Quotes about anything
page 28

“They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Sex, Thinking, Sleep, Time

“The word "souvenir" has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.”

Alan Coren (1938–2007) humorist and writer from the United Kingdom

"And Though They Do Their Best To Bring…".
The Sanity Inspector (1974)

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Varied Types (1903)

“Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
I am invincible
I am woman”

Helen Reddy (1941) Australian actress

"I Am Woman"; written and sung by Reddy
Lyrics, "I Don't Know How To Love Him"(1971)

Wisdom, Pain, Strong

“He never asks the orchestra to do anything which contradicts the players' feeling of what the music signifies or what the printed notes of the score actually mean in plain musical language. To his credit he does not pretend to omniscience. When a certain progression of programs with the Philharmonic decreed that he conduct the Brahms Fourth Symphony two seasons ago, he disavowed intensive rehearsals with the simple statement to the orchestra: "Gentlemen, you know the work better than I do." Both the compliment and the attitude endeared themselves so much to the orchestra that they literally forgot themselves in a mass effort to justify his statement—and, as one of those who heard the performance, I can testify that they delivered one of the most powerful and integrated interpretations of the score that New York has experienced in years.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

On conductor George Enescu, in "Music in Aspic," Harper's Magazine (October 1939) and A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); as quoted in "Lightning Wit Plays On American Musical Scene; Oscar Levant Answers Unspoken Request for 'Information, Please' With Uncensored Comments on Exalted Persons" by Ray C. B. Brown, in The Washington Post (January 14, 1940), p. E4

Music, Feeling, Effort, Season

“These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 5, Corporations Unlimited, p. 138

World, History

“Terrible things have happened. The de Witts are killed.”
“Is this so terrible? They have been your foes from the moment of your birth, and though out of power would have continued to conspire against you.”
“Sagi, if we must needs kill our opponents then civilization is a chimera. Governments are formed so that men may disagree without murder, and I tell you true, I loathe a mob more than anything.”
“They acted out of love for you.”

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

“That does not comfort me.”
Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 15 (p. 195)

Love, Men, Birth

“I'm capable of anything, my imagination can give me wings”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

Thugz Mansion (N.Y.)
On Albums, God's Son (2002)

Imagination

“The matter was still "Top Secret" and the subject of cabinet debates at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don't ask me why it was top secret, or even restricted; our government has gotten the habit of classifying anything as secret which the all-wise statesmen and bureaucrats decide we are not big enough boys and girls to know, a Mother-Knows-Best-Dear policy. I've read that there used to be a time when a taxpayer could demand the facts on anything and get them. I don't know; it sounds Utopian.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 24 (p. 127)

Secret, Girl, Boy, Time

“I'm looking at a hand full of broken plans, and I'm tired of playing it down, you just want her to do anything to you, there ain't nothing you won't allow, you wake up in the middle of the night, from a dream you won't remember flashing on like a cop's light, you say she's waiting and I know what for, the white lady loves you more**The White Lady Loves You More”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Lyrics, Elliott Smith (1995)

Love, Dreams, Light, Waiting

“I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.”

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Life

“Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex: for it is with this drive that all its beauty is bound up. More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please. This comes from the fact that they are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything whatever, and the reason for this is, I think, as follows. Man strives in everything for a direct domination over things, either by comprehending or by subduing them. But woman is everywhere and always relegated to a merely indirect domination, which is achieved by means of man, who is consequently the only thing she has to dominate directly. Thus it lies in the nature of women to regard everything simply as a means of capturing a man, and their interest in anything else is only simulated, is no more than a detour, i. e. amounts to coquetry and mimicry.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "On Women" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Women, Beauty, Art, Music

“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”

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

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 7
Misattributed

“We are touring the Ozarks. Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the steam? About the future prospects for bass or trout?”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Natural History: The Forgotten Science" [1938]; Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 62.
1930s

Future

“The Decision Theory School : Another approach to management theory, undertaken by a growing and scholarly group, might be referred to as the decision theory school. This group concentrates on rational approach to decision-the selection from among possible alternatives of a course of action or of an idea. The approach of this school may be to deal with the decision itself, or to the persons or organizational group making the decision, or to an analysis of the decision process. Some limit themselves fairly much to the economic rationale of the decision, while others regard anything which happens in an enterprise the subject of their analysis, and still others expand decision theory to cover the psychological and sociological aspect and environment of decisions and decision-makers.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: "The Management Theory Jungle," 1961, p. 180

School, Idea, Decision, Personality

“My work will use everything that it can to communicate. It will use any trick; it'll do anything — absolutely anything — to communicate and to win the viewer over. Even the most unsophisticated people are not threatened by it; they aren't threatened that this is something they have no understanding of. They can look at it and they can participate with it. And also somebody who has been very highly educated in art and deals with more esoteric areas can also view it and find that the work is open as far as being something that wants to add more to our culture. The work wants to meet the needs of' the people. It tries to bring down all the barriers that block people From their culture. that shield and hide them. It tells them to embrace the moment instead of always feeling that they're being indulged by things that they do not participate in. It tells them to believe in something and to eject their will. The idea of St. John and baptism right now is that there are greater things to come. And it's about embracing guilt and shame and moving forward instead of letting this negative society always thwart us — always a more negative society, always more negative.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

Partly cited in: Linda Weintraub, Arthur Coleman Danto, Thomas McEvilley. Art on the edge and over: searching for art's meaning in contemporary society, 1970s-1990s. Art Insights, Inc., 1996. p. 201; And cited in Kristine Stiles, ‎Peter Howard Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. p. 381
"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

People, Education, Art, Feeling

“But it never occurred to him to want to be a philosopher, or dedicate himself to Speculation; he was still too fickle for that. True, he was not drawn now to one thing and now to another – thinking was and remained his passion – but he still lacked the self-discipline required for acquiring a deeper coherence. Both the significant and the insignificant attracted him equally as points of departure for his pursuits; the result was not of great consequence – only the movements of thought as such interested him. Sometimes he noticed that he reached one and the same conclusion from quite different starting points, but this did not in any deeper sense engage his attention. His delight was always just to be pressing on; wherever he suspected a labyrinth, he had to find the way. Once he had started, nothing could bring him to a halt. If he found the going difficult and became tired of it before he ought, he would adopt a very simple remedy – he would shut himself up in his room, make everything as festive as possible, and then say loudly and clearly: I will do it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills, and his father’s life had not discredited this theory. Experiencing this had given Johannes indescribable pride; that there could be something one could not do when one willed it was unbearable to him. But his pride did not in the least indicate weakness of will, for when he had uttered these energetic words he was ready for anything; he then had a still higher goal – to penetrate the intricacies of the problem by force of will. This again was an adventure that inspired him. Indeed his life was in this way always adventurous. He needed no woods and wanderings for his adventures, but only what he possessed – a little room with one window.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus p. 22-23
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Life, Way, Departure, Problem

“I understand that it is the wish of the Editor of this collection of essays that each contributor should describe his own system of philosophy. Were I to interpret this demand literally I could not contribute anything at all, for two excellent reasons. In the first place, I have nothing worth calling a system of philosophy of my own, and there is no other philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a faithful follower. If this be a defect I see no likelihood of its ever being cured. Secondly, if I had a system of my own, I should doubt the propriety of "pushing" my crude philosophical wares in competition with the excellent products of older firms with well-earned reputations.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Critical and Speculative Philosophy (1924)

Faith, Understanding

“You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [ Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in Zola's novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard in Cezanne's studio in Aix - after the death of Zola in 1902; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

God, Youth, Art, Painting

“You know, the way I'm accepted, I almost feel like Judy Garland, truly. It makes no sense to me because I don't think that I've been any more outspoken… Or maybe I have, I don't know. But everyone I know supports anything that has to do with raising money or with AIDS.”

Bea Arthur (1922–2009) actress, singer, comedian

Interview, TV Legends, August 6, 2005

Money, Way, Feeling, Support

“Can we afford to let Laloo, whose knowledge of anything except caste structures is non-existent, damage the rural economy further? The long-suffering railway ministry, which has by now lost its ability to resist any absurd decision by any of their ministers, has agreed to budget Rs 250 crore a year to buy kulhars. While all that money comes from your pocket, where will it actually go?”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

Criticising Railway Minister Lalu Prasad's plan to introduce disposable clay-cups or kulhars to serve tea in trains, as quoted in "Clay-Pot Dictator!" http://www.outlookindia.com/article/claypot-dictator/224296, Outlook India (28 June 2004) 2001-2010

Money, Knowledge, Decision, Suffering

“Nobody is entitled to someone else's money, that is the bottom line. People think they are entitled to it because they think they paid into it, nobody paid into anything, it was a fraud. Every single dollar that the gov collected in social security taxes, has already been spent, there is nothing there, there is no money, so the only money the government gets to make current payment is the money it can take from people who are still working. Its a transfer from the working poor in many cases to the retired rich. We don't have the money, I feel bad for the fact people made promises we can't keep, I feel bad for the people that invested with Bernie Madoff and lost their money, but its the same principle, its the same Ponzi scheme. We have to put an end to it, we have to find real solution to these problems because if we keep on denying that they exist and keep on spending money, we're going to destroy the value of everyone's benefits.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

RTC, Avon, CT, 10th May 2010

Money, People, Feeling, Fraud

““That wasn’t very godly,” Alec calls up to him.
“And what has God to do with me?” Nicholas shouts back. “No voices speak to me out of any burning bush. No word at all. Hideous vacancy, monstrous indifference, and a senseless universe!”
“Well,” says Alec cautiously, “I would think that was a good thing. Shouldn’t you have grown out of this by now? What do you want meaning in the universe for, anyway? Nothing means anything! We’re just here to go along for the adventure.””

Kage Baker book The Sons of Heaven

Source: The Sons of Heaven (2007), Chapter 23, Section 1 “Child Care in the Cyborg Family, Volume Ten: The Awkward Years” (pp. 274-275)

God, Thinking, Universe, Indifference

“Unable to do anything for a month after the ordeal. No more cancer. No more radiation. My doctor pronounced me clear on March 29. Felt the crucifixion this year, and the tomb, and Easter Sunday. Still not sure who has emerged.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 132

“Libya is an African country. May Allah help the Arabs and keep them away from us. We don't want anything to do with them. They did not fight with us against the Italians, and they did not fight with us against the Americans. They did not lift the sanctions and siege from us. On the contrary, they gloated at us, and benefited from our hardship….”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Al Jazeera (27 March 2007)
Interviews

Help, Fight, Country

“Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!””

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 115)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Children, Stupidity, World, Understanding

“Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

Democracy

“The greater the speed required of us in the digital world – and speed does matter, but never at the expense of accuracy or fairness or anything which would imperil trust – the more we should be honest about the tentative nature of what is possible.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Alan Rusbridger (2008) cited in: Stuart Allan (2010) News Culture. p. 2.
2000s

World, Nature, Speed

“American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth. We can do anything we want to do.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Cultural Conservatism and the Religious Right https://www.c-span.org/video/?c3858491/phyllis-schlafly, C-SPAN.org (April 4, 2012)

Women, People

“For thus it is, men of Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it is the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death or anything else, before the baseness”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

of deserting his post
VII, 45
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

Death, Men, Truth, Thinking

“Thinking would not be possible at all if we were not social; we would have no words, no abstract ideas, and no energy for anything outside of immediate sensuality.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 7

Idea, Thinking

“With the main perpetrators of the 2000 coup around anything disastrous can happen. These people are the root of the coup culture and once they are put away this country can move forward.”

Maciu Navakasuasua Fijian political organizer

Source: "Interview, 11 January 2006", Fiji Sun http://www.sun.com.fj, 11 January 2006.

People, Country

“Yesterday I had a violent run-in with M. Eugene Manet on the subject of Seurat and Paul Signac. The latter was present, as was Guillaumin. You may be sure I rated Manet roundly. - Which will not please Renoir. - But anyhow, this is the point, I explained to M. Manet, who probably didn't understand anything I said, that Seurat has something new to contribute which these gentlemen, despite their talent, are unable to appreciate, that I am personally convinced of the progressive character of his art and certain that in time it will yield extraordinary results. Besides I am not concerned with the appreciation of artists, no matter whom. I do not accept the snobbish judgments of "romantic impressionists" to whose interest it is to combat new tendencies. I accept the challenge, that's all..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Paris March 1886, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 73-74
1880's

Art, Understanding, Time, Personality

“I don't think there's anything guaranteed 100% in life. I want to have discussions for sure and there's lots of talking to be done. I'm not saying I don't want to be Derby manager, I'm saying that I don't think in life anything is 100% guaranteed. Now we'll sit down, have a chat and see what happens. I'm not prepared to discuss it at the moment and I'm not prepared to go into specifics. I've never said I'm leaving but it was always my intention to get to the end of the season and have a discussion.”

Billy Davies (1964) Scottish association football player and manager

May 2007, http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/sport/north-east-football/2007/05/29/derby-county-1-west-brom-0-79310-19213006/
Billy made these remarks shortly after gaining promotion to the Premiership with Derby County

Life, Thinking, Season

“Mr. Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Rolling Stones

Source: The Rolling Stones (1952), Chapter 4, “Aspects of Domestic Engineering” (p. 61)

Mathematics, Learning, Heart, Personality

“With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler you can never be sure of anything. But I am determined to keep the country out of war. …[Hankey] thinks sanctions were put in [the Covenant of the League of Nations] at the request of the Americans. Likely enough, as they would be the first to run away from enforcing them. You will not get our people for a long time yet to be willing to pledge themselves to go to war for objects in the east of Europe.”

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

Conversation with Thomas Jones (30 April 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 191.
1936

War, People, Thinking, Time

“All right, I also have a condition:that you should not write down anything without grasping the full significance of what I say.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

Vyasa's condition agreeing to the terms set by Ganesha. Quoted in p. 139.
Sources, Hindu Culture, An Introduction

“I have a rather masculine nature. I'm not afraid of anything.”

Jeanne Calment (1875–1934) French supercentenarian who had the longest confirmed human life span in history

Source: Jeanne Calment: From Van Gogh's Time to Ours : 122 Extraordinary Years, 1998, p. 67

Nature

“When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.”

Robert Kagan book Of Paradise and Power

Alternate version: If you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
Of Paradise and Power, p. 26
According to Kagan, this is a variation of the proverb "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." (p. 25 of the same book)

“Unless the person is aiming upward, there is nothing you can do about their situation. And this seems to be about that initial choice between good and evil. Once someone comes to therapy, they've already done something. They've already said: I have a problem, conceivably I can fix it, and I need to do something about it. And so half the work is already done before they show up, because they've already said that 'things aren't as good as they could be, and I want to do something about it.' The question is, can you do anything about that person who is not at that state? You can't. All you can do is serve by example. But until the person has decided, on their own, that they're wrong (that's why they're suffering – there's something wrong about what they are doing) and that they want to fix it… I think that hammering against their situation often makes it worse. That's part of free will. I do not think that people can learn unless they admit that they're wrong.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

People, Question, Problem, Thinking

“As long as my colleagues and I have anything to do with the government of this province, we will see to it that Alberta continues to lead the world in the great fight to secure for every man, woman and child complete and permanent freedom from fear and worry and from social and economic insecurity.”

Ernest Manning (1908–1996) Canadian politician

Source: [Will The Real Alberta Please Stand Up, University of Alberta Press, 2010, 74, Geo Takach]

World, Fear, Freedom, Fight

“I am a feminist and I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist. What I don’t like about feminism and the far left in general is the in-fighting, the way that the far left in-fights too much to get anything done and I feel like in feminism it’s like, ‘well, she’s not really feminist enough’ and there can be this kind of less-than thing in feminism. And also I think there’s a biological paradigm between men and women where men are just men and women are just women, and there is something to be said about that. But at the same time, I think equality amongst the sexes is critical.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

On feminism, Dazed http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/30477/1/courtney-love-on-kurt-cobain-hole-andy-warhol-feminism-london (22 March 2016) 2014–2017

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“This calls for an explanation and it may be this, that no painting, however good it seems to us is anything in itself, except chemicals smeared on a flat surface. The value in the work of art is in the spectator, you see, and a painting has no bigger value than the mental and intellectual forces it arouses in the spectator.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Jorn's quote, from his speech at the library of Silkeborg, September l0th 1953 (translated from an unpublished Danish manuscript by Guy Atkins) ; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum Articles by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255 1949 - 1958, Various sources

Art, Painting

“Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done. … Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely this reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions. … We function of the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, … refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall. The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 324.

Life, Death, Beauty, Error

“This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 20
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

People, Way, Understanding, Reality

“I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me … from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching … a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Love, Age, Making love, Feeling

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63. C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities." 1940s

Lie, Sense, Sea

“It was from this day on that I began to notice a real difference between our vaqueros on the ranch from Mexico and the gringo cowboys. The American cowboys always seemed so ready to act rough and tough, wanting to “break” the horse, cow, or goat or anything else. Where, on the other hand, our vaqueros—who used the word “amanzar,” meaning to make “tame,” for dealing with horses—had a whole different attitude towards everything. To “break” a horse, for the cowboys, actually, really meant to take a green, untrained horse and rope him, knock him down, saddle him while he fought to get loose, then mount him as he got up on all four legs, and ride the living hell out of the horse until you tired him out, taught him who was boss, and “broke” his spirit. To “amanzar” a horse, on the other hand, was a whole other approach that took weeks of grooming, petting, and leading the green horse around in the afternoon with a couple of well-trained horses. Then, after about a month, you began to put a saddle on the horse and tie him up in shade in the afternoon for a couple of hours until, finally, the saddle felt like just a natural part of him. Then, and only then, did a person finally mount the horse, petting and sweet-talking him the whole time, and once more the green horse was taken on a walk between two well-trained horses.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Hell, Nature, Time, Horse

“I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Soul, Thinking, Time

“It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12.

Death, Men, Search, Personality

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians! It's no different! It is the same thing! It is happening all over again! It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians! Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today! More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history! … And it is happening here and now! Same thing, but directed against Christians by the liberal government and media! Send money today or these liberals will be putting Christians like you and me in concentration camps!”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

quoted in * 1993-09-15
Molly
Ivins
Molly Ivins
Toss (some of 'em) to the lions
The Tuscaloosa News
6A
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19930915&id=qIIfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hqUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6445,4278412

Money, History, Suffering

“I was never proud of anything. I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that.”

Luise Rainer (1910–2014) German-born Austrian and American film actress

Spartacus Schoolnet biography http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USArainer.htm

Birth, Baby

“Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 49.

“To do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding doubt and fear.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Website

Fear

“The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Love, People, Feeling, Support

“All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you… You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.”

Kathy Acker book Blood and Guts in High School

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

Hate, People, Law, Feeling

“Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics… Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 495

Life, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324171554491596803 (16 April 2013) Twitter

“When I saw the newspaper headline "Gas Chamber Expert Captured" and an American lieutenant explained it to me, I was pale in amazement. How can they say such things about me? I told you I was only in charge of the Intelligence Service from 1943 on. The British even admitted that they tried to assassinate me because of that, not because of having anything to do with atrocities, you can be sure of that.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

4/11/46. Quoted in "Nuremberg Diary" - Page 255 - by G. M. Gilbert - History - 1995

Intelligence

“God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings — not dummies! Be personal — be prejudiced — be catty — be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Dr Reilly
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

God, Way, Soul, Personality

“Scum they might be; many would otherwise have been hanged or deported, but firm discipline and fair treatment would soon change that. The hard men who would never break, Adam would take on himself to train. They often proved to be the best sailors, especially those who had never known anything but poverty and oppression.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

For My Country's Freedom, Cap 7 "Like a Troubled Sea"

Men, Change, Training

“If we know human anatomy and we are reasonably intelligent, he assumes that we can figure out how to do almost anything.”

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

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 84

Intelligence

“I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 5: Hollow's Cottage

Books, Drawing

“Anything negative about the country or the regime will be rapidly erased from the collective memory. This memory deletion is being carried out by censoring newspapers, magazines, television news, the Internet and anything that preserves memories.”

Yan Lianke (1958) Chinese novelist and satirist

"On China's State-Sponsored Amnesia"

Memory, Country

“We've let our rivals and challengers think they can get away with anything, and they do… If President Obama's goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.”

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

2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)

Thinking

“In fact, using entirely reasonable assumptions, you can make the Dow's discounted market value almost anything you want it to be.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 2, Measuring The Beast, p. 53.

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.”

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

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 246

Death, Communication

“As we all know, socialism failed. At the height of its popularity it caused widespread starvation and deprivation, wrecking whole economies wherever it was applied. It inspired childish, petulant dictators — ideologues who were eager to do anything except give up an idea that didn’t work — to put millions against the wall and send millions more to places like Siberia because the people couldn’t (the dictators said 'wouldn’t') gladly transmogrify themselves into New Collectivist Mankind, or whatever the slogan was at the time. In the end, it finally destroyed the most enormous empire history had ever known.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"New Maps of Bulgaria," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=41 26 October 2007.

People, History, Idea, Time

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

World, Girl, Fight

“.. But there is better. Simplicity, being direct. Everything else is just a game, just building castles in the sky... Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I'm brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 158-159, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Way, Game, Thinking, Animals

“Why does God want us to let go of our dreams? Because anything you are unwilling to let go of is an idol, and you are in sin.”

Phil Vischer (1966) American puppeter

Source: Me, Myself, & Bob (2006), p. 236

God, Dreams

“If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

Source: Why Evolution is True (2009), p. 140

History, Science

“The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

Fellow Teachers (1973)

God, War, Truth, Education

“[T]he South looked like anything but a market society, and no matter that slavery was based on the absurd and irrational prejudice of race; slavery's greatest attractions were its cheapness, its capacity for violent exploitation, and its mobility.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

Source: 2010s, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Chapter One

“War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway.”

Michael Herr book Dispatches

Dispatches (1977)

War, People

“Too much going on, never in my life thought that I'd had to worry about anything of this sort, rather than my mehendi!”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: PTI Me and my family know the truth: Sania http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-04-03/news/27587127_1_siddiquis-pakistani-cricketer-shoaib-malik-sania-mirza, The Economic Times, 3 April 2010

Life

“I love animals, always had. It's totally unfair what we do to animals who have no voice, who can't say anything, who can't do anything about it. And since they can't help themselves, someone needs to … I think people definitely need to pay more attention because it's so unfair. … [If you see an animal in need or mistreated] just make sure that you don't forget about the animal, because you wouldn't want anybody to forget about you if you couldn't talk.”

Marlen Esparza (1989) boxer

"Marlen Esparza: Don't Forget About Animals in Need" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t78Ns8vsoVU, interview with PETA (16 January 2013).

Love, People, Thinking, Help

“A gentleman can live through anything.”

William Faulkner book The Reivers

The Reivers (1962)

“To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to 'express' the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention, Section V : The Heroic Couplet and its Recent Rivals
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

Way, Feeling

“I just don't have the desire no more, I don't have the stomach to do it no more. I don't even kill insects in my house. I just don't kill anything no more. I used to kill pigeons, rip their heads off, 'You dirty rat pigeon!' I don't even have the heart to kill an animal no more. I just changed my whole life in general. That probably could have changed the way I fight.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=2083509&type=story
On boxing

Life, Way, Change, Heart

“I was completely absorbed as to what would happen because anything was possible.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“And again, don't misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It's not funny, it's sad.
Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle — we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say this is "gay". It's anything but gay.
It's profoundly sad to recognize that almost all, if not all, individuals who have gone into the lifestyle have been abused at one time in their life, either by a male or by a female. There's been profound hurt and profound things that have happened in almost all of their lives.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2010s

Life, People, Sadness, Family

“He who allows himself to be devoured will be devoured, and he will die before he has done his work. The man who has an ardent passion for work asks of others only what will help him. He shirks no work that ca be of use and that he ca do well, but he flies from conversations, meetings, talkfests, studios full of phrase-makers. Goethe even advises such a man to ignore daily events if he cannot do anything about them. If we spend an hour every morning informing ourselves about distant wars and another hour lamenting their possible consequences, when we are neither ministers, generals, nor journalists, nor anything, we render no service to our country and we waste the most irrecoverable of our possessions: our own short life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Life, War, Distant, Passion

“Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy; and, with the axe and plough and hammer, if not yet with any much finer kind of implements, are triumphantly clearing out wide spaces, seedfields for the sustenance and refuge of mankind, arenas for the future history of the world; doing, in their day and generation, a creditable and cheering feat under the sun. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men, World, Hope, History

“My words are nearly always an offense.
I don't know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can't say I see how.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Home Burial (1915)

“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Religion, Smile

“You sit around and you go, “Oh, I hope people like me, and I hope they friend me, and I hope they do all this superficial stuff that doesn't cost anything.” But what you really want is to not suck enough that people that you really admire wouldn't mind doing something with you.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

“Back to Work” podcast, Episode 1 (at 5:58) http://5by5.tv/b2w/1 Podcasts, 5by5 Studios podcasts

People, Hope

“I have a philosophy, you do the best you can, and the things you can’t do anything about, don’t give any thought to them. … I feel I have to make a contribution. When I was doing surgery, I made it by operating. Now I try to make it by speaking about preventive medicine.”

Ellsworth Wareham (1914–2018)

Interview with CNN's chief medicine reporter Sanjay Gupta (April 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGQTpxjbwaM.

Feeling

“Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened the islands that form, with the mainland, the canal of Santa Barbara. There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, and there is the beautiful point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheater of high hills and distant mountains. There is the old white mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little is it altered — the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific… the same bright-blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Beauty, Mountain, Distant, Housing

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War, People, Mountain, Star

“These masters of the universe must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk… The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds.”

Vince Cable (1943) British Liberal Democrat politician

Comment's on hedge funds http://blythvalleylibdems.org.uk/news/000037/hbos_brought_to_its_knees_by_hedge_funds_hunting_in_a_pack__cable.html, 17 September 2008. 2008

Family, Universe