the General Trattato of Tartaglia…”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p. 384; Ch. 6: Algebra

Way, Knowledge, Appearance, Science

“Unless we act to end the slaughter of civilians in Syria by President Assad, Isis will continue to find a steady stream of recruits from the Syrian Sunni population driven to desperation and radicalisation. In this context no amount of military action against Isis will be able to eradicate them. … As long as these attacks persist these forces will not be able to focus – as many want to – on freeing their country from the cancer of Isis.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Country

“Taxes. Everyone desires a reduction of taxes, and there is a great preponderance of sentiment in favor of taxation reform. When I approved the present tax law, I stated publicly that I did so in spite of certain provisions which I believed unwise and harmful. One of the most glaring of these was the making public of the amounts assessed against different income-tax payers. Although that damage has now been done, I believe its continuation to be detrimental To the public welfare and bound to decrease public revenues, so that it ought to be repealed.”

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

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

Law

“We had been talking about marriage for a while so it wasn't a massively big surprise. I took her up somewhere nice in Kenya and I proposed. … I'd been planning it for a while but as any guy out there will know it takes a certain amount of motivation to get yourself going. I was planning it and then it just felt really right out in Africa. It was beautiful at the time. I had done a little bit of planning to show my romantic side.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

First post-engagement interview (2010)

Marriage, Beauty, Guy, Motivation

“Is it true that the North hates slavery? My next proposition is that in the past the North has invariably exerted against slavery, all the power which it had at the time. The question merely was what was the amount of power it had to exert against it. They abolished slavery in that magnificent empire which you presented to the North; they abolished slavery in every Northern State, one after another; they abolished slavery in all the territory above the line of 36 30, which comprised about one million square miles. They have endeavored to put the Wilmot Proviso upon all the other territories of the Union, and they succeeded in putting it upon the territories of Oregon and Washington. They have taken from slavery all the conquests of the Mexican war, and appropriated it all to anti-slavery purposes; and if one of our fugitives escapes into the territories, they do all they can to make a free man of him; they maltreat his pursuers, and sometimes murder them. They make raids into your territory with a view to raise insurrection, with a view to destroy and murder indiscriminately all classes, ages and sexes, and when the base perpetrators are caught and brought to punishment, condign punishment, half the north go into mourning. If some of the perpetrators escape, they are shielded by the authorities of these Northern States-not by an irresponsible mob, but, by the regularly organized authorities of the States.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Hate, War, Age, Sex

“The first problem I propose to tackle is this: how much of its income should a nation save? To answer this a simple rule is obtained valid under conditions of surprising generality; the rule, which will be further elucidated later, runs as follows.
The rate of saving multiplied by the marginal utility of money should always be equal to the amount by which the total net rate of enjoyment of utility falls short of the maximum possible rate of enjoyment.”

Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930) British mathematician, philosopher

"A Mathematical Theory of Saving", The Economic Journal, Vol. 38, No. 152 (Dec., 1928)

Money, Problem

“The curriculum of the girl’s school should be vernacular, needle work and sanitation…teaching women amounted to loss of nationality… English education had [a] de-womanising impact on women by denying them a happy worldly life…hurt the sentiments of the Hindus…teaching Hindu women to read English would ruin their precious traditional virtues and would make them immoral and subordinate.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

His opposition to teaching women in English.[Pati, Biswamoy, Bal Gangadhar Tilak: Popular Readings, http://books.google.com/books?id=U4TWzCkjrm4C, 2011, Primus Books, 978-93-80607-18-4, 16]

Life, Women, Happiness, Education

“Your ability to deal w/surprise is in inverse relation to the amount of your backlog of "stuff."”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

4 September 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/22924717953 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life, Truth, Art, Spring

“It is a fundamental and deplorable error by which we in this country have confused education with the acquisition of knowledge…. Amount of knowledge is in itself not of first importance, but to make the best use of what we know. The easy assumption of our educationists that we have only to supply the mind with a smattering of facts in each department of knowledge and the mind can be trusted to develop itself and take its own suitable road is contrary to science, contrary to human experience…. Much as we have lost as a nation, we have always preserved our intellectual alertness, quickness and originality; but even this last gift is threatened by our University system, and if it goes, it will be the beginning of irretrievable degradation and final extinction.”

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

Early 1900s, Centenary Edition of Sri Aurobindo's works (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972) 3.125-127
India's Rebirth

Education, Error, Knowledge, Universe

“If we turn back to the time when the first compulsory education act was passed, we find that the capitalists of England fought these acts with all their might, but that they soon withdrew their opposition and supported them. For the employers recognised that though the children would know a little more, the amount could be so restricted that the result would only be to make them better wage slaves, knowing no more of freedom than what we have known and experienced of it.”

William Earsman (1884–1965) Australian left-wing activist

The Proletariat and Education: The Necessity for Labor Colleges

Children, Education, Support, Freedom

“But that was only a small part of the reason why I quit. The main reason was the disturbing new player-base. The game got bigger with every new expansion that was released, and as it got bigger, it brought in a vast amount of new players. I noticed that more and more “normal” people who had active and pleasurable social lives were starting to play the game, as the new changes catered to such a crowd. WoW no longer became a sanctuary where I could hide from the evils of the world, because the evils of the world had now followed me there. I saw people bragging online about their sexual experiences with girls… and they used the term “virgin” as an insult to people who were more immersed in the game than them. The insult stung, because it was true. Us virgins did tend to get more immersed in such things, because our real lives were lacking. I couldn’t stand to play WoW knowing that my enemies, the people I hate and envy so much for having sexual lives, were now playing the same game as me. There was no point anymore. My best friend Bradley, betrayed me by leaving me and going to some ginger named William. One day, I will get my revenge. I realized what a terrible mistake I made to turn my back on the world again. The world is brutal, and I need to fight for my place in it. My life was at a crucial turning point, and I couldn’t waste any more precious time.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Thoughts at 19, Quitting World of Warcraft

Life, Hate, People, Pleasure

“Clearly, I would be lying if I said I do not have a bank account in Europe; I do. I would be lying if I said I do not have considerable money in my account; I do. Yes, I do have a fair amount of money. However, I would estimate it to total less than 50 million dollars. What is that for twenty-two years as head of state in such a big country?”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Mobutu to congressman Mervyn Dymally, 1988. Elliot and Dymally, p. 25

Money, Lying, Country

“We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

http://kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/02/01/1309_type82915_117609.shtml 2006- 2010

People, Problem, Country

“Consider our development aid record. Last year, the nations of the world spent over $1 trillion on armaments. But we contributed less than 10 per cent of that amount — a mere $80 billion — as official development assistance to the developing parts of the world, where 850 million people suffer from hunger.”

Mohamed ElBaradei (1942) Egyptian law scholar and diplomat, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Nobel …

Nobel lecture (2005)

Hunger, People, World, Suffering

“One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Reading this for the first time I was puzzled and continued to be throughout much of the essay, since despite the work’s persuasive logic and eloquence there was a lot that eluded me, and I always came back to grapple vainly with the initial hypothesis, unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place. A later short novel, The Fall, I admired with reservations; the guilt and self-condemnation of the lawyer-narrator, gloomily spinning out his monologue in an Amsterdam bar, seemed a touch clamorous and excessive, but at the time of my reading I was unable to perceive that the lawyer was behaving very much like a man in the throes of clinical depression. Such was my innocence of the very existence of this disease.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), II

Life, Disease, Question, Problem

“The question is as follows: if the Arabs settle among us and make enough children to become a majority, will Israel continue to be a Jewish state? Do we have to accept that the Arab majority will decide? Obviously, nobody in Israel can accept this. Because to accept this would amount to being anti-Zionist!”

Meir Kahane (1932–1990) American/Israeli political activist and rabbi

G-d's Law: an Interview with Rabbi Meir Kahane https://web.archive.org/web/20090219141224/http://kahane.org/meir/interview.htm

Children, Question

“Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo—it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 75

Speed

“I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" A belated reply from Francis Spufford, who defends his faith http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/a-belated-reply-from-francis-spufford-who-defends-his-faith/" October 2, 2012

Truth, Disease, Music, Question

“Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U. S. is now 45 percent socialist.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Article "We Have Socialism, Q.E.D." http://www.sangam.org/taraki/articles/2006/11-25_Friedman_MGR.php?uid=2075 in The New York Times (31 December 1989)

“From a careful determination of the amount of solar heat that which would fall per minute on an area of one square centimetre placed perpendicular to the radiation as it falls on Earth's surface and from a knowledge of the Earth's distance, we deduce that each square centimetre of the solar surface radiates on the average of about the rate of a nine horse-power engine.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

"Why the Sun Shines" (18 July 1957)

Knowledge, Horse

“[In my family] we read books on the subject—a lot of them—and came to the conclusion that, because of the number and amounts of hormones now used to fatten animals, meat isn't healthy. … [Vegetarianism] helped my cycling some, but the diet is more important over the long run and later in life.”

Wayne Stetina (1953) American cyclist

"They Hunger for Success" https://www.si.com/vault/1977/02/28/560840/they-hunger-for-success, interview with Sports Illustrated (February 28, 1977).

Life, Books, Family, Reading

“No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one.”

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (1883–1950) senior officer of the British Army

I – The Good General.
"Generals and Generalship" (1939)

Nature, Study, Learning

“In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. […] However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune […].”

Truman Capote book In Cold Blood

Part 4
In Cold Blood (1965)

Time

“I have used this [vegan] diet since 2008. I first tried it when I was preparing for my challenge of WBC super lightweight champion Junior Wittier -- my first world title fight -- and after seeing the results it gave me I have tried to stay as loyal to it as possible. It helps keep my body clean and it provides me with a tremendous amount of energy due to my body spending less energy breaking down foods like meats. This is a big key factor in my fitness. … The energy is always there. I feel so alive. My senses and reflexes are so acute. … With a vegan diet you always have energy, so much that sometimes I have trouble sleeping at night. You feel light. You don't feel bulky or heavy. This would benefit any athlete in any sport.”

Timothy Bradley (1983) American boxer

"Timothy Bradley Explains His Vegan Diet, The Benefits", in BoxingScene.com (30 September 2013) http://www.boxingscene.com/timothy-bradley-explains-his-vegan-diet-benefits--70134

World, Food, Feeling, Sense

“It would not be too much to say that if all drinking of fermented liquors could be done away, crime of every kind would fall to a fourth of its present amount, and the whole tone of moral feeling in the lower order might be indefinitely raised.”

Charles Buxton (1823–1871) English brewer, philanthropist, writer and politician

Reported to be in his pamphlet How to Stop Drunkenness in Grappling with the Monster http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13509/13509.txt by T. S. Arthur Attributed

Feeling, Drink

“The basis of the [scientific] method is a belief in natural uniformity – if two events are regularly connected in our observations we can conclude that they obey a universal law. But this is not a conclusion we reach by observation. No amount of evidence can demonstrate the existence of laws of nature, since new experience can always overturn them. Science rests on the belief that the future will be like the past; but that belief is rationally groundless. This is not a new line of thinking. David Hume argued that the expectation that the future will be like the past, which is the basis of induction, is a matter of habit. Hume wanted to show that since miracles transgress known laws of nature it was unreasonable to accept reports of them, in the Bible or anywhere else. But his arguments against induction showed that the laws of nature could not in fact be known, so events that seemed impossible could happen at any time. The upshot was that faith in miracles returned by the back door of sceptical doubt.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (p. 68)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Faith, Law, Nature, Thinking

“Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. […] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

Death

“Daddy, daddy, daddy,
All I want is you.
You can have me, baby —
but my lovin’ days is through.
A certain amount
of impotence
in a dream deferred.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"Same in Blues"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

Dreams, Baby

“My experience indicates that most managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload. They must spend a great deal of time separating the relevant documents. For example, I have found that I receive an average of 43 hours of unsolicited reading material each week. The solicited material is usually half again this amount.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Management misinformation systems, 1967, p. 148.

Suffering, Time, Reading

“It is far better to eat moderate amounts of food in all of the food ranges, and to consume smaller portions more often. I realize that your social mores also dictate your eating habits - but four light meals a day will overall serve you very well, and give the body a more steady, regulated nourishment.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 316

Food, Light

“The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious amounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into the dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.
Perhaps, I thought, Christian spirituality really was the difference between illusion and magic.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Children, Sex

“Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 4, Counting Bits, The scientific measure of information, p. 28

Way, Question

“The annual payment [of German reparations] will very likely spread over some thirty years at least. It would therefore be fair and logical for the military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads to last for the same length of time…There is, moreover, something quite unusual in the idea of renouncing a security before the amount secured has been completely paid…After the war of 1870, the Germans occupied various French provinces until they received the last centime of the indemnity imposed on France…It is argued that even when the occupation ceased, it could be resumed in the event of non-payment. This option to renew occupation may look tempting to-day on paper. But its bristling with drawbacks and risk. Let us imagine ourselves sixteen or seventeen years ahead. Germany has paid regularly for fifteen years. We have evacuated the whole left bank of the Rhine. We have returned to our side of the political frontiers which afford no military security. Imagine Germany again prey to Imperialism or imagine that she simply breaks faith. She suspends payment and we are obliged to reoccupy. We give the necessary orders, but who will vouch for our being able to carry them out without difficulty?”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

Memorandum to Clemenceau (28 April 1919), quoted in David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties. Volume I (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 428.

War, Faith, Imagination, Idea

“I had offers from Dodgers, Giants and Braves. Braves offer same amount as Dodgers but I have many friends on Brooklyn team. I feel more at home there and I sign.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "The Scoreboard" by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Tuesday, May 10, 1955), p. 31
Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>

Feeling, Home

“Further, it should be clear that meat in itself as protein is not much superior to eggs or nuts and could not alter the evolution of the brain – if this were so, this miracle food would have continued to enlarge humans’ brain size in succeeding years when much greater amounts of meat were consumed.”

Colin Spencer (1933) British writer

The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1996), p. 16 https://books.google.it/books?id=rIjZo-cvifAC&pg=PA16.

Food

“In point of material wealth and resources, we are greatly in advance of them. The taxable property of the Confederate States cannot be less than twenty-two hundred millions of dollars! This, I think I venture but little in saying, may be considered as five times more than the colonies possessed at the time they achieved their independence. Georgia, alone, possessed last year, according to the report of our comptroller-general, six hundred and seventy-two millions of taxable property. The debts of the seven confederate States sum up in the aggregate less than eighteen millions, while the existing debts of the other of the late United States sum up in the aggregate the enormous amount of one hundred and seventy-four millions of dollars. This is without taking into account the heavy city debts, corporation debts, and railroad debts, which press, and will continue to press, as a heavy incubus upon the resources of those States. These debts, added to others, make a sum total not much under five hundred millions of dollars. With such an area of territory as we have-with such an amount of population-with a climate and soil unsurpassed by any on the face of the earth-with such resources already at our command-with productions which control the commerce of the world-who can entertain any apprehensions as to our ability to succeed, whether others join us or not?”

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

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

World, Thinking, Time, Wealth

“Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science - The Endless Frontier (1945), Summary

War, Health, World, Peace

“With the massive amount of personal data on the Internet, Facebook nation has opened Pandora's box of total information awareness in the age of big data. Fortunately, Pandora's box released not only evil but also hope. … The hope is that good will trump evil.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

Age, Hope, Evil, Personality

“What must we do with these sciences in schools—I mean the elementary part of them? for… the amount which we can teach in a school to the ordinary kind of boys, that is the very great majority, is not much.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

School, Boy, Science, Parting

“I want to see all Americans have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then I want to see them educated to use such leisure for their own enjoyment and betterment, and the strengthening of the quality of their citizenship. We can go a long way in that direction by getting them out of doors and really interested in nature. We can make still further progress by engaging them in games and sports. Our country is a land of cultured men and women. It is a land of agriculture, of industries, of schools, and of places of religious worship. It is a land of varied climes and scenery, of mountain and plain, of lake and river. It is the American heritage. We must make it a land of vision, a land of work, of sincere striving for the good, but we must add to all these, in order to round out the full stature of the people, an ample effort to make it a land of wholesome enjoyment and perennial gladness.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Women, Men, People, Education

“Your pa had seven years at sea, mostly in foreign parts.
You’ve heard him talk. He’s got a way about him, a way with words. He can make the temple bells tinkle for you, and you can just hear them big old elephants shuff-shuffling along, the priests callin’ folks to prayer and the like.
Your pa learned a sight of things most folks never even hear of. I’ve seen scholars back off an’ look at your pa, amazed.
You take these Injuns, now. You look at the way they live and you’ll say they don’t amount to much, but what are they thinkin’? What do they know? What memories do they have? They want different things, boy, and they consider different things important. Many a thing we’d give anything to know, they just take for granted.
Some of these Injuns, maybe all of them, they’re in tune with something. I don’t know what. But some of them have lost touch with it, and others are losin’ touch. Goin’ the white folks’ way might seem the likely thing to do, but maybe they lose as much as they gain.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Lonesome Gods (1983), Ch. 11

Way, Boy, Learning, Memory

“A group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 158.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Way, Communication, Animals

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Tony Hayward (1957) British businessman

BP boss admits job on the line over Gulf oil spill http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/13/bp-boss-admits-mistakes-gulf-oil-spill.

Water

“Musharraf has bent over backwards, sir. Quite frankly, I would have bet my pension that Musharraf would not have done half of what he's done. He's done a tremendous amount for us.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
Hardball with Chris Matthews, November 16 2004
2000s

“I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 27

Music

“Worst damnfool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected Vice President of the United States. Should have stuck with my old chores as Speaker of the House. I gave up the second most important job in the Government for one that didn't amount to a hill of beans. I spent eight long years as Mr. Roosevelt's spare tire. I might still be Speaker if I didn't let them elect me Vice-President.”

John Nance Garner (1868–1967) American politician

Comment shortly after leaving office, on leaving his post as speaker of the United States House of Representative to become the Vice President, quoted by Frank X. Tolbert, "What is Cactus Jack Up to Now," Saturday Evening Post (November 2, 1963) and recounted in Alden Whitman's obituary of Garner in the New York Times (November 8, 1967).

Housing

“Some people say that we ought to audit the Fed. Here's what I do know. The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it's ridiculous. I don't know why people think we're gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don't know enough about it. There's no hidden secrets going on in the Federal Reserve to my knowledge.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

The Neal Boortz Show
2010-12-29
Radio, quoted in [Herman Cain: Federal Reserve Audit Unnecessary, 2011-10-10, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18jMzTWJ9A]

People, Secret, Knowledge, Thinking

“Labour freed up enormous amounts of money for third sector initiatives, which was magnificent. But it also became too statist. Charities became very reliant on state funding to pursue their agendas, so charities became distant from local communities. Despite all the funding, there was no transformation of the lives of excluded poor people. The greatest gift of the big society will be the renewal of the Labour Party. If it takes civil society and people power seriously, and listens to people who have a following in their own communities, it will find that it has reconnected with its own political traditions.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Third Sector, 6 June 2011 http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/interview-lord-glasman/infrastructure/article/1073529

Money, People, Communication, Distant

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Love, Life, Men, God

“It was not until my second year as a doctoral student that I began to understand that mathematics was an ever-expanding universe. My thesis advisor at Princeton was Emil Artin, one of the great algebraists of the century. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he offered me no advice in the selection of a thesis topic. I think it was a fluke that I got started at all. But once I did, a whole new world opened up, to which I would devote a vast amount of time and energy for over thirty years.”

O. Timothy O'Meara (1928–2018) American mathematician

[The Idea of a Catholic University: A Personal Perspective, Marquette Law Review, Winter 1995: Symposium on Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, 78, 2, 389–396, http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=mulr]

World, Mathematics, Understanding, Thinking

“Those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain, low religious activity, and negligible or absent killing, mutilating, or torturing of the enemy.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Pain

“The phrase "contempt of court" often misleads persons not lawyers, and causes them to misapprehend its meaning, and to suppose that a proceeding for contempt of court amounts to some process taken for the purpose of vindicating the personal dignity of the Judges, and protecting them from personal insults as individuals. Very often it happens that contempt is committed by a personal attack on a Judge or an insult offered to him; but as far as their dignity as individuals is concerned, it is of very subordinate importance compared with the vindication of the dignity of the Court itself; and there would be scarcely a case, I think, in which any Judge would consider that, as far as his personal dignity goes, it would be worth while to take any steps.”

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn (1813–1896) British judge

Skipworth's Case (1873), L. R. 9 Q. B. Ca. 232.

Thinking, Personality

“Rita: Will they sack you.
Frank: [lying flat on the floor] The sack? God no; that would involve making a decision. Pissed is all right. To get the sack, it'd have to be rape on a grand scale; and not just with students either. [Rita gets up and moves across to look at him] That would only amount to a slight misdemeanour. For dismissal it'd have to be nothing less than buggering the bursar.”

Willy Russell book Educating Rita

Pages 42-43.
Educating Rita (1980)

God, Lying, Decision

“Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but…
I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street
'Cause they can't make opinions meet about God,
I can't believe in you.”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Dear God".
Skylarking (1986)

God, People, Feeling, Tear

“I love the life of an actor because you spend brief amounts of time with other people and then you just leave. I need to be alone a lot, and I need the outdoors.”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

As quoted in The Los Angeles Times (30 January 1994)

Love, Life, People, Time

“The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.”

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

Speech at the Cambridge Union (March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 95-96.
1924

People, Imagination, Training

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.”

Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) French politician

Quoted in: William Sharp McKechnie (1896). The State & the Individual: An Introduction to Political Science, with Special Reference to Socialistic and Individualistic Theories https://archive.org/details/stateindividuali00mckeuoft. p. 77

Art

“As far as the Cluniacs and the Cistercians are concerned, what follows is a fair appraisal of the two orders. Give the Cluniacs today a tract of land covered with marvellous buildings, endow them with ample revenues and enrich the place with vast possessions: before you can turn round it will all be ruined and reduced to poverty. On the other hand, settle the Cistercians in some barren retreat which is hidden away in an overgrown forest: a year or two later you will find splendid churches there and fine monastic buildings, with a great amount of property and all the wealth you can imagine.”
De duobus tamen ordinibus istis, Cluniacensi scilicet et Cisterciensi, hoc compertum habeas. Locum aedificiis egregie constructum, redditibus amplis et possessionibus locupletatum, istis hodie tradas; inopem in brevi destructumque videbis. Illis e diverso eremum nudam, et hispidam silvam assignes: intra paucos postmodum annos, non solum ecclesias et aedes insignes, verum etiam possessionum copias, et opulentias multas ibidem invenies.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 1, chapter 3, pp. 105-6.
Itinerarium Cambriae (The Journey Through Wales) (1191)

Imagination, Wealth

Quotes about amount page 8

Quotes about amount
page 8