Quotes about attempt
page 15

“It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

p 14
Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600, 1970

Life, Age, Education, Art

“Positive non-alignment, or indiscriminate openmindedness to the world, is a fundamental feature of Zaire's foreign policy. To this end, we are exerting ourselves in a bid to promote genuine cooperation among all countries that are willing to accept Zaire for what it is…The debacles that Zaire has faced and continues to face in various areas - colonization, alienation, exploitation, secession, rebellion - are due to the imperialist policies of the superpowers who have assumed the right to govern the world. Thus, we do not want to be involved directly or indirectly in any attempt to subjugate a state or group of states.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Mobutu explaining his foreign policy. Elliot and Dymally, p. 51

World, Country

“We inhabit a complex world. Some boundaries are sharp and permit clean and definite distinctions. But nature also includes continua that cannot be neatly parceled into two piles of unambiguous yeses and noes. Biologists have rejected, as fatally flawed in principle, all attempts by anti-abortionists to define an unambiguous “beginning of life,” because we know so well that the sequence from ovulation or spermatogenesis to birth is an unbreakable continuum—and surely no one will define masturbation as murder.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Living with Connections", p. 76
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Life, World, Birth, Nature

“There was strong warrant for pretensions… As far back as 1493, Pope Alexander VI had settled disputes between Spain and Portugal arising out of their rivalry in the Orient and the Occident by drawing a line from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores, giving all west of it to the Spanish, all east of it to the Portuguese. Both these nations attempted more or less persistently to exercise the sway thus given over the oceans as well as over the continent. The Portuguese forbade under heavy penalties any person, whether native or alien, to pass through the waters off the African and Brazilian coasts without special permission; the Spanish were hardly less severe toward those who without leave approached their dependencies. But, though the realization of the earth's rotundity renewed the old difficulty, and Spain and Portugal discovered that the Papal decision was futile, since all their new dominions could be approached both from the east and the west, both nations continued to maintain, as best they could, their sovereignty over the vast oceans. Other nations followed these examples.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 60-61

Penalty, Exercises, Decision, Strong

“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

World, Law, Thinking

“If your archenemy tried to kill you, this person would attempt to stop him.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006), Recognizing Your Nemesis

Personality

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication, Water

“Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

New York City (February 1916), p. 145
1910s, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color, Feeling, Home, Water

“To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Remaking Society (1990).

Nature

“I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can’t wait for the chance to try again.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 197

World, Chance, Waiting

“Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Elle est positivement apparentée avec l'infini.Sans elle, toutes les facultés, si solides ou si aiguisées qu'elles soient, sont comme si elles n'étaient pas, tandis que la faiblesse de quelques facultés secondaires, excitées par une imagination vigoureuse, est un malheur secondaire. Aucune ne peut se passer d'elle, et elle peut suppléer quelques-unes. Souvent ce que celles-ci cherchent et ne trouvent qu'après les essais successifs de plusieurs méthodes non adaptées à la nature des choses, fièrement et simplement elle le devine. Enfin elle joue un rôle puissant même dans la morale; car, permettez-moi d'aller jusque-là, qu'est-ce que la vertu sans imagination?
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés
Salon de 1859 (1859)

Truth, Imagination, Nature

“The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live… In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threathen China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Munk debates – “21st Century will belong to China” – Kissinger, Zakaria, Ferguson, Li http://www.livestream.com/munkdebates/video?clipId=pla_937b4cf4-e0ea-4ed5-a458-6a3ba43769b8 2000s

World, Peace, Imagination, Problem

“At is taking risks.... a sincere attempt to achieve the impossible, the unknown.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, 14 September 1967; p. 68
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Sincerity

“If this is an attempt by voters to blackmail the government, to compromise on important issues or principles, then we must show them we cannot be blackmailed. No government should succumb to blackmail.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

24 December 1984, in the aftermath of an election in which the Opposition got 2 seats

“In this book, we have reported on a behavioral research study of hospital patients that included a post-hospital follow-up and an investigation of patients'families, We have in brief attempted to state what the borderline syndrome is and speculate on the how and the why.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: The borderline syndrome, (1968), p. v

Books, Behavior, Study

“When a cartoonist attempts to be ‘fair and balanced’ and ‘understand all sides,’ they have failed. Too many avoid that altogether and instead become comedians. They take any topic and cast about and ask themselves: “What’s funny in this?” I despise that attitude. Sure, satirical humor is an important element, but not the only element. A good cartoonist need not be funny to be effective. Many of my best cartoons are not funny.”

Ben Garrison American political cartoonist

The “Rogue Cartoonist” Ben Garrison on What it’s Like to be a Political Cartoonist During the Presidential Election http://www.lifeandnews.com/articles/the-rogue-cartoonist-ben-garrison-on-what-its-like-to-be-a-political-cartoonist-during-the-presidential-election/ (September 30, 2016)

Understanding

“A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.”

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

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

Truth, Religion, Way, Error

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

People, Way, Behavior, Nature

“The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?”

H. G. Wells book The New World Order

The New World Order (1939)

Success

“No honest historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid army. Contemporary as well as later historians do not attempt to veil the nefarious acts but relate them with pride.”

Mohammad Habib (1895–1971) Indian historian

Politics and Society During the Early Medieval Period: Collected Works of Professor Mohammad Habib, Volume 2; p. 78
Mohammed Habib, quoted in Elst, K. 2002, Ayodhya: the case against the temple. Ch.10.

Faith

“Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Existentialism Is a Humanism, lecture (1946)

Men, God, Hope, Understanding

“One of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others -- "that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination" -- but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Abstract
Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925

Life, Art, Imagination, Reality

“The law has armed the High Court of Justice with the power, and imposed on it the duty of preventing brevi manu and by summary proceedings any attempt to interfere with the administration of justice. It is on that ground, and not on any exaggerated notion of the dignity of individuals that insults to Judges are not allowed.”

Charles Bowen (1835–1894) English judge

In re Johnson (1887), L. R. 20 Q. B. D. 74.

Justice, Law

“Others … are in the habit of teaching that religion and philosophy are really the same thing. Such a statement, however, appears to be true only in the sense in which Francis I is supposed to have said in a very conciliatory tone with reference to Charles V: ‘what my brother Charles wants is also what I want’, namely Milan. Others again do not stand on such ceremony, but talk bluntly of a Christian philosophy, which is much the same as if we were to speak of a Christian arithmetic, and this would be stretching a point. Moreover, epithets taken from such dogmas are obviously unbecoming of philosophy, for it is devoted to the attempt of the faculty of reason to solve by its own means and independently of all authority the problem of existence.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Andere wieder, von diesen Wahrheitsforschern, schmelzen Philosophie und Religion zu einem Kentauren zusammen, den sie Religionsphilosophie nennen; Pflegen auch zu lehren, Religion und Philosophie seien eigentlich das Selbe;—welcher Sah jedoch nur in dem Sinne wahr zu seyn scheint, in welchem Franz I., in Beziehung auf Karl V., sehr versöhnlich gesagt haben soll: „was mein Bruder Karl will, das will ich auch,”—nämlich Mailand, Wieder andere machen nicht so viele Umstände, sondern reden geradezu von einer Christlichen Philosophie;—welches ungefähr so herauskommt, wie wenn man von einer Christlichen Arithmetik reden wollte, die fünf gerade seyn ließe. Dergleichen von Glaubenslehren entnommene Epitheta sind zudem der Philosophie offenbar unanständig, da sie sich für den Versuch der Vernunft giebt, aus eigenen Mitteln und unabhängig von aller Auktorität das Problem des Daseyns zu lösen.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 155, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 142-143
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Religion, Problem, Sense, Appearance

“In attempting to expose the views of another, one is forced to make one's own view appear infallible and absolute, which is a procedure altogether to be avoided if one is making a specifically non-evaluative investigation. The second possible approach is nevertheless to combine such a non-evaluative analysis with a definite epistemology. Viewed from the angle of this second approach there are two separate and distinct solutions to the problem of what constitutes reliable knowledge — the one solution may be termed relationism, and the other relativism.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Knowledge, Problem, Appearance

“My difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one. I do not believe – and no one believed for 200 years – that the Constitution contains a right to abortion. And if a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would and could in good conscience vote against an attempt to invalidate that law, for the same reason that I vote against invalidation of laws that contradict Roe v. Wade; namely, simply because the Constitution gives the federal government and, hence, me no power over the matter.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Call for Reckoning http://pewforum.org/deathpenalty/resources/transcript3.php3 - Pew Forum conference (25 January 2002). N.b. this speech was later modified into an article - God's Justice and Ours http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/gods-justice-and-ours-32 which repeats much the same points. 2000s

Law

“Bohr's investigation had typified what had become a standard procedure in problems of theoretical physics. The first step was to discover the mathematical laws governing certain groups of phenomena; the second was to devise hypothetical models or pictures to interpret these laws in terms of motion or mechanism; the third was to examine in what way these models would behave in other respects, and this would lead to prediction of other phenomena-predictions which might or might not be confirmed when put to the test of experiment. For instance, Newton had explained the phenomena of gravitation in terms of a force of gravitation; a later age had seen the luminiferous ether introduced to explain the propagation of light and, subsequently, the general phenomena of electricity and magnetism; finally Bohr had introduced electronic jumps in an attempt to explain atomic spectra. In each case the models had fulfilled their primary purpose, but had failed to predict further phenomena with accuracy.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Age, Law, Way, Mathematics

“Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth century) as being both temple plunderers, can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two….. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk"…. Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention….. So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about his eminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Way, History, Idea, Reading

““Will you write the story?”
“If there is one.”
“Happy ending or no?” He was serious.
She attempted a smile. “Fairy tales always have a happy ending.”
He leaned back in his chair. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you are Rumplestiltskin or the Queen.””

Jane Yolen book Briar Rose

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 16 (p. 91)

Smile, Dependency, Happiness

“For instance, I have never believed that Jesus Christ would approve either abortions or the death penalty, but I obeyed such Supreme Court decisions to the best of my ability, at the same time attempting to minimize what I considered to be their adverse impact.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Page 57
Post-Presidency, Our Endangered Values (2005)

Death, Penalty, Decision, Time

“We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror.”

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

Remarks by the President to United Nations General Assembly http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/10/ret.bush.un.transcript/index.html?_s=PM:US (November 10, 2001) 2000s, 2001

Truth

“The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Conservation Esthetic", p. 174.

“Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

As quoted in The Albany Law Journal Vol. XLIX (January - June 1894), p. 47; also paraphrased as: "Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms."

Life, Law

“The term Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is typically used to describe software development approaches in which abstract models of software systems are created and systematically transformed to concrete implementations…. Full realizations of the MDE vision may not be possible in the near to medium-term primarily because of the wicked problems involved. On the other hand, attempting to realize the vision will provide insights that can be used to signiﬁcantly reduce the gap between evolving software complexity and the technologies used to manage complexity.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Model-driven development of complex software: A research roadmap (2007), p. 37: Abstract

Problem

“While politics is the art of the possible, history is the art of the impossible. I have never hesitated in attempting the impossible. What is historically relevant may not be politically prudent. One has to make one’s choices.”

V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician

The Lonely Punter: V.P.Singh

Art, History

“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

As quoted in Play to Live (1982) by Alan Watts

World, Hell, Chance

“There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights. Not that civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive that civil rights. And as that movement grew and developed it was inspired by and in turn inspired liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It was not only a question of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in society, but rather it was also about substantive rights—it was about jobs, free education, free health care, affordable housing, and also about ending the racist police occupation of black communities.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

Health, Education, Communication, Question

“This attempt to usurp the government by subverting the Constitution of the United States was the policy of the greatest leader the system of slavery has ever had in this country — that pagan of our politics, Mr. Calhoun. While other statesmen merely saw, he foresaw. His mind, of large forecast and comprehensive grasp, perceived that the logic of history, of civilization, of our national idea, of the universal conscience, was against slavery. But he had seen the conscience of the country, roused for a moment in the Missouri debate, drop asleep again. And with the audacity of genius he resolved to stun the country into acquiescence by claiming that slavery was the fundamental law of the land.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

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

Law, History, Idea, Universe

“Very quickly the church found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First, he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? … Again, Jesus says, “Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and then come and follow me.” How are we to take this? …
The way opens, then, for the sapping work of theologians of all kinds, then of lawyers, in an attempt to explain that Jesus wanted to say something other than what is written, or that these commandments are meant only for a spiritual elite and are simply counsels for others, or that the order given to the rich young ruler was meant for him alone. In other words, the texts have been wrested in all kinds of ways so that we should not be driven into a corner or forced to recognize the distance between God and us.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 41-42

God, Way, Christ, Perfection

“You say the right hon. baronet [Peel] is a traitor. It would ill become me to attempt his defence after the speech which he delivered last night—a speech, I will venture to say, more powerful and more to be admired than any speech which has been delivered within the memory of any man in this House. I watched the right hon. baronet as he went home last night, and for the first time I envied him his feelings. That speech was circulated by scores of thousands throughout the kingdom and throughout the world; and wherever a man is to be found who loves justice, and wherever there is a labourer whom you have trampled under foot, that speech will bring joy to the heart of the one, and hope to the breast of the other. You chose the right hon. baronet—why? Because he was the ablest man of your party. You always said so, and you will not deny it now. Why was he the ablest? Because he had great experience, profound attainments, and an honest regard for the good of the country. You placed him in office. When a man is in office he is not the same man as when in opposition. The present generation, or posterity, does not deal as mildly with men in government as with those in opposition. There are such things as the responsibilities of office. Look at the population of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and there is not a man among you who would have the valour to take office and raise the standard of Protection, and cry, "Down with the Anti-Corn Law League, and Protection for ever!" There is not a man in your ranks who would dare to sit on that bench as the Prime Minister of England pledged to maintain the existing law. The right hon. baronet took the only, the truest course—he resigned. He told you by that act: "I will no longer do your work. I will not defend your cause. The experience I have had since I came into office renders it impossible for me at once to maintain office and the Corn Laws."”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

The right hon. baronet resigned—he was then no longer your Minister. He came back to office as the Minister of his Sovereign and of the people.
Speech in the House of Commons (17 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 148.
1840s

Love, Men, People, World

“Even 'Jurassic Park III' tried to jump on the avian-dino bandwagon by making a brave attempt to adorn Velociraptor with a feathery hair-piece. (The result looked like a roadrunner's toupee- don't blame the effects-artists; it's notoriously difficult to render feathers in computer graphics animation, so we'll have to wait for 'JP IV' for a more thoroughly rendered avian pelage.)”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

“Dinosaurs Acting Like Birds, and Vice Versa – An Homage to the Reverend Edward Hitchcock, First Director of the Massachusetts Geological Survey” in Feathered Dragons. Currie, P.; Koppelhus, E.; Shugar, M.; Wright J. eds. 2004. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 1-11.

Waiting, Animals

“A great part of its theories derives an additional charm from the peculiarity that important propositions, with the impress of simplicity on them, are often easily discovered by induction, and yet are of so profound a character that we cannot find the demonstrations till after many vain attempts; and even then, when we do succeed, it is often by some tedious and artificial process, while the simple methods may long remain concealed.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

On higher arithmetic. Mathematical Circles Adieu (1977) by Howard W. Eves

Parting

“In the long run, any attempt to reduce the complexity of the relations among the sacred, the properly secular, and the profane is doomed to failure, although each such effort can cause great human hardship in the short run. But in both the short and the long run, the Church, or the synagogue, or the mosque or the temple, is where you go when you want to be connected to the One who relates to everyone and every people. If the Church is where one goes to be truly free, how does the Church contribute to our understanding of who we are and what we should do in the activities that shape the world we live in, that fill the theater of secularity?”

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

God in Action: How Faith in God Can Address the Challenges of the World (2011) Ch. 1 "God in American Public Life," pp. 46-47.

People, World, Failure, Understanding

“All through these attempts to give the traditional concept of God a more explicit content philosophers did not mind if, in making the content more explicit, they departed from the original, highly emotionally charged, concept of deity.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 154, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.

God

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life, Death, Money, Fate

“Thus, Grünendahl has noted Pollock's tendency to develop broad narratives without any supporting evidence. Moreover, he draws attention to Pollock's messianism in promoting American scholarship…., casting doubt on Pollock's attempt to analyse Sanskrit objectively. He raises the pertinent question as to whether Pollock is providing the intellectual foundations for America's 'New Raj', to replace the dead British Raj - i. e., whether American imperialism is replacing the dead British imperialism.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Question, Support, Drawing, Dead

“The result was that when war did break out German preparations were far ahead of our own, and it was natural then to expect that the enemy would take advantage of his initial superiority to make an endeavour to overwhelm us and France before we had time to make good our deficiencies. Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason—whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete—however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Central Council of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations at Central Hall, Westminster (4 April 1940), quoted in "Confident of Victory," The Times (5 April 1940), p. 8.
Hitler began the 'Westfeldzug' five weeks later and entered France at the beginning of june. June 10th, Paris was declared to be an 'open town.
Prime Minister

War, Nature, Time, Fight

“After a certain age, any new friends we make in our attempt to replace the ones we've lost are like glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Les nouveaux amis que nous faisons après un certain âge, et par lesquels nous cherchons à remplacer ceux que nous avons perdus, sont à nos anciens amis ce que les yeux de verre, les dents postiches et les jambes de bois sont aux véritables yeux, aux dents naturelles et aux jambes de chair et d'os.
Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris :1923), #303
Reflections

Age, Falseness

“The subject matter of mathematics has increased so rapidly and extensively that there is some element of truth in maintaining that mathematics is not so much a subject as a way of studying any subject, not so much a science as a way of life. We turn, then, from the attempt to characterize the material object of mathematics to an attempt to determine its formal object, i. e., its methodology.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Life, Truth, Way, Mathematics

“There’s a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)
Variant: There's a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.

Waiting

“They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life…It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends. (Cheers.) The social problems that confront us are many and formidable. Let the Government labour to its utmost, let the Legislature labour days and nights in your service; but, after the very best has been attained and achieved, the question whether the English father is to be the father of a happy family and the centre of a united home is a question which must depend mainly upon himself. (Cheers.) And those who…promise to the dwellers in towns that every one of them shall have a house and garden in free air, with ample space; those who tell you that there shall be markets for selling at wholesale prices retail quantities—I won't say are imposters, because I have no doubt they are sincere; but I will say they are quacks (cheers); they are deluded and beguiled by a spurious philanthropy, and when they ought to give you substantial, even if they are humble and modest boons, they are endeavouring, perhaps without their own consciousness, to delude you with fanaticism, and offering to you a fruit which, when you attempt to taste it, will prove to be but ashes in your mouths.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Cheers.
Speech at Blackheath (28 October 1871), quoted in The Times (30 October 1871), p. 3.
1870s

Life, Family, Home, Question

“Once one learns how to speak a language, the authority of the language has fulfilled its aim, but is not thereby overcome. Authority remains as the entry to the inquiry one has undertaken. It is not overcome or passed by so much as it is actualized, fulfilled. That is why philosophic reformations seem too often to be nested within what it is they seek to reform. Insofar as it begins from its predecessor, every attempted reformation is only the confession of the authority of its predecessor's discourse. The appearance of abrupt 'revolutions' in philosophy is produced only by ignoring, sometimes ingenuously, the authority of previous speech.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

Learning, Appearance

“A large proportion of allegedly feeble-minded children are actually attempted abortion cases... However many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God... All these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested again.”

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

Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

God, Children, Sex

“All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
1980s

World

“In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 210.

“I was also not willing to accept the orders of the leaders regarding my personal life or the personal lives of the other members. I had refused to allow the government to tell me how to live, so why should I allow the leadership of Progressive Labor to reorient my life?… Open criticism of the leadership dictums did not sit well with them, and they immediately began to accuse me of ‘trying to create a splinter group.’… The leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their ‘public image’ that they told members to shave their mustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful whom they are seen with, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concerns, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertarians!”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 44

Life, People, Girl, Time

“I don't post on forums or comments for the same reason I don't attempt to french kiss pneumatic drills.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

24 January 2010
Twitter

Kiss

“The opponents of the Constitution declared that the larger states would disturb the United States by their powerful contentions; the supporters replied that those contentions were sure to disturb the continent if the larger states were not united, much less sure to do it if they were united and so could be expected to arrive at peaceable agreements.
The opponents of the Constitution were convinced that the people of the individual states could be protected only by their states armed with full, or at least substantial sovereignty. The supporters of the Constitution knew that conflicting sovereignties had been the causes of most wars, in which the people have regularly suffered.
The opponents of the Constitution in 1787 could talk only of the difficulties of forming a new government The supporters of the Constitution aware of the dangers facing the Confederation, demanded that a new government be attempted, no matter what the difficulties.”

Carl Van Doren (1885–1950) American biographer

Preface
The Great Rehearsal (1948)

War, People, Support, Suffering

“Our Constitution wisely assigns both joint and separate roles to each branch of the government; and a President and a Congress who hold each other in mutual respect will neither permit nor attempt any trespass.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

First State of the Union Address (30 January 1961)
1961, State of the Union

“Hayek’s blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right - and wrong (2015)

People, Appearance, Time

“But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, "3rd State of the Onion"

Spring, Literature

“We live today in a world which only faintly resembles that of a half century ago. The standard of living, the level of education, and the political complexion of the United States today profoundly affect both the possibilities and limitations of organizational behavior. In addition, technological changes are bringing about changes in all types of organization. In the military, for example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage a weapons team in the field as a typical infantry unit was managed a couple of decades ago. Such a team requires a high degree of autonomy. Instead of following explicit orders from superiors, it must be able to adjust its behavior to fit local circumstances within the context of relatively broad objectives. (It is interesting to note the attempts that are made — by "programming" for example — to retain central control over the operations of such units. Established theories of control are not abandoned easily, even in the face of clear evidence of their inappropriateness.) Underlying the principles of classical organization theory are a number of assumptions about human behavior which are at best only partially true.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 16 (2006; 23)

World, Education, Behavior, Change

“In 1925 Heisenberg made a new attempt, on entirely novel lines, to obtain an explanation of atomic spectra. Working in collaboration with Bohr, he had come to the conclusion that the imperfections of Bohr's theory had been a consequence of assuming too simple a model for the atom. For Bohr had not only assumed that the atom consisted of particles moving through space and time, but also that the particles inside atoms were of the same kind as the electrons outside atoms.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Time

“I am not one to advocate the reducing of our navy in any degree below that proportion to the French navy which the exigencies of our service require; and, mind what I say, here is just what the French Government would admit as freely as you would. England has four times, at least, the amount of mercantile tonnage to protect at sea that France has, and that surely gives us a legitimate pretension to have a larger navy than France. Besides, this country is an island; we cannot communicate with any part of the world except by sea. France, on the other hand, has a frontier upon land, by which she can communicate with the whole world. We have, I think, unfortunately for ourselves, about a hundred times the amount of territory beyond the seas to protect, as colonies and dependencies, that France has. France has also twice or three times as large an army as England had. All these things give us a right to have a navy somewhat in the proportion to the French navy which we find to have existed if we look back over the past century. Nobody has disputed it. I would be the last person who would ever advocate any undue change in this proportion. On the contrary—I have said it in the House of Commons, and I repeat it to you—if the French Government showed a sinister design to increase their navy to an equality with ours; then, after every explanation to prevent such an absurd waste, I should vote 100 millions sterling rather than allow that navy to be increased to a level with ours—because I should say that any attempt of that sort without any legitimate grounds, would argue some sinister design upon this country.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Rochdale (26 June 1861), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 433-4.
1860s

World, Communication, Thinking, Change

“Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (pp. 259-260).

Life, Death, Pain, People

“Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize — make seem natural — the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not from the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as part of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination over others… Most fundamentally, I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life, God, People, World

“We may question, do the European policymakers act morally correct when they do not take serious attempts to prevent the arctic oil drilling.”

Syksy Räsänen (1973)

2013
Moraali voi sivuuttaa lakipykälät HS 5.10.2013

Question

“The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God.”

Ken MacLeod (1954) Scottish science fiction writer

Newton's Wake
Other works

God, People

“Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures. Some examples of such popular offerings include”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Planning Methodologies: Stage Assessment, Critical Success Factors, Strategy Set Transformation, etc.
Design Approaches: Structured Analysis, Entity-Relationship Approaches, etc.
Tools and Techniques"Problem Statement Language/Problem Statement Analyzer (PSL/PSA), Prototype Development Methodology, Structured Analyses and Design Techniques, etc.
From an historical perspective, BSP and BICS likely will be looked back on as primitive attempts to take an explicit, enterprise-level architectural approach to information systems.
Source: Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982, p. 32

“Far back in history, there is evidence that men who have attempted to solve the riddle of water have been bitterly attacked. Every attempt to explain the nature of water in old books has been demolished in the later editions. In any case, maintaining the sense of mystery about water ensures the prosperity of the capital intensive economy, for financial interest thrives only on a defective economy. If the riddle surrounding the origins of water were solved, it would be possible to make as much pure water available as required at any location; in this way vast areas of desert would become fertile. As a consequence, the selling values of the produce would sink so low that there would be no more incentive to speculate, or to develop agricultural machinery. The concept of unrestricted production and cheap machine power is so revolutionary, that the way of life all over the world would experience a change. Maintaining the mystery of water, therefore, maintains the value of capital, so every attempt to come nearer to an explanation is attacked.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Living Water

Life, Men, Books, World

“I will continue to use my voice. I believed from the beginning that [the lawsuit] was an attempt to muzzle my voice, and I come from a people who have struggled and died in order to have a voice in this country. And I refused to be muzzled.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

"Oprah: 'Free speech rocks' " in CNN (26 February 1998)

People, Country

“Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.”

Whitney Chadwick (1943)

Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) ISBN 0-500-20393-8

Art, History

“ARTS is a somewhat conservative magazine but it is not uniformly, simply or blindly conservative, and the several conservative writers vary. And I am certainly not a conservative and neither is Miss Harrison. I decidedly disagree with the basic positions of Mr. Kramer, Miss Raynor and Mr. Tillim, though not with some of their evaluations, both of conservative and nonconservative artists. I think Ben Johnson's paintings, for example, are relatively uninteresting and powerless and that the work of some of the dop artists is full of true emotion. uninteresting and powerless and that the work of some of the dop artists is full of true emotion. The conservatism of Mr. Kramer and Mr. Mellow as successive editors lies only in the publication of more articles on conservative artists than on unconservative ones. Neither editors ever suggested to me that the magazine should have a uniform position or attempt to control my reviews, which are often contrary to Mr. Kramer’s opinions.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

1960s
Source: Arts Magazine, Vol. 38, (1963) p. 7

Art, Thinking, Success, Painting

“Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Look to Windward
Culture series, Look to Windward (2000)

God, Sense, Memory, Animals

“Swedish politicians are not right about much, but you get the impression they think they're setting the example to the rest of us. And they are right about that. Their recent bizarre decision to recognize 'Palestine' – a country that doesn't exist – is somewhat poignant: as the way things are going Sweden itself won't exist much longer. Seems like every piece of news that comes out of that country is more disturbing than the last. But, then, they have been committing cultural suicide so enthusiastically for so long there is now almost a sense that a tipping point is being reached and that, for the rest of us, it's really just a matter of watching the grim process unfold as we thank our lucky stars we don't live there… In Sweden today, democracy is a threat that must be neutralised, just as free speech is a threat that must be criminalised. Like the old Soviet Union, they can't afford to allow either because they're attempting to create an artificial society from a blueprint that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And they've given it an almost theological significance so that a dogma has been established, and this has led, inevitably, to heresy becoming a problem. So now anyone in Sweden who expresses the wrong opinion about Muslim immigration is liable to be arrested, that's if the police are not too busy running away from violent Muslims.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Sweden — Ship of fools" (13 October 2014) https://youtube.com/watch/?v=RZsvdg1dkJ4 2014

Way, Democracy, Star, Business

“For ourselves, we firmly believe that the finger of Providence is pointing the way to all races, and colors, and nations, along the path that is to lead the east and the west alike to the great goal of human wants. Demons infest that path, and numerous and unhappy are the wanderings of millions who stray from its course; sometimes in reluctance to proceed; sometimes in an indiscreet haste to move faster than their fellows, and always in a forgetfulness of the great rules of conduct that have been handed down from above. Nevertheless, the main course is onward; and the day, in the sense of time, is not distant, when the whole earth is to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, "as the waters cover the sea.
One of the great stumbling-blocks with a large class of well-meaning, but narrow-judging moralists, are the seeming wrongs that are permitted by Providence, in its control of human events. Such persons take a one-sided view of things, and reduce all principles to the level of their own understandings. If we could comprehend the relations which the Deity bears to us, as well as we can comprehend the relations we bear to him, there might be a little seeming reason in these doubts; but when one of the parties in this mighty scheme of action is a profound mystery to the other, it is worse than idle, it is profane, to attempt to explain those things which our minds are not yet sufficiently cleared from the dross of earth to understand.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Preface
Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848)

Color, Way, Understanding, Knowledge

“Lenin may be proud of what his comrades are doing; the Russian workers are acquiring immortal glory in attempting the realization of what hitherto had been only an abstract idea…..”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

“For Lenin,” Soviet Russia, Official Organ of The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Vol. II, New York: NY, January-June 1920 (April 10, 1920), p. 356

Idea

“We have been attempting to relieve ourselves and the other nations from the old theory of competitive armaments. In spite of all the arguments in favor of great military forces, no nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace or to insure its victory in time of war. No nation ever will. Peace and security are more likely to result from fair and honorable dealings, and mutual agreements for a limitation of armaments among nations, than by any attempt at competition in squadrons and battalions. No doubt this country could, if it wished to spend more money, make a better military force, but that is only part of the problem which confronts our Government. The real question is whether spending more money to make a better military force would really make a better country. I would be the last to disparage the military art. It is an honorable and patriotic calling of the highest rank. But I can see no merit in any unnecessary expenditure of money to hire men to build fleets and carry muskets when international relations and agreements permit the turning of such resources into the making of good roads, the building of better homes, the promotion of education, and all the other arts of peace which minister to the advancement of human welfare. Happily, the position of our country is such among the other nations of the world that we have been and shall be warranted in proceeding in this direction.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

Men, Money, War, World

“What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 24

Marriage, People, Communication, Dependency

“Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane — while the other half of the window is wide open?”

Wei Wu Wei (1895–1986) writer

Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)

“It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)

People, Education, Personality

“The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors… The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.”

Rolf Gindorf (1939–2016) German sexologist

"Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event," from The repressed sexes: Historical texts and commentaries on homosexuality, ed. J.S. Hohmann (Lollar: Achenbach, 1977), pp. 129-44

Sex, Behavior, Error, Help

“Socialism, when it attempts to predict or imagine the future (which Marx refused to do, since he conceived of a path, not a model), provides us merely with an improved form of labor”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

salaries and material conditions on the job
Henri Lefebvre (1970/2003) The Urban Revolution p. 110.
Variant:
Marx... conceived of a path, not a model.
As cited in: "Anti-Capitalist Meet Up: Henri Lefebvre looks out into space" at dailykos.com, 2012.04.29
Other quotes

Imagination, Future