Quotes about anything
page 27

“But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes no, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Love, Life, Men, God

“And in this, that philosophy begins in wonder [Plato, Theaetetus 155d], lies the, so to speak, non-bourgeois character of philosophy; for to feel astonishment and wonder is something non-bourgeois (if we can be allowed, for a moment, to use this all-too-easy terminology). For what does it mean to become bourgeois in the intellectual sense? More than anything else, it means that someone takes one's immediate surroundings (the world determined by the immediate purposes of life) so "tightly" and "densely," as if bearing an ultimate value, that the things of experience no longer become transparent. The greater, deeper, more real, and (at first) invisible world of essences is no longer even suspected to exist; the "wonder" is no longer there, it has no place to come from; the human being can no longer feel wonder. The commonplace mind, rendered deaf-mute, finds everything self-explanatory. But what really is self-explanatory? Is it self-explanatory, then, that we exist? Is it self-explanatory that there is such a thing as "seeing"? These are questions that someone who is locked into the daily world cannot ask; and that is so because such a person has not succeeded, as anyone whose senses (like a deaf person) are simply not functioning — has not managed even for once to forget the immediate needs of life, whereas the one who experiences wonder is one who, astounded by the deeper aspect of the world, cannot hear the immediate demands of life — if even for a moment, that moment when he gazes on the astounding vision of the world.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 101–102

Life, World, Feeling, Question

“Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Ambassador's Journal (1969), p. 84 http://books.google.com/books?id=J1NCAAAAIAAJ&q=&quot;meetings+are+a+great+trap&quot;+&quot;they+are+indispensable+when+you+don't+want+to+do+anything&quot;&pg=PA84#v=onepage

“McLeavy: I'm innocent. (A little unsure of himself, the beginnings of panic) Doesn't that mean anything to you?”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act II

“Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster. … [W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership … Are you totally without culpability here? Are you totally blameless? Are you totally irresponsible of anything that happened?”

Neil Cavuto (1958) American television presenter

"Loaning to Minorities … Is a Disaster" http://www.npr.org/blogs/newsandviews/2008/09/loaning_to_minoritiesis_a_disa_1.html, NPR.org, (September 25, 2008).

“I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are.”

Wilkie Collins book The Law and the Lady

The Law and the Lady [Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1875] ( p. 195) Also in Gothic Returns in Collins, Dickens, Zola, and Hitchcock by Eleanor Salotto [Springer, 2016, ISBN 1-137-11770-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=qPmE-w86r0AC&pg=PA195 ( p. 39 https://books.google.com/books?id=recYDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA39) The Law and the Lady (1875)

Children, Pleasure, Imagination, Change

“Young children simply aren't interested in Fermat. They just want to hear a story and they're not going to let you do anything else.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

Children

““Magic is nonsense.”
“Magic is anything you don’t understand.””

Joan Slonczewski book A Door into Ocean

Part 3, Chapter 3 (p. 128)
A Door into Ocean (1986)

Understanding

“The defeatists should fear Allah lest they distort this religion and cause it to become weak on the basis of the claim that it is a religion of peace. Yes, it is the religion of peace but in the sense of saving all of mankind from worshiping anything other than Allah and submitting all of mankind to the rule of Allah.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

[Fiqh al-Da’wah, Fiqh al-Da’wah, IslamQA, http://web.archive.org/web/20061017053855/http://www.islamqa.com/index.php?ref=43087&ln=eng, 217–222, 2007-11-22, 2006-10-17]

Fear, Peace, Religion, Sense

“It goes without saying that if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Singing

“So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in

Money, Hope, Guy

“A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

As quoted in A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955), p. 115
Undated

God, Waiting

“I now have an abundance of models. Every woman I address on the street understands me pretty well. I never experienced anything like that, otherwise they always called me names. It is horrible that I don't have anyone [in Amsterdam] like you, because the only good I have heard about my works came from you. So visit me often.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Ik heb tegenwoordig een zee van modellen. Iedere vrouw die ik op straat aanspreek, vat het nogal goed op. Ik heb nog nooit zoo iets bijgewoond, anders schelden ze me altijd uit ‘t is toch naar dat ik niemand heb, eigenlijk zooals jij, want het enige goed dat ik gehoord heb, over mijn werken is van jou geweest. Kom dus maar dikwijls over. quote of Breitner in a letter to his friend Herman van der Weele, Amsterdam, 14 June 1893, original text in RKD-Archive, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/54 1890 - 1900

Understanding

“The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Faith

“This is the worst stuff on the Internet. There isn't anything worse than this.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2007-08-01
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television
http://www.billoreilly.com/show?action=viewTVShowByDate&date=20070801#5
on Daily Kos

“I don’t expect them to build a big stone monument to me; that’s not my goal in life. I’d like to think that if I did anything extraordinary, it was the work that we did in getting the corporation ready for the 21st century.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Smith cited in: Micheline Maynard (2007) " Roger B. Smith, 82, Ex-Chief of G.M., Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/business/01smith.html" in The New York Times December 1, 2007.

Life, Thinking

“The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith."”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Faith, Feeling

“Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe, then Professor of Pure Mathematics at University College, London. …On the sad death of Professor Rowe, in October 1884, I was requested… to take up the task of editing… For the latter half of Chapter III. and for the whole of Chapter IV. …I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. …With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. …Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion. I have since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle to me, because I was unaware of his having written anything on the subject. I have accordingly expressed, although with great hesitation, my own views on the subject; these may be concisely described as a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have (allowing for certain minor differences) the weighty authority of Professor Mach, of Prag. But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some account of which appeared in Nature, June 10, 1880. Therein it is stated that 'no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

This fragmentary account of the discourse undoubtedly proves that Clifford held on the categories of matter and force as clear and original ideas as on all subjects of which he has treated; only, alas! they have not been preserved.
Preface by Karl Pearson
The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)

Death, Books, Sadness, Law

“We are not in the time of separation; we are in the time of unification. There will not be an Armageddon or anything. Wars have come to an end from now on. They should forget about wars.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

23 April 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

War, Time, Forgetting

“So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Parallel Lives, Pericles

Truth, History

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

World, Change, Time

“Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it…”

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

The Mixture As Before (1940) "The Treasure"
Short Stories

Life

“The reason the corporate media serves the Republican agenda so much is it means they don't have to work hard. They don't have to do anything. They don't have to do investigative journalism. They don't have to get into the dirty waters of speaking truth to power. If the corporate media continues to serve their Republican masters, then their job is easy peasy. It's nuttin'. You go to Matt Drudge. You go get some stuff from Karl Rove. You go to Grover Norquist meetings. You get the talking points. Easy peasy.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

Majority Report, July 12, 2005 broadcast
Majority Report

Truth, Water

“If my mind can conceive it, if my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it because I am somebody!
Respect me! Protect me! Never neglect me!
I am somebody!
My mind is a pearl! I can learn anything in the world!
Nobody can save us, from us, for us, but us!
I can learn. It is possible.
I ought to learn. It is moral.
I must learn. It is imperative.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Speech at Anderson College in Anderson, Indiana (4 March 1979), quoted in Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith (1987) by David G. Myers and Malcolm A. Jeeves. The first sentence is a modification of a quote by Napoleon Hill: "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

World, Learning, Heart

“I've been in trouble most of my life. No stealing or anything like that, just fights. It's all fights.”

Billy Joe Shaver (1939) American singer-songwriter

Billy Joe Shaver: Outlaw Country's Real Deal (2014)

Life, Fight

“Those perilous climbings [with her sister Claudia, in the Palo Duro Canyon, 1916] were frightening, but it was wonderful to me and not like anything I had known before. The fright of the day was still with me in the night and I would often dream that the foot of my bed rose straight up into the air — then just as it was to fall I would wake up. Many drawings came from days like that, and later some oil paintings.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

About climbing the Palo Duro Canyon, 1916
1970s, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)

Dreams, Sister, Drawing, Painting

“We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all Eretz Yisrael is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land [ha'aretz] cultivated fields that are not used for planting. Only those sand fields or stone mountains that would require the investment of hard labor and great expense to make them good for planting remain uncultivated and that's because the Arabs do not like working too much in the present for a distant future. Therefore, it is very difficult to find good land for cattle. And not only peasants, but also rich landowners, are not selling good land so easily…We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them. … But, if the time comes that our people's life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, pp. 14-15.

Life, People, Mountain, Understanding

“One of the stated objectives [of the Warren Commission] was to calm the fears of the people about a conspiracy. But in our country, the government has no right to calm our fears, any more than it has, for example, the right to excite our fears about Red China, or about fluoridation, or about birth control, or about anything. There's no room in America for thought control of any kind, no matter how benevolent the objective. Personally, I don't want to be calm about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't want to be calm about a president of my country being shot down in the streets.”

Jim Garrison (1921–1992) American judge

[part of Garrison's response to a NBC News White Paper, 15 July 1967]

People, Fear, Birth, Personality

“It's not my dreams that get me in trouble, it's the things my wife dreams I did… My wife punched me in the middle of the night; I woke up, I was like "Oww! What was that for?" She said "I dreamt you were making out with Faith Hill." I said "I wasn't dreaming anything! Send her over to my dream, we'll both be happy."”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Have Your Loved Ones Spayed and Neutered (2004)

Happiness, Faith, Dreams, Night

“Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be as impossible as it would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 9–10
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men, Children, Truth, Age

“The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

Personality

“Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual – the Orientals did that.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, pp. 142-143

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“While studying antiaircraft fire control, Wiener may have conceived the idea of considering the operator as part of the steering mechanism and of applying to him such notions as feedback and stability, which had been devised for mechanical systems and electrical circuits. No doubt this kind of analogy had been operative in Wiener’s mathematical work from the beginning and sometimes had even been productive. As time passed, such flashes of insight were more consciously put to use in a sort of biological research for which Wiener consulted all kinds of people, except mathematicians, whether or not they had anything to do with it. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) is a rather eloquent report of these abortive attempts, in the sense that it shows there is not much to be reported. The value and influence of Cybernetics, and other publications of this kind, should not, however, be belittled. It has contributed to popularizing a way of thinking in communication theory terms, such as feedback, information, control, input, output, stability, homeostasis, prediction, and filtering. On the other hand, it also has contributed to spreading mistaken ideas of what mathematics really means”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Norbert Wiener (2008)

People, Way, Communication, Mathematics

“The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Fate, Hope, Soul, Thinking

“I don’t know about that because nobody said anything to me on my face. And if I was being favoured, I would have just come for a couple of hours for the shoot and gone. Instead, I used to be on the sets for more than six hours, rehearsing, performing and then rushing off for my Madhubala shoot!”

Drashti Dhami (1985) Indian television actress and model

At some point your co-contestants felt that you were being favoured http://www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/interview-i-was-in-another-zone-reveals-jhalak-dikhla-jaa-6-winner-drashti-dhami-1890057

“Roger: All right, cool. Thank you. Oh great, it ends on me saying I liked a Hillary Duff song. I was hoping for something else after that. Make something up, something… to be or not to be – anything.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Hope

“This extremist ideology is not true Islam. I have said it myself many, many times, and it’s absolutely right to do so. And I’ll say it again today. But simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims. … It is an exercise in futility to deny that. And more than that, it can be dangerous. To deny it has anything to do with Islam means you disempower the critical reforming voices; the voices that are challenging the fusing of religion and politics; the voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on; the voices that are crucial in providing an alternative worldview that could stop a teenager’s slide along the spectrum of extremism.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

Religion, Exercises, Time

“Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 192

Change

“And if You look, You look through Me. And when You talk, You talk at Me. And when I touch You, You don't feel anything”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"Stay (Faraway,So Close)
Lyrics, Zooropa (1993)

Feeling

“For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

World, Nature

“I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home. It certainly doesn't work for north America, that's for sure. I mean, I'm sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don't know what they were because they didn't write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don't think we'd have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we've had in north America.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.

World, Home, Hell, Thinking

“She didn't hide what she was thinking, she didn't try to impress him, nor was she swayed by anything he'd accomplished in the past. Instead she seemed to evaluate him as he was today, right now, without holding either the past or the future against him.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Jeremy Marsh, Chapter 9, p. 159
2000s, True Believer (2005)

Thinking, Past, Future

“The one question, the one principle, the one crisis in art of the twentieth century centers in the uncompromising 'purity' of art, and in the consciousness that art comes from art only, not from anything else.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 155

Art, Question

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only of principaly [sic] from human relation[ships]. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

In a letter to Russell Fritz (as known as Ron Franz), April 1992

God, Courage, Thinking, Relation ships

“Nobody precisely knew where he born, but it's known it wasn't in São Paulo, nor in Rio de Janeiro, nor in Pará. It was wrong trying to find in this man any kind of regionalism. Before anything, Quaresma was a Brazilian.”

Lima Barreto book Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma

Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915)

“I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
1970s

“The character of the Judges is public property, and if they have done anything amiss, they ought to be censured. But if not, their characters ought to be respected; otherwise the most mischievous consequences will arise to the public.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Holt's Case (1793), 22 How. St. Tr. 1234.

“One can be a true believer in anything: psychic ability, Christianity or, as Bertrand Russell classically suggested (with irony), in the fact there is a teapot orbiting the earth. I could believe any of those things with total conviction. But my conviction doesn't make them true. Indeed, it is something of an insult to the very truth I might hold dear to say that something is true just because I believe it is.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Truth

“People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.”

Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 15, “Preparing for Ghosts and Dogs” (pp. 245-246)

People, Motivation

“Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 16, p. 144

Men, Stupidity, Failure, Thinking

“Life — is it anything more than a machine to which money imparts the motion?”

Honoré de Balzac book Gobseck

La vie n'est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l'argent imprime le mouvement? p. 26, 1921 édition https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158007362832;view=1up;seq=63 Gobseck (1830)

Life, Money

“If there was any justice in this world, I would have been a dead man at least two times over. By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming – thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun. … [When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Kitchen Confidential (2000)

Life, People, World, Sadness

“There was one form of concerted action that Tolstoy believed advisable and he asked the workers to refrain religiously, firstly, from working for capitalists, if they could possibly get on without it; secondly, from offering their work at a lower rate than that current; thirdly, from improving their position by passing over to the side of the capitalists and serving their interests; and fourthly and chiefly, from participating in governmental coercion, be it police, customhouse, or military service. Only by such "a religious attitude toward the form of their activity" can the workmen liberate themselves from oppression. …a bloodless revolution that would be carried into effect through passive resistance. The workers are simply to refrain from doing anything that will add to the wealth or power of those who now dominate their lives. …All the people cannot be shot down or imprisoned and if all the people were willing to do as Thoreau did—go to jail rather than pay taxes, government itself would disappear.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 72-73

People, Wealth

“SPAN ID=The_process_by>The process by means of which human beings can arbitrarily make certan things stand for other things may be called the symbolic process. Whenever two or more human beings can communicate with each other, they can, by agreement, make anything stand for anything. For example, here are two symbols:
X Y
We can agree to let X stand for buttons and Y for bows; then we can freely change our agreement and let X stand for […] North Korea, and Y for South Korea. We are, as human beings, uniquely free to manufacture and manipulate and assign values to our symbols as we please. Indeed, we can go further by making symbols that stand for symbols. […] This freedom to create symbols of any assigned value and to create symbols that stand for symbols is essential to what we call the symbolic process.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Symbolic Process, p. 24

Communication, Freedom, Change

““You see God as an engineer?” asked Urpastor Phelps.
“I don’t see God as anything at all.”
“An engineer, you said. An incompetent engineer.”
“Incompetent, perfect, who knows? God is whatever we agree to pretend God is. God is our image of God.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 16 (p. 272)

God, Perfection

“Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five second delay won't do anything with”

Peter Jackson (1961) New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter

After receiving the Best Picture Oscar for "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" at the 76th Academy Awards

“What we do attracts to a certain type of people. I don't think age has anything to do with it: either you get into it or you don't. You can be 16 or 60 and you will like us or not depending on your sensibilities.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

X-Press Magazine, Australia, September 2000

People, Age, Thinking, Dependency

“Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. …Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. …harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Art, Music

“You have Mel Brooks and your Marx Brothers and your Larry David. So it's affected it enormously and really not at all. I don't think I've ever done anything comedically where the joke of it had to do with Judaism and Jewishness, but there's definitely a proud tradition of comedy in the Jews.”

Andy Samberg (1978) American comedian

Quoted in Monica Kim, "Andy Samberg on SNL, his hair and other things not in a box," http://www.northbynorthwestern.com/2008/04/9035/andy-samberg-on-snl-his-hair-and-other-things-not-in-a-box/ NorthbyNorthwestern.com (April 16, 2008).

Thinking

“You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Source: Stop Smiling Magazine with James Hughes http://www.errolmorris.com/content/interview/stopsmiling0306.html

Idea, Thinking, Despair

“It's a failure only if you don't get anything out of it, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work; yet we have lights today.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 36

Way, Failure, Light

“My house got robbed in New York. I didn't even call the police. I wanted to, but I couldn't. My crib is too nice. It's not that it's too nice, but it's too nice for me. You know how the police are in New York. Soon as I open the door, they'll be like, "He's still here! Open and shut case, Johnson. Apparently this black guy broke in and hung up pictures of his family everywhere. Never seen anything like it."”

Dave Chappelle (1973) American comedian

Comedy specials, HBO Comedy Half-Hour: Dave Chappelle (1998)

Family, Guy, Housing

“What had originally been a straightforward battle of ideas between anarchy and fascism had been turned into a kind of ham-fisted parable of 9-11 and the war against terror, in which the words anarchy and fascism appear nowhere. … It struck me that for Hollywood to make V for Vendetta, it was a way for thwarted and impotent American liberals to feel that they were making some kind of statement about how pissed off they were with the current situation without really risking anything. It’s all set in England, which I think that probably, in most American eyes, is kind of a fairytale kingdom where we still perhaps still have giants. It doesn’t really exist; it might as well be in the Land of Oz for most Americans. So you can get set your political parable in this fantasy environment called England, and then you can vent your spleen against George Bush and the neo-conservatives. Those were my feelings, and I must admit those are completely based upon not having seen the film even once, but having read a certain amount of the screenplay. That was enough.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

On the film adaptation of V for Vendetta
Alan Moore on Anarchism (2009)

War, Way, Feeling, Idea

““I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?
A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”
Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.””

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 143)

Wisdom, People, Food, Question

“The tomato hit Brother Leon on his left cheek, a ripe tomato that exploded in juicy fury, splattering his shirt and his hair and smearing his face with what looked like blood. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. Nobody cheered or booed. Everybody sat there in a profound silence as Brother Leon, mouth agape, wiped the tomato from his face, still silent as he stalked from the stage, leaving an assembly hall full of students who sat stunned, silent for a few minutes, then quietly filed out of the hall. Broher Leon never learned the culprit's name. He, in fact, never made an effort to do so. Nobody else ever mentioned the incident. But Henry Malloran was elected president of the senior class at the next day's election and nobody ran against him.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 273

Effort, Silence, Learning

“Interestingly, Islam acknowledges the reality of sin and hell, and the justice of God, but the hope it offers is that sinners can escape God’s justice if they do religious works. God will see these, and because of them, hopefully he will show mercy—but they won’t know for sure. Each person’s works will be weighed on the Day of Judgment and it will then be decided who is saved and who is not—based on whether they followed Islam, were sincere in repentance, and performed enough righteous deeds to outweigh their bad ones. So Islam believes you can earn God’s mercy by your own efforts. That’s like jumping out of the plane and believing that flapping your arms is going to counter the law of gravity and save you from a 10,000-foot drop. And there’s something else to consider. The Law of God shows us that the best of us is nothing but a wicked criminal, standing guilty and condemned before the throne of a perfect and holy Judge. When that is understood, then our “righteous deeds” are actually seen as an attempt to bribe the Judge of the Universe. The Bible says that because of our guilt, anything we offer God for our justification (our acquittal from His courtroom) is an abomination to Him, and only adds to our crimes. Islam, like the other religions, doesn’t solve your problem of having sinned against God and the reality of hell.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

God, Religion, Justice, Law

“We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Family, Law, Sex, Home

“You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.”

W. Somerset Maugham The Circle

The Circle
Plays

World

“Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 1.16
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Love, Life

“The last time I ever witnessed a movement that had these qualifications: (1) a totally monolithic movement with a single point of view and a single authoritarian head; (2) replete with fanatical followers who are prepared and programmed to do anything their master says; (3) supplied by absolutely unlimited funds; (4) with a hatred of everyone on the outside; (5) with suspicion of parents, against their parents -- the last movement that had those qualifications was the Nazi youth movement, and I'll tell you, I'm scared.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

Rabbi Maurice Davis, quoted http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-16.html in Ronald Enroth, Ph.D.'s Youth, brainwashing, and the extremist cults, 1977, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House.

Youth, Parent, Time

“Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.”

Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright

As quoted in Unleashing Intellectual Capital (2000) by Charles Ehin, p. 99

Democracy, Time

“Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

"Hayek and the Austrian tradition", in Edward Feser(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Age, Failure, Nature, Parting

“It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 12, "Winter"

“For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others… There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle.”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

One of Those People
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

War, People, Feeling, Support

“President Saddam, he always think about America, "They are foolish. They don't understand anything in this world. They never travel. They don't know anything outside the area. Just they believe what the president says. They are the dictatorship, not us." And about George Bush, the father, he always called him stupid.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Latif Yahia, double for Uday Saddam Hussein, in I knew… Saddam (31 July 2007) Al Jazeera English
Attributed

Stupidity, World, Travel, Understanding

“The great majority of experimental psychologists relate to the tradition of their field in much the same way as physicists. Their look at the past might take the form of a review of the literature in a specific research area, and perhaps they would go so far as to take time off for celebrating a few icons on appropriate ceremonial occasions, but there is no room in their world for a reflective or critical history. They would gladly leave anything like that to the professional historians without any sense of having surrendered something that might have the slightest relevance to their own research interests. In the U. S. this attitude may be more widespread than elsewhere, and it is certainly accompanied by a growing tendency for the history of psychology to be taken up by historians rather than psychologists, but of course, the same attitudes are to be found wherever there are psychological laboratories.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

World, Way, History, Literature

“It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I—or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace—cared to look at.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 18-19
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Flowers, Time, Reading

“We live in stormy and unsettled times. Hence we may confer a benefit, not only on ourselves, but on others, by diverting attention from the exciting circumstances of the present day—from the disheartening eccentricities of a literature which meanders in a thousand frivolous directions—to the calm regions where the inner man, self-examined, submits himself to moral treatment. Here our connection with things, our object, our duty, become clear; and, while we quietly separate ourselves from a world which is unable to assure us of anything, we feel that the joy we thought lost again returns, and that a second innocence spreads its clear and tranquillizing light over human existence. The child may amuse himself with childish rhymes. Man should find his recreation in reflecting on his relation to the things of this life. To all has this power been vouchsafed; by all should it be exercised.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Life, World, Feeling, Exercises

“I wasn't expecting him to be a gracious, so fair enough. The winner can say anything when he wins… so I guess we will just have to swallow it for now.”

Viswanathan Anand (1969) Indian chess player

2013 World Chess Championship

“I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world that you can't now go around and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it. The remoteness of Americans from German attack had made them feel confident. They didn't really believe that anything could reach out and kill them. Americans are quite unconscious now that we look on them as just as much beaten as we are. They're quite unconscious of that. They have always talked of Vietnam as if by getting out they were surrendering the prospect of victory, as if they were being noble by renouncing the possibility of victory. But they couldn't have had a victory. They couldn't possibly have won.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 13

War, World, Way, Feeling

“I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did."”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

On the creation of Fight Club
Interview with Rolling Stone (2002-09-19)

Thinking

“The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)

People, Law, Problem

“(The gnani) "(…) tastes of the pure, uncaused, undiluted bliss. He is happy and fully aware that happiness is his very nature and that he need not do anything, nor strive for anything to secure it. It follows him, more real than the body, nearer than the mind itself. (…)."”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Bliss and happiness
Source: I am That, P.179.

Happiness, Nature

“In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything — parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done."”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 177

People, World, Forgiveness, Parent

“True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Understanding, Knowledge, Indifference

“Now I as a painter shall never stand for anything of importance. I feel it utterly... I sometimes regret I did not simply keep to the Dutch palette [of Dutch impressionism ] with its grey tones, and have brushed away at landscapes of Montmartre [in 1886-87] with no ado.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, 3 May 1889; 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 590), p. 33 1880s, 1889

Feeling

“There in Rangoon I realized that the gods
were enemies, just like God,
of the poor human being.
Gods
in alabaster extended
like white whales,
gods gilded like spikes,
serpent gods entwining
the crime of being born,
naked and elegant buddhas
smiling at the cocktail party
of empty eternity
like Christ on his horrible cross,
all of them capable of anything,
of imposing on us their heaven,
all with torture or pistol
to purchase piety or burn our blood,
fierce gods made by men
to conceal their cowardice,
and there it was all like that,
the whole earth reeking of heaven,
and heavenly merchandise.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Allí en Rangoon comprendí que los dioses
eran tan enemigos como Dios
del pobre ser humano.
Dioses
de alabastro tendidos
como ballenas blancas,
dioses dorados como las espigas,
dioses serpientes enroscados
al crimen de nacer,
budhas desnudos y elegantes
sonriendo en el coktail
de la vacía eternidad
como Cristo en su cruz horrible,
todos dispuestos a todo,
a imponernos su cielo,
todos con llagas o pistola
para comprar piedad o quemarnos la sangre,
dioses feroces del hombre
para esconder la cobardía,
y allí todo era así,
toda la tierra olía a cielo,
a mercadería celeste.
Religión en el Este (Religion in the East) from Memorial of Isla Negra [Memorial de Isla Negra] (1964), trans. by Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 463).

Men, God, Smile, Christ

“The moral authority of governors rests, in reality, on the self-interest of the governed. The latter having a natural tendency to resist anything harmful to their self-interest, unacknowledged authority would continually require the help of physical force.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 51

Nature, Reality, Help

“Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Law, Problem, Universe, Science

“I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I think most people who have dealt with me think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Trevor Kavanagh, "Blair: My big blunder", The Sun, 17 November 1997, p. 8.
Interview with John Humphrys on BBC TV's "On the Record", 16 November 1997.
1990s

People, Guy, Thinking, Country