Quotes about anyone
page 28

“My discovery of the Life Energy is today widely known nearly all over the globe, in hundreds of institutions, whether acclaimed or cursed. It can no longer be stopped by anyone, no matter what happens to me.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Response to FDA complaint (1954)

Life

“[Before the prostate operation] I feel gay and calm, but have an open mind as to whether I shall get through or not[. ] I don't say this to anyone else, but I love you too much to say anything but the truth. I don't feel afraid of anything and it is your love that has made me be like this. I hope to come back to you and everything and be as before, and I will try my best to do so.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 311, to Robert J. Buckingham, 17 December 1935
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Love, Truth, Hope, Feeling

“On the Day of Resurrection when He Whom God will make manifest cometh unto you, invested with conclusive proofs, ye shall hold His Cause as being devoid of truth, whereas God hath apprised you in the Bayán that no similarity existeth between the Cause of Him Whom God will make manifest and the cause of others. How can anyone besides God reveal a verse such as to overwhelm all mankind? Say, great is God! Who else but Him Whom God will make manifest can spontaneously recite verses which proceed from His Lord — a feat that no mortal man can ever hope to accomplish?”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVIII, 3
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, Truth, Hope

“I expect better from Catholic bishops. They need to understand that Ukip and the Catholic Church have so much in common. I cannot think of anyone who is a bishop or a priest who would not have the same values for people as we do.”

Margot Parker (1943) UK politician

Margot Parker: ‘The bishops must meet with Ukip’ http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/10/08/margot-parker-the-bishops-must-meet-with-ukip/ (October 8, 2014)

People, Understanding, Thinking

“Dianetics is not in any way covered by legislation anywhere, for no law can prevent one man sitting down and telling another man his troubles, and if anyone wants a monopoly on dianetics, be assured that he wants it for reasons which have to do not with dianetics but with profit.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

1987 Edition, p. 226.
Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

Law, Way

“To put it very simply, anyone can become an American, but only a Chinese can be Chinese - and that places an additional and significant barrier in the way of any essentially national global hegemony.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Conclusion, p. 210.
The Grand Chessboard (1997)

Way

“I'll bet if I compare notes with Junie Allyson and Debbie Reynolds and anyone else who's had more than one marriage, the fact is that you fall in love and it's so wonderful to think about something other than yourself and whether the script's right for you and who's going to be your leading man, that you don't really ask yourself questions about the fellow. He's just wonderful looking and he dances well and you have a wonderful time and it's fun to go out, and all of a sudden you're in a lifelong marriage.”

Esther Williams (1921–2013) competitive American swimmer and actor

At Home With: Esther Williams; Swimming Upstream http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/02/garden/at-home-with-esther-williams-swimming-upstream.html (September. 2, 1999)

Love, Marriage, Question, Thinking

“I am a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt; it is more difficult silently to obey our own interior promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperaments and our gifts — if we have any. I do not say "neither God, nor Master," only in the end to substitute myself for the God I have excommunicated…"”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Rouault, Georges. "Climat pictural." La Renaissance. XX, no. 10-12. (1937)
Variant translation: Anybody can rebel. But to obey in silence, an inner calling to search lifelong without impatience for the means of expression adequate to us... that is much more difficult.
Quotes, 1930-1940

God, Sincerity

“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Source: Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fool by Randomness | A Review of Market Fools of Randomness Constants | The Traits They Shared
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Loyalty, Idea

“The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it! This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front. We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that π is a round number. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics? Obviously the authors of this book didn’t.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, People, Books, Bird

“Some… resistance also came from the belief that preserved historical writings could provide all anyone needed to know about the habits of past civilizations. …According to the archeologists, this site was supposed to have had an uninterrupted sequence of Israelite occupation… These archeologists "knew" that there had been a continual occupation of people practicing full-blown Jewish orthodoxy based on their interpretation of the preserved written records. …But, to the extreme surprise of the dig's staff… one-third of the bones from the floor of the synagogue were pig. Anathema! …directly beneath the floor of this synagogue… the first piece of bone I picked up was from the skull of a young human. Again, anathema! How could orthodox Jews build anything, much less a synagogue, over a human burial area? …no reports on the site including my analyses have ever seen the light of day.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

People, Light, Past

“I think it’s more difficult to be vegan than gay. I think people have a harder time accepting it; people feel more uncomfortable with a vegan at their dinner table than they do a lesbian. It’s confronting. It’s kind of suggesting that what someone else is doing is bad or wrong, and it hits them on a more personal level. … If somebody is setting there eating a steak watching you eat polenta, they’re thinking that you’re trying to preach to them or you’re trying to convert them in some way. Whereas with being gay, I don’t think anyone’s concerned that that’s the agenda. “Hey, Mom, you also have to be gay. I’m gay and so should you be!””

Portia de Rossi (1973) Australian-American actress

Certainly when I told her that I was vegan, it forced her to look at her habits. Interview for VegNews magazine, July/August 2011 issue. Quoted in VegetarianStar.com http://vegetarianstar.com/2011/07/07/portia-de-rossi-on-vegnews-julyaugust-2011-issue/.

People, Way, Feeling, Moms

“I've never killed anyone. I don't need to kill anyone. I think it. I have it here.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

[points to head]
NBC interview (1987)

Thinking

“I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity.”

Jessamyn West (1902–1984) American author

The Life I Really Lived, part 1 (1979)

Thinking, Appearance, Childhood, Happiness

“The most dangerous and at the same time most stupid explanation of fascism is the propaganda theory. In the first place, I have never been able to find anyone who could reconcile it with the fact that right up to the fascist victory—and in Italy beyond it—literally all means of propaganda were in the hands of uncompromising enemies of fascism. There was not one widely-read newspaper but poured ridicule on Hitler and Mussolini while the Nazi and the fascist press were unread and on the verge of bankruptcy. The radio in Germany, owned by the government, issued one anti-Nazi broadside after the other. More powerful than both, the established churches used all the enormous direct influence of the pulpit and the confessional to fight fascism and Nazism.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 7-8

Stupidity, Time, Reading, Victory

“If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it.”

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

Speech to the British and Foreign Bible Society (2 May 1928); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 92 - 93
1928

God, World, Faith, Hope

“There are many good players in this game. If they weren't good, they wouldn't be in the majors. I'm not bragging when I say I think I'm as good as anyone. Mays, Aaron, Robinson, guys like that, hit with more power than I do. After that, I think I can hold my own.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Change of Pace"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1963</big>

Guy, Game, Thinking

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: The Mirror of Solitude (p. 150-1)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Animals

“I still can't believe it. I don't want to believe it. It can't be so. He will live in my heart forever but it’s not enough. My life feels so empty. I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The purest most giving love I've ever known.”

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) British-American actress

As quoted in "Michael Jackson: Elizabeth Taylor Honors her good friend" by Dave Karger, Entertainment Weekly (26 June 2009)

Love, Life, Feeling, Thinking

“Charm was what he excelled at. If anyone sensed his underlying shallowness, they usually mistook it for well-hidden great depth of character, like misinterpreting a radar bounce.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 4 (p. 42)

Sense

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Love, Life, Mountain, Motivation

““You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster.
“You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor.
“I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.”
“The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—”
“Meaning yourself?” asked Weber.
“You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—”
“You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.””

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (pp. 34-35)

Men, People, World, Way

“Always when I look at anyone's art, I get flashes of the person. If I walk into a room and there's a painting by Joan Mitchell, I say, "There's Joannie." Or Grace, if it's Grace Hartigan. And to me all art is self-portraits.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

Quote in: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-elaine-de-kooning-11999; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories. 1972 - 1989

Art, Painting, Personality

“We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death. My head was reeling. I was walking through a cemetery. Among the stiffened corpses, there were logs of wood. Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death, Silence, Appearance, Help

“Every now and again I get approached by "celebrities" [saying] "oh, you're doing a great job mate, I think it's wonderful what you're doing". Ok, and what you're gonna do? You're gonna make a freaking film now, aren't you? You're gonna make another bloody record! You're gonna stand in front of tens of thousands of people, you're gonna go on chat shows watched by millions of people! Are you gonna bring this subject up yourself? No! Why? "Me, me, me!" "I don't wanna affect my carrer!" I tell you… anyone in the public eye - come nowhere near me unless you are prepared to put your-bloody-self when your mouth is. Walk the talk or walk the other way!”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: Icke's Remember Who You Are event, 2012

People, Way, Thinking

“I have never been a role model for anyone.”

Romário (1966) Brazilian association football player

Eu nunca fui exemplo para ninguém.
Source: Veja Magazine; 1903 Edition. May 4th, 2005.
Context: When talking about his carrer in the Brazilian national team.

“At the invitation of Her Majesty's Government, the United States is about to station on the soil of the United Kingdom nuclear weapons which, we are told, will be used only after consultation and by joint decision with Her Majesty's Government. Anyone who, after the experience of the last few days and of recent years, imagines that the United States will defer to the views of the Government of this country is living in a dangerous fool's paradise. Anyone in office who entertains that illusion is in no position to serve the security of this country.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/oct/26/grenada-invasion in the House of Commons (26 October 1983) during the debate on the American invasion of Grenada. 1980s

Fools, Imagination, Decision, Country

“I would never point a finger at anyone and say, 'They lived their life badly.' I take it as it comes and deal with each situation as it arrives.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Garth Pearce (April 29, 2007) "The plot to slow me down - Interview", The Sunday Times, p. InGear 3.
2000s

Life

“For some reason, cats are usually addressed familiarly, though no cat has ever drunk bruderschaft with anyone.”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Book Two in 'The Extraction of the Master', P/V
The Master and Margarita (1967)

Cats

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 146
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Life, Fate, World, Feeling

“Anyone who embraces the Republic of China with all of their heart definitely does not support the Taiwan independence movement.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2016) cited in: " President urges mainland China not to misjudge flag controversy http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201601160006.aspx" in Focus Taiwan, 16 January 2016. Statement made in responding to Mainland China about the ROC flag controversy showed by a Taiwanese member of South Korean girl group Twice, 16 January 2016. Political issues

Support, Heart

“Conan stood paralyzed in the disruption of the faculties which demoralizes anyone who is confronted by an impossible negation of sanity.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Devil in Iron" (1934)

“Often I think of that excellent painter Monticelli,... when I come back myself from the mental labor of balancing the six essential colors.... sheer work and calculation, with one's mind utterly on the stretch, like an actor on the stage in a difficult part, with a hundred things at once to think of in a single half-hour.
Don't think that I would artificially keep up a feverish condition, but do understand that I am in the midst of a complicated calculation which results in quick succession in canvases quickly executed, but calculated long beforehand. So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Summer 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 507) p. 32 1880s, 1888

Color, Understanding, Thinking, Success

“Everytime she walks out (on stage), she acts like she's shocked anyone showed up! Every night! As if every single day, at about 3 o'clock, she's like, "You know Rene, maybe tonight iz ze night zey do not come?"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Strong Black Woman (2006)

Night

“Anyone who tries to sell you the elixir of life in the form of a perfect society - is your enemy - the enemy of your humanity.”

Akber Choudhry (1967)

http://www.qern.org/ur/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%B2%D9%86%D8%AF%DB%81-%DB%81%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7-%DB%81%DB%92-%DB%81%D8%B1-%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%A7-%DA%A9%DB%92-%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%AF/ Describing some Muslim preachers who try to sell the utopia of a perfect Islamic society.

Life, Perfection

“I know perfectly well that I am nothing to anyone. But the middle finger is no longer than the pinky if one measures both against infinity; or if one clenches one's fist.... Even if a mouse came to me and said that it was going to fly over the ocean, and an eagle said it was thinking of digging itself a hole in the ground, I would say, 'Go ahead.'”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Jón of Skagi
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Flying, Thinking

“A boor cannot be sin-fearing, an ignoramus cannot be pious, a bashful one cannot learn, a short-tempered person cannot teach, nor does anyone who does much business grow wise.”

Hillel the Younger

2:5
Pirkei Avot

Fear, Business, Learning, Personality

“Nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.
Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

People, Fear, Law, Suffering

“So here’s my challenge to Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, the Sulzberger family, and anyone else who runs a major media operation: Why not hire a realist? If you’re looking for some suggestions, how about Paul Pillar, Chas Freeman Jr., Robert Blackwill, Steve Clemons, Michael Desch, Steve Chapman, John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, Andrew Bacevich, or Daniel Larison? Give one of them a weekly column, and then you could genuinely claim to be offering your readers a reasonably comprehensive and balanced range of opinion on international affairs. I mean: What are you folks so afraid of?”

Stephen M. Walt (1955) American political scientist

"What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like?", Foreign Policy (January 8, 2016)

Family

“At 83 Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's.”

Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943) American critic

Referring to George Bernard Shaw in While Rome Burns (1934).

“If you have an awareness that your life is not full and that you are not yourself, that is the beginning, I think, of the journey toward spirituality. I don't have a clue what God is; I really don't. I would never, ever and tell anyone what to look for. The only thing I would say is: the journey to spirituality is the journey to your own humanity. The more human you are, I think, the more godlike you are. And that is the genius of God.”

Martin Sheen (1940) American actor

2000s, AARP magazine interview (2008)

Life, God, Thinking

“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

“Of course after the conference a desperate attempt was made by Mr. Bonham-Carter to show that of course they weren't committed to federation at all. Well I prefer to go by what Mr. Grimond says; I think he's more important. And when he was asked about this question there was no doubt about his answer; it was on television. And the question was [laughter] I see what you mean, I see what you mean. Yes was the question: "But the mood of your conference today was that Europe should be a federal state. Now if we had to choose between a federal Europe and the Commonwealth, this would have to be a choice wouldn't it? You couldn't have the two." And Mr. Grimond replied in these brilliantly clear sentences: "You could have a Commonwealth linked, though not of course a direct political link, you could have a Commonwealth link of other sorts. But of course a federal Europe I think is a very important point. Now the real thing is that if you are going to have a democratic Europe, if you are going to control the running of Europe democratically, you've got to move towards some form of federalism and if anyone says different to that they're really misleading the public." That's one in the eye for Mr. Bonham-Carter. [laughter] Now we must be clear about this, it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. I make no apology for repeating it, the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: "All right let it end." But, my goodness, it's a decision that needs a little care and thought. [clapping] And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth; how can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe, which is what federation means, it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations; it is sheer nonsense.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1962, page 159. Speaking against the Liberal Party's policy of British membership of the European Communities, Labour Party Conference, 2 October 1962. See the video clip here http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/6967366.stm

History, Idea, Mood, Question

“Remember when I told you, for the first time? You nearly threw me off the roof—”
“I thought you deserved it. You know, it’s an opinion I return to from time to time, whether or not a roof is available.”
“You’re a difficult woman, Sabetha. But then, difficult women are the only ones worth falling in love with.”
“How would you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been after anyone else—”
“That part’s easy. I started with the most difficult woman possible, so there was never any need to look any further.”
“You’re trying to be charming.” She squeezed his hand once, then pulled away. “I choose not to be entirely charmed, Locke Lamora.”
“Not entirely?”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

“Not entirely. Not yet.”
Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 8 “The Five-Year Game: Infinite Variation” section 11 (p. 483)

Love, Women, Time, Parting

“The profit motive should not be confused with the profit system. By the profit system, of course, we mean the institution of private property in capital goods and the free private enterprise that goes along with it. There is no reason why the "profit motive" should be necessarily connected with the profit system. In a profit system there is nothing to prevent anyone acting on altruistic lines; there is no law that says a businessman must maximize his profits. If a businessman chose to operate with outputs, prices, and wages that yielded him a smaller profit than the maximum, but which he felt were socially more desirable, there is nothing in the profit system that would prevent him from doing this. Nothing in the profit system would prevent the most ardent liberal from refusing an increase in wages, or from accepting an unpleasant and poorly paid job. At the other extreme, there is nothing in a communist system that would do away with the profit motive, or the "advantage motive."”

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

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 239

Law, Motivation

“I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith based community in Georgia of which my family and I are a part of for all of our lives.”

Nathan Deal (1942) American politician

Remarks on HB 757 https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/28/georgia-governors-wise-veto-of-anti-lgbt-bill-still-raises-a-red-flag/ (March 2016)

Family, Faith, Communication, Thinking

“I put the candy on the desk. So you know, it doesn't matter who you shut your eyes and pray to — to God, or anyone, even our leader — no one will ever give you anything. Only another human being … only I, or someone like me, can give you things. Praying to God or anyone for something is a waste of time.”

James Clavell book The Children's Story

"Teacher"
The Children's Story (1982)

God, Time

“I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company stronger. Already 90 percent of the world's searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase. Soon it'll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece of information, permanently, that's two seconds' work. If you want to ruin anyone, that's five minutes' work. How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and access to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they're well on their way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know every move everyone makes? When all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information, every piece of one's life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one channel?”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Kalden/Ty, to Mae; pp. 487-488
The Circle (2013)

Life, Health, World, Way

“This world is a pretty good place under normal conditions, but anyone who’s read Russian history knows what a bad place it can be.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

The cowboy in autumn https://world.wng.org/2016/04/the_cowboy_in_autumn (May 14, 2016)

World, History, Reading

“There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… the U. S. Patent Office handles an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.”

James Randi (1928) Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic

The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Nostradamus, p. 140–142.

Age, World, Religion, Smile

“There are many things in this world I do not know. I do not know how butterflies get out of their cocoons without damaging their wings. I do not know why anyone would boil vegetables when roasting them is much tastier. I do not know how to make olive oil, and I do not know why dogs bark before an earthquake, and I do not know why some people voluntarily choose to climb mountains where it is freezing and difficult to breathe, or live in the suburbs, where the coffee is watery and all of the houses look alike.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People, World, Dogs, Mountain

“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Question, Summer, Personality

“Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

[Interview: Theo de Raadt on Industry and Free Software, http://en.epochtimes.com/news/5-7-5/30084.html, 2005-07-05, 2007-01-10, The Epoch Times]

Money, Time

“Nevertheless I like being in Norway [to escape the Nazi threat Schwitters fled to Norway, c. 1937], for it is a country of unparalleled beauty... I paint landscapes and portraits, model portrait, glue and paint abstract pictures and glue abstract plastic art; besides, I write poetry in German... What distresses me most of all is that I cannot live in my 'Merzraum' [a sculptured studio-space, Schwitters had built in Germany in the 1920's, but bomb-damaged in the war] and that it may be given up to destruction. For that reason I ask you once more, can you keep your ear to the ground again, to see if anyone in America is willing to give me an opportunity to shape a three-dimensional room?”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

In a letter to w:Galka Scheyer, 24 July 1937; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 41.
1930s
Source: http://www.sprengel-museum.de/bilderarchiv/sprengel_deutsch/fotos/merzbau1933_530.jpg

War, Beauty, Art, Painting

“Within the next ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There'll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there'll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves… But before that some awful things may happen, Miss Glory. That just can't be avoided. But then the subjugation of man by man and the slavery of man to matter will cease. Never again will anyone pay for his bread with hatred and his life. There'll be no more laborers, no more secretaries. No one will have to mine coal or slave over someone else's machines. No longer will man need to destroy his soul doing work that he hates.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Life, Hate, People, Soul

“It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking... I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), pp. 179-180

People, Thinking, Freedom, Time

“Again, it's fine to not agree with someone's sense of humour, but calling me a fascist, how is that helping anyone?”

PewDiePie (1989) Swedish YouTuber and video game commentator

2017, My Response (February)

Sense, Help

“The desire that drives an artist to graphic work is perhaps partly the effort to capture the unique and indefinite nature of a drawing in a fixed and durable form. Another aspect of it is that the technical manipulations exercise energies in the artist that he does not use in the far less strenuous crafts of drawing and painting... the mysterious attraction that surrounded the invention of printing in the Middle Ages is still felt by anyone who takes up graphics seriously and performs every stage in the process wit hits own hands.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

as quoted in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 27
undated

Age, Exercises, Nature, Effort

“I think an interpreter has to sing everything, to sing what wants to sing. It cannot be with that foolishness, that here in Brazil we face this thing that when one records a song, later no one can rerecord it. This is madness, absurd. Music doesn't have an owner, the music doesn´t belong to anyone.
- Comment on the excessive protectionism of composers in Brazil. Domingão do Faustão Program, Rede Globo, 2003”

Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira (1949) Brazilian singer

Music, Thinking, Singing, Madness

“The Dutch example shows that when people overcome their fear, David can defeat Goliath. For decades, the multicultural elite suppressed dissent by denouncing as racists anyone who questioned their pro-Islam, pro-mass immigration dogma. But ﬁnally, after silently watching for years the immense damage done to our nation by the elite's policies, the Dutch people had enough. In the face of all the threats and intimidation levelled against my supporters, enough people had the courage to vote for the PW that we fundamentally altered our country's politics. All it takes is courage.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 13: "How to Turn the Tide", p. 208

People, Fear, Courage, Question

“Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"The Aesthetics of Politics," p. 156
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Life, History, Thinking

“Let’s forget for the moment the generalizations about what the Muslim religion as a whole had to do with September 11th. How did anyone ever get the idea that Hinduism had anything to do with that whatsoever? And how is it that no one in this country can tell a Muslim or a Hindu apart from a Sikh? How do these people justify their own senseless stupidity? It pains me that our paranoid reactionary religiously-bigoted society produces people of such stark hatred and bewildering inanity.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out." http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/30/kill-em-all-let-god-sort-em-out/, Patheos (December 30, 2012) Patheos

Pain, People, Stupidity, Religion

“Anyone who consults a soothsayer on account of curiosity of the future will suffer capital punishment.”

Constantius II (317–361) Roman emperor

CT 9.16.4 released 25 June 357
Codex Theodosianus

Suffering, Future

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

Luke the Evangelist one of the four evangelists

2:44-45 NIV
Acts of the Apostles

“[After having made an abortion joke] I know that can hit close to home for some people…. was anyone here aborted?… (mimicking child's voice:) 'I was found in a trash can!”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

Okay, well, that sorta counts...
It's Not Funny

People, Home

“For the Government, it is quite hard for them to find media faces – to find people to head up campaigns – because they are all so weird-looking, aren't they? They all look like Muppets who have been left too close to a radiator. I don't like to mock the afflicted, but how did anyone know that Willie Whitelaw had had a stroke? What genius spotted that? I mean, with most people it's quite a dramatic change, isn't it? But what happened? Someone thought 'Oh, Willie's dribbled an extra pint today. What's going on? We'll run a few tests.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

People, Affliction, Change

“I am myself convinced that the existing law on abortion is uncertain and is also, and perhaps more importantly, harsh and archaic and that it is in urgent need of reform. I certainly shall have no hesitation in voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. I take this view because I believe that we have here a major social problem. How can anyone believe otherwise when perhaps as many as 100,000 illegal operations a year take place, that the present law has shown itself quite unable to deal with the problem? I believe this, too, because of the danger which exists at present to those who are forced to resort to back-street abortionists and to the misery which is caused to some of those who fail to get an abortion. I believe it also because we all know…that the law is consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one law for the poor.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1966/jul/22/medical-termination-of-pregnancy-bill in the House of Commons in favour of the Bill legalising abortion (22 July 1966) 1960s

Law, Question, Problem, Reading

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

Ian McEwan book Black Dogs

Page 164-165.
Black Dogs (1992)

Love, Life, Death, War

“Political structures are excessively paternalistic, and to maintain them requires a high level of energy. The massive amounts of energy they consume are unsustainable and invite political meltdowns, bailouts, and fallout. On the other hand, proponents of complexity theory take the paradigm–shattering view that less is more. They understand that, paradoxically enough, the complexity of simplicity is the key to the emergence of systems, repeatable patterns and the social glue that holds community together and creates order. Anyone can make simplicity complicated; it takes a true genius to make the complicated simple.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 90

Communication, Understanding

“It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

Letter to Virginia Woolf (29 January 1927). as quoted in Granite and Rainbow : The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (2000) by Mitchell Leaska, p. 259

Love

“"I'm not sure I ever 'got it' when it comes to how to live my life in a way that was original and free," reflected Steven Salt, a retired businessman. "Of course, like most men, I always believed I had the answers and that I was not going to live my life the stupid way other men do. I was going to be unique and avoid their mistakes, but instead I'm just another male stereotype. I started off thinking that being an achiever and a 'winner' would be the key to real freedom. So all my energy went that way and I faked everything else when it came to caring about other people. Then I thought I'd marry the 'perfect' woman and be the 'perfect' dad and husband, not like the other married men. I'd be different. But no matter how I tried I was forcing it and probably fooling no one but myself. My wife finally left and I barely know who my kids really are. When we talk it's mainly 'business.' I fell into all the traps. Now that I'm in my seventies, I'm becoming just like all those guys I felt sorry for when I was younger— guys with no real friends and with no patience for anyone else's ideas or opinions. I can barely stand to talk to anyone and yet I'm still looking to fulfill myself by meeting the 'perfect' woman. I've become a macho cliché. It's taken me this long to realize that even if she existed I really wouldn't know how to be with her and make it feel good anyway."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, p. 9
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Life, Men, People, Stupidity

“Translated: We are no one's, always at a boundary, always someone’s dowry. Is it a wonder then that we are poor? For centuries now we have been seeking our true selves, yet soon we will not know who we are, we will forget that we ever wanted anything; others do us the honour of calling us under their banner for we have none, they lure us when we are needed and discard us when we have outserved the purpose they gave us. We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and nor being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognise us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff. Crude force has worn us out and we made a virtue out of a necessity: we grew smart out of spite.”

Meša Selimović book Death and the Dervish

So what are we? Fools? Miserable wretches? The most complex people in the world. No one is such a joke of history as we are. Only yesterday we were something that we now wish to forget, yet we have become nothing else. We stopped half way through, flabbergasted. There is no place we can go to any more. We are torn off, but not accepted. As a dead-end branch that streamed away from mother river has neither flow, nor confluence it can rejoin, we are too small to be a lake, too big to be sapped by the earth. With an unclear feeling of shame about our ancestry and guilt about our renegade status, we do not want to look into the past, but there is no future to look into; we therefore try to stop the time, terrified with the prospect of whatever solution might come about. Both our brethren and the newcomers despise us, and we defend ourselves with our pride and our hatred. We wanted to preserve ourselves, and that is exactly how we lost the knowledge of our identity. The greatest misery is that we grew fond of this dead end we are mired in and do not want to abandon it. But everything has a price and so does our love for what we are stuck with.
Death and the Dervish (1966)

People, World, History, Sea

“The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent.”

Carl Safina (1955) American biologist

[Conservation Biology, 7, 2, June 1993, Bluefin Tuna in the West Atlantic: Negligent Management and the Making of an Endangered Species, 229–234, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2386419]

Travel, Animals, Sea

“Performing the magic, for me, is not about convincing anyone I have amazing abilities. It’s about providing a journey which comes to a place where the brain starts spinning. And of course, the best brains spin the most.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“One day Donald Trump discovers that he is owned, lock, stock, and roulette wheel, by Lutheran Brotherhood, and must renegotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don't understand why anyone would pay more than $120 for a suit.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

"Minnesota's Sensible Plan, TIME (11 September 1995)

Understanding

“This divergence and perversion of the essential question is most striking in what goes today by the name of philosophy. There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: What must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition on the Christian nations. For example, in Kant´s Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and specially Rousseau.

But in more recent times, since Hegel´s assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards.

The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzsche´s half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others.

If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgetting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzsche´s works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this.

Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument to these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr. N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

People, World, Education, Law

“It should be remembered that the pharmacologic treatment of raised farm animals can cause damage to the health of anyone who eats their meat. For example, the antibiotics that are legally added to animal feed—with the objective of preventing infections—can cause a resistance to antibiotics in humans. That is to say, a selection of bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics can be transmitted from animals to man through food; and can thereby generate infections difficult to stop”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

at times fatal, as with salmonella
The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Health, Food, Time, Animals

“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.”
In tranquillo esse quisque gubernator potest.

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 358
Sentences

Leadership, Sea

“Disorderly, unorganised and petty terrorist acts may, if carried to extremes, only scatter and squander our forces. That is a fact, which, of course, should not be forgotten. On the other hand, under no circumstances should it be forgotten that a slogan calling for an uprising has already been issued, that the uprising has already begun. To launch attacks under favourable circumstances is not only every revolutionary’s right, but his plain duty. The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations, the liberation of prisoners, the seizure of government funds for the needs of the uprising—such operations are already being carried out wherever insurrection is rife, in Poland and in the Caucasus, and every detachment of the revolutionary army must be ready to start such operations at a moment’s notice. Each group should remember that if it allows a favourable opportunity for such an operation to slip by today, it will be guilty of unpardonable inactivity, of passivity—and such an offence is the greatest crime a revolutionary can commit at a time of insurrection, the greatest disgrace that can befall anyone who is striving for liberty in deed, and not in word alone.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents, Collected Works, Vol. 9, pages. 420-24.
Attributions

Time

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me... is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass (1959) American radio personality

The Taste Gap: Ira Glass on the Secret of Creative Success, Animated in Living Typography http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/ira-glass-success-daniel-sax/ at brainpickings.org This American Life

People, Disappointment, Way, Game

“They have to make you care. They have to force it down your throat. When anyone has to force it, it's a problem. You didn't have to force that the world was round. You didn't have to.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2010

World, Problem

“We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.”
Inde fit ut raro, qui se vixisse beatum dicat et exacto contentus tempore vita cedat uti conviva satur, reperire queamus.

Horace book Satires

Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)

Life, World, Happiness

“I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.”

Chelsea Manning (1987) United States Army soldier and whistleblower

Letter to Barack Obama (2013)

Love, People, Law, Understanding

“I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.”

Bernard Malamud The Natural

The Natural (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) p. 149 http://books.google.com/books?id=wCWhegoGUxwC&q=%22I+don't+think+you+can+do+anything+for+anyone+without+giving+up+something+of+your+own%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage. (originally published 1952)

Thinking

“Language death is a terrible loss, to all who come into contact with it: `Facing the loss of language or culture involves the same stages of grief that one experiences in the process of death and dying.”‘ We do not have to be members of an endangered community to sense this grief, or respond to it. Anyone who has worked with these communities, even over a short period, knows that it is a genuine insight, well justifying the dramatic nature of the analogy. And it is this keen, shared sense of loss which fuels the motivation and commitment of linguists, community groups, and support organizations in many parts of the world.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 216

Death, World, Communication, Motivation

“All the Democrats are for higher taxes. All of them are in favor of Hillary's socialist health-care plan. All of them are for higher pay for teachers and nurses — and no pay at all for anyone in the pharmaceutical or oil industries, especially Halliburton executives, who should be sent to Guantánamo. All the Democrats believe the way to strike fear in the hearts of the terrorists is for the federal government to invest heavily in windmills.
All the Democrats oppose the war. And all the Democrats who took a position on the war before it began were for it, but now believe that everything Bush did from that moment forward has been bad! bad! bad! … Finally, all the candidates are willing to sell out any of these other issues in service of the one burning desire of all Democrats: abortion on demand. If they could just figure out a way to abort babies using solar power, that's all we'd ever hear about.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"What happened to your queer party-friends?" (22 January 2004) http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2004/01/22/what_happened_to_your_queer_party-friends/page/full/ also in How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), p. 49. 2004

War, Health, Fear, Way

“I have served the Liberal cause for twenty-two years. That ought to be long enough for anyones lifetime.”

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

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 1, In the beginning, p. 3

“When I think of me as a psychic, I get hung up because I seem to be in the company of so many nuts. Writers may be as nuts as anyone else but it's a nuttiness that doesn't bug me -- there's no dogma attached.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

p. 122, Speaking of Jane Roberts (2001) by Susan M. Watkins

Thinking

“Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"1896", p. 17
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

Truth

“How Adewen stuffed her braid in her mouth at that! Or she'd cover her mirth with her hands and shake till you'd think that the fit was upon her. She did the same too when she wept so you'd never be sure which she hid with her hands, her tears or her cackling. I think there were times she herself didn't know, nor does anyone know at times. Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

Thinking, Tear, Time

“I am a little shy of any assumption of moral indignation. There is always in it an element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 32, p. 116

Sense

“Anyone who has no character is not a man, but a thing.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Quiconque n'a pas de caractère n'est pas un homme, c'est une chose.
Maximes et pensées (1805)

“But now if any one hath a mind to come over to their sect, he is not immediately admitted, but he is prescribed the same method of living which they use for a year, while he continues excluded'; and they give him also a small hatchet, and the fore-mentioned girdle, and the white garment. And when he hath given evidence, during that time, that he can observe their continence, he approaches nearer to their way of living, and is made a partaker of the waters of purification; yet is he not even now admitted to live with them; for after this demonstration of his fortitude, his temper is tried two more years; and if he appear to be worthy, they then admit him into their society. And before he is allowed to touch their common food, he is obliged to take tremendous oaths, that, in the first place, he will exercise piety towards God, and then that he will observe justice towards men, and that he will do no harm to any one, either of his own accord, or by the command of others; that he will always hate the wicked, and be assistant to the righteous; that he will ever show fidelity to all men, and especially to those in authority, because no one obtains the government without God's assistance; and that if he be in authority, he will at no time whatever abuse his authority, nor endeavor to outshine his subjects either in his garments, or any other finery; that he will be perpetually a lover of truth, and propose to himself to reprove those that tell lies; that he will keep his hands clear from theft, and his soul from unlawful gains; and that he will neither conceal anything from those of his own sect, nor discover any of their doctrines to others, no, not though anyone should compel him so to do at the hazard of his life. Moreover, he swears to communicate their doctrines to no one any otherwise than as he received them himself; that he will abstain from robbery, and will equally preserve the books belonging to their sect, and the names of the angels [or messengers]. These are the oaths by which they secure their proselytes to themselves.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

Life, Men, God, Hate

“What has gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan has many echoes with what was going in this part of the world in 18th and 19th century - setting up of puppet governments, the lending of troops and the training of local troops in recent Western techniques. Anyone that knows the history of South Asia in 18th century can see million echoes in what has been going in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

In Zeenews, "William Dalrymple's book on first Anglo-Afghan war out in December"

World, History, Parting, Training

“The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 560

God, People, World, Law

“I don't know, but I do know that if anyone does he'll be bloody tired.”

George Hirst

When asked if anyone would ever match his feat of 2000 runs and 200 wickets in a season. (Nobody has.)
Obituary, Wisden's Almanack, 1955; quoted in A Wisden Anthology.

“Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 308)

Parent, Time, Past

“[Black Jade], I never dared to speak the secrets of my heart to you. I'll be bold today and I care not if I die as a consequence. I am also sick because I am constantly thinking of you. I dare not tell anyone. I won't be well until you are well again. I cannot forget you even in my dreams.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 161

Secret, Dreams, Thinking, Heart