Quotes about attitude
page 12

“Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 337
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith, Soul

“Their attitude to Marx, as the leading critic of capitalism, is therefore much less cocksure than it used to be. In my belief, they have much to learn from him.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Foreword, p. xxii
An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966)
Context: Until recently, Marx used to be treated in academic circles with contemptuous silence, broken only by an occasional mocking footnote. But modern developments in academic theory, forced by modern developments in economic life — the analysis of monopoly and the analysis of unemployment — have shattered the structure of orthodox doctrine and destroyed the complacency with which economists were wont to view the working of laissez-faire capitalism. Their attitude to Marx, as the leading critic of capitalism, is therefore much less cocksure than it used to be. In my belief, they have much to learn from him.

Learning

“Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again left me”

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

1940s, "Autobiographical Notes" (1949)
Context: Even when I was a fairly precocious young man the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chases most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness with considerable vitality. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. Moreover, it was possible to satisfy the stomach by such participation, but not man in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being. As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came—despite the fact that I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original poignancy.

“For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Stig Bjorkman interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: That I wasn't interested in politics or social matters, that's dead right. I was utterly indifferent. After the war and the discovery of the concentration camps, and with the collapse of political collaborations between the Russians and the Americans, I just contracted out. My involvement became religious. I went in for a psychological, religious line... the salvation-damnation issue, for me, was never political. It was religious. For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour. My revolt against bourgeois society was a revolt-against-the-father. I was a peripheral fellow, regarded with deep suspicion from every quarter... When I arrived in Gothenburg after the war, the actors at the Municipal Theatre fell into distinct groups: old ex-Nazis, Jews, and anti-Nazis. Politically speaking, there was dynamite in that company: but Torsten Hammaren, the head of the theatre, held it together in his iron grasp.

God, World, Faith, Communication

“You can take the IAT yourself at ProjectImplicit. org. But be forewarned: it can be disturbing. You can actually feel yoursel moving more slowly when you are asked to associate good things with the faces of one race rather than another. You can watch as you implicit attitude contradicts implicit associations with many social groups, such as black people, immigrants, obese people, and the elderly.”

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind (2012)

People, Feeling

“Having a positive mental attitude is asking how something can be done rather than saying it can't be done. ”

Бо Беннет (1972)

Attitude

“Change occurs by following this process: New Information is accepted. A new attitude is adopted. A new behavior is practiced. New conviction influence others.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

Behavior, Change

“Being teachable requires two things: Capacity and attitude.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

“Possessing the intentional attitude and behavior to keep learning and growing throughout life is teachability.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

Life, Behavior, Learning

“Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.”

Ralph Smart

Patience, Attitude, Good Morning

“Remember, most of your stress comes from the way you respond, not the way life is. Adjust your attitude, and all that extra stress is gone.”

Ralph Smart

Life, Way

“Balu is a Kannadiga Brahmin by birth, a former Marxist, and his discourse has a very in-your-face quality. In his latest book, Reconceptualizing India Studies, the attentive reader will see a critique of the Indological establishment in the West and the political and cultural establishment in India. Like Rajiv Malhotra’s recent works, it questions their legitimacy. The reigning Indologists and India-watchers would do well to read it.... Balu’s theses are uncomfortable and sure to provoke debate. So far, the attitude of the India-watching class and of the elites in India has been to ignore any criticism of their worldview. … On the whole, Balu’s thesis is optimistic. He offers solutions to the problems he analyzes, mostly solutions that he himself has already worked out or has been practising for years. It is not as if any fate condemns Indian policy and academic India-watching to their present prejudices. He also believes in the promise of the age of globalization, and thinks Indians and Europeans genuinely have something to offer each other.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015. Ch. 3. The Lost Honour of India Studies

Fate, Books, Age, Birth

“Today, the American Government has dropped its original attitude of disbelief and admitted that it has over eighteen hundred authentic cases on its files. The British Air Ministry is more cautious, but grudgingly admits that it also has a secret department to deal with or to discourage questions.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Secret, Question

“Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement.”

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) British classical scholar, linguist and feminist

p. 1 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3939906;view=1up;seq=31 Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion (1903)

God, Religion, Way, Confidence

“Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

Life, World, Feeling, Motivation

“The fatwas reflect this belief in double standards. The differential attitude to conversion and apostasy illustrates this vividly. Islam regards it as a right and duty to convert persons from other religions. The ulema vehemently insist on it....Exactly the same position holds in regard to doing something or refraining from doing something out of regard for the other person’s religious sentiments.....An even more vivid instance is the stance in regard to the continuation of religious practices. It is the right and duty of a Muslim to carry on his religious rituals. ...Under no circumstances can the Islamic ruler give permission to kafirs to continue their religious rites, declares the Fatawa-i-Rizvia, and asks: shall he permit them to practise their kufr and thereby himself become a kafir?...It adds that there are several Hadis to the effect that no non-Muslim should remain in the Arab island...So, no non-Muslim shall be allowed to stay in the Arab island, but if a Bangladeshi who has entered India illegally is asked to leave, that is an assault on Islam!...Similarly, even today in no Islamic state can teachers in a school impart religious education of their faith to non-Muslim children...No restriction can be tolerated on teaching of the Quran and on religious instruction, declares Kifayatullah. ...And yet if we were to go by secularist discourse there is no religion which has abolished distinctions as Islam has, there is no religion which treats all equally as Islam does!”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action)

Children, Education, School, Faith

“The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On the writing process in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review (September 1991)

People, Suffering

“Even though there’s a massive amount of people of colour now living in Scotland…this country is 30 or 40 years behind any other English city in terms of racial attitudes and integration. There’s no proper acknowledgement of the slave trade and how many Scottish cities were founded on money from that. Our children are just not taught that history.”

Jackie Kay (1961) Poet and novelist

On how she believes Scotland perceives race in “Jackie Kay on putting her adoption on stage – and getting a pay rise for her successor” https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/aug/07/jackie-kay-adoption-on-stage-pay-rise-successor-scotland-national-poet-scandal-five-grand in The Guardian (2019 Aug 7)

Money, Children, People, History

“Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew, made the Jewish cultural position in the West not only tenable, but impregnable. But the same Baruch Spinoza was actually responsible for the cultural anti-Semitism of modern Europe. He shaped the strong anti-Jewish attitude of his greatest admirers, followers, and adepts Herder, Goethe, Hegel, and Fichte. They were outspoken Jew-haters. They admired Spinoza, but with their master hated his race and its world-picture.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (1933)

Hate, World, Strong

“Success is not about having, it’s about living. Success does not mean achievement. Its definition keeps on changing. Through the changing times success achieved in the previous stages becomes irrelevant and the achievements should never be considered as success in present time. Your talent and and skills may take you to certain heights but the attitude filled within you is what takes you to the higher destiny.”

Gaur Gopal Das (1973) Indian spiritual leader, lifestyle coach and motivational speaker

[‘Failures are positive steps for success', https://www.deccanherald.com/failures-are-positive-steps-700395.html, Deccan Herald, 28 October 2018]

Change, Time, Success

“On the one hand this catastrophe had brought to light the utterly corrupt and pernicious character of the ruling oligarchy, their incapacity, their coterie-policy, their leanings towards the Romans. On the other hand the seizure of Sardinia, and the threatening attitude which Rome on that occasion assumed, showed plainly even to the humblest that a declaration of war by Rome was constantly hanging like the sword of Damocles over Carthage, and that, if Carthage in her present circumstances went to war with Rome, the consequence must necessarily be the downfall of the Phoenician dominion in Libya. Probably there were in Carthage not a few who, despairing of the future of their country, counselled emigration to the islands of the Atlantic; who could blame them? But minds of the nobler order disdain to save themselves apart from their nation, and great natures enjoy the privilege of deriving enthusiasm from circumstances in which the multitude of good men despair. They accepted the new conditions just as Rome dictated them; no course was left but to submit and, adding fresh bitterness to their former hatred, carefully to cherish and husband resentment—that last resource of an injured nation. They then took steps towards a political reform.(1) They had become sufficiently convinced of the incorrigibleness of the party in power: the fact that the governing lords had even in the last war neither forgotten their spite nor learned greater wisdom, was shown by the effrontery bordering on simplicity with which they now instituted proceedings against Hamilcar as the originator of the mercenary war, because he had without full powers from the government made promises of money to his Sicilian soldiers. Had the club of officers and popular leaders desired to overthrow this rotten and wretched government, it would hardly have encountered much difficulty in Carthage itself; but it would have met with more formidable obstacles in Rome, with which the chiefs of the government in Carthage already maintained relations that bordered on treason. To all the other difficulties of the position there fell to be added the circumstance, that the means of saving their country had to be created without allowing either the Romans, or their own government with its Roman leanings, to become rightly aware of what was doing.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 2

Wisdom, Men, Money, War

“In attitude towards poverty, there is a considerable double standard. America more or less expects the Negro to be poor (and is convinced that things are getting better, a point to be dealt with in a later chapter). There is no emotional shock when people hear of the experience of these human beings in Chicago. The mind and the feelings, even of good-willed individuals, are so suffused with an unconscious racism that misery is overlooked.”

Michael Harrington book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 2

People, Feeling

“In the first days of psychic training, let us deal with the practical part of introspection or self-knowledge. Arrange for a magic diary and enter all the bad sides of your soul into it. This diary is for your own use only, and must not be shown to anybody else. It represents the so-called control book for you. In the self-control of your failures, habits, passions, instincts and other ugly character traits, you have to observe a hard and severe attitude towards yourself. Be merciless towards yourself and do not embellish any of your failures and deficiencies. Think about yourself in quiet meditation, put yourself back into different situations of your past and remember how you behaved then and what mistakes or failures occurred in the various situations. Make notes of all your weaknesses, down to the finest nuances and variations. The more you are discovering, all the better for you. Nothing must remain hidden, nothing unrevealed, however insignificant or great your faults or frailties may be...”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 35

Bad luck, Books, Making love, Soul

“An experiment about your next vacation will allow you to observe your attitude to your experiencing self: At the end of the vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow a potion that will wipe out all your memories of the vacation. How would this affect your vacation plans? How much would you be willing to pay for it, relative to a normally memorable vacation? My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.Imagine a painful operation during which you will scream in pain and beg the surgeon to stop. However, you are promised an amnesia-inducing drug that will wipe out any memory of the episode. Here again, my observation is that most people are remarkably indifferent to the pains of their experiencing self. Some say they don’t care at all. Others share my feeling, which is that I feel pity for my suffering self but not more than I would feel for a stranger in pain.I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think (Part 4): Daniel Kahneman, bloomberg.com, 24 October 2011, 15 May 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-4-daniel-kahneman.html, "Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think" (2011)

Pain, People, Feeling, Suffering

“But the blot on the encyclopedia’s fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature…. If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn’t Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities. …”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

http://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2012/04/meera-nanda-against-hinduism-and-its.html
2010s, The argumentative Hindu (2012)

Fools, History, Nature

“Our concern should extend to non-Party cadres as well as to Party cadres. There are many capable people outside the Party whom we must not ignore. The duty of every Communist is to rid himself of aloofness an arrogance and to work well with non-Party cadres, give them sincere help, have a warm, comradely attitude towards them and enlist their initiative in the great cause of resisting Japan and reconstructing the nation.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

ibid. pp. 147
Role of the Chinese Communist Party (October 1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 不但要关心党的干部，还要关心非党的干部。党外存在着很多的人材，共产党不能把他们置之度外。去掉孤傲习气，善于和非党干部共事，真心诚意地帮助他们，用热烈的同志的态度对待他们，把他们的积极性组织到抗日和建国的伟大事业中去，这是每一个共产党员的责任。

People, Help, Sincerity

“Jazz in itself is not struggling…That is, the music itself is not struggling. It and the baseball history you talk about are two anchors of the African American cultural community. It’s the attitude that’s in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.”

August Wilson (1945–2005) American playwright

On not tossing certain facets of African American culture as relics in “AN INTERVIEW WITH AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT AUGUST WILSON” https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25048/Tibbetts_AugustWIlson_2002.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y (John C. Tibbetts, 2002)

Music, History, Communication, Forgetting

“This group of boys showed considerable: and consistent effects from medication with UML or LSD daily for two to eleven months. Their behavior, ward management, school-room adjustment and progress at home changed favorably with less acting out and less disturbed behavior. They not only needed no other tranquilizing, sedative, or antidepressant medication, but furthermore, unlike the tranquilizers which made them sleepy and groggy, they were generally cheerful and alert. Personnel and families noted the difference. Repeated psychiatric interviews revealed a change in fantasy material which was less bizarre, personalized or disturbing. Depressive, anxious and paranoid attitudes were focused on real objective problems. Insight was impressive. Intellectual changes, as seen in psychometric tests, indicated improved maturity, better organization and motivation with a rise in IQ which was reflected in improved school work. The Rorschach and drawing tests also showed increased maturity and control with clearer thinking.”

Lauretta Bender (1897–1987) American neuropsychiatrist

L. Bender, L. Cobrinik, G. Faretra, D.V. Siva Sankar, "The Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia with LSD and UML" http://www.neurodiversity.com/library_bender_1966a.html, Biological Treatment of Mental Illness, Proceedings II of the International Conference of the Manfred Sakel Foundation 10/31-11/3/1962, 1966; 2(4):463-91.

School, Family, Behavior, Home

“Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude. In our kind of society - with its absence of pre-capitalist traditions - the only way to do away with training devices is to change the laws and their enforcement so that, unlike the current income tax, they do not depend upon individual integrity. Another way is to pass only laws that result from great social movements with concomitant changes in moral codes, but there is no such movement underway in any area of American society today.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

Law, Way, Support, Change

“The literary James Bond is a creation of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Afterword, “The Golden Age of Spying” (p. 385)
The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006)

Women

“Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

Beauty, Feeling, Time

“The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings", p. 279
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Life, Making love, Justice, Universe

“It has been called a problem of adaptation. There is a subjective and there is an objective, a self and a not-self. And between this self and the not-self there is incessant irrelation. That which is not-self is a process, always changing. It never tires of adopting new attitudes toward the self. The self also is a process, and hence is continually losing joint, or is in continual danger of losing joint, with its environment. Life, therefore, at best, since in the nature of things it is a struggle and a search, is an enterprise with exasperating lack of sunshine.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 74–75

Life, Search, Nature, Problem

“Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world. The root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity.”

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

debunked in 2014
Misattributed

World

“A detached attitude toward the problems of others is not illegal.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Killing Machine (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 180)

Problem

“Humanity many times has had sad experience of superpowerful police forces…As soon as (the police) slip out from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitrary, merciless, a law unto themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth, jingling their weapons in megalomaniac euphoria. People thereupon become not masters, but servants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly overzealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption. The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminals escape them. Better a hundred unchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Star King (1964), Chapter 3 (pp. 32-33)

People, Sadness, Justice, Law

“I of course take a negative attitude about a great deal that is happening, and I have said so directly and frankly to many of those who stand at the head of government. They behave well towards me, and many things I asked were carried out. They even proposed that I should take part in their work, but I refused. As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

About the Bolshevik revolution, as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 428

Parting

“With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account of the world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them but statements standing in logical relation to one another.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

World, History, Universe, Relation ships

“This defective approach to scholarship was suffered by different categories of colonial student. Many of them had been handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates of worthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

Life, People, Age, Reality

“The lead Britain can give and is already giving rests on the fact that we are a world-minded people. Britain will give a lead in political attitudes and political developments in Europe. We cannot do that by taking our bat home and sinking into an off-shore island mentality.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech during the European Communities membership referendum, quoted in The Times (4 June 1975), p. 5
Prime Minister

People, World, Home

“This country cannot afford now—if it ever could afford—unofficial strikes, wasteful stoppages, long, weary arguments about industrial demarcation, any more than we can afford out-of-date industrial methods, industrial promotion based on influence and connexion rather than technical ability, or management attitudes which give a higher priority to tax avoidance or the earning of quick, uncovenanted capital profits than to modernization and innovation in industrial production methods, or aggressiveness in exports.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton (12 December 1964), quoted in The Times (14 December 1964), p. 14
Prime Minister

Country

“And there is another way to rise above self-centeredness and that is by having the proper inner attitude toward your position or toward your status in life or whatever it is. You conquer self-centeredness by coming to the point of seeing that you are where you are today because somebody helped you to get there. And so many people, you see, live a self-centered, egocentric life because they have the attitude that they are responsible for everything and for their position in life. For everything they do in life, they feel, somehow, that they are responsible and solely responsible for it.”

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

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Life, People, Way, Feeling

“Now, we can say to a certain extent that persons in this situation are persons who have really never grown up. They are still children, at a point. For you see, a child is inevitably, necessarily egocentric. He is a bundle of his own sensations, clamoring to be cared for. And, to be sure, he has his own social context. He belongs to his mother, but he cares for her only because he wants to be fed and protected. He does not care for his mother for her sake but he cares for his mother for his own sake. And so a child is inevitably egocentric, inevitably self-centered. And that is why Dr. Burnham says that during the first six or seven years of development, the ego is dominant within the child. And both in behavior and in attitudes, a child is a victim of self-centeredness. This is a part of the early development of a little child. When people become mature, they are to rise above this.”

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

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Children, People, Behavior, Parting

“By refusing to multiply our element, we take the risk of not setting a limit to our field; for it is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 28

“Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.”

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) Martiniquais politician

Source: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), p. 13

Life, Dance, Sea

“My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Much Obliged, Jeeves

Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971)

Feeling, Game, Time, Christmas

“Here’s my attitude, and I’m sort of sorry to say this sometimes – but there are people who try and elevate film music - of all kinds – to being the great twentieth century classical music, and my opinion is it just isn’t. It’s very straightforward, major/minor or modal writing. The only time you get any kind of originality is usually in the timbres and the sounds and the mixture of elements. But to get through a scene it’s either happy, or sad – and it’s either going forward in action or it’s not – and it can be ironic, which means you’ve got to switch from major to minor frequently. But it’s not rocket science. It’s a lot of skills – a lot of political skills, frankly. It’s being in a room and playing off fifty opinions from studios, producers, directors, sometimes actors – and coming out the end with something that vaguely represents music. And frequently it doesn’t. The minute you try to get original or break the box – unless you’ve got either a very experimental or powerful director, it’s probably not going to happen.”

Graeme Revell (1955) New Zealand musician

Happiness, People, Sadness, Music

“Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock, in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn’t their parents’. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell Flashback Q&A: 'We Have to Be Aware That Life Is So Short', Yahoo!, May 19, 2017 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/chris-cornell-flashback-qa-aware-life-short-023857577.html, Solo career Era

People, Music, Thinking, Parent

“Many of the dead very considerably retard the process of dissolution by clinging passionately to the earth which they have left; they simply will not turn their thoughts and desires upward, but spend their time in struggling with all their might to keep in full touch with the physical plane, thus causing great trouble to any one who may be trying to help them. Earthly matters are the only ones in which they have had any living interest, and they cling to them with desperate tenacity even after death. Naturally as time passes on they find it increasingly difficult to keep hold of things down here, but instead of welcoming and encouraging this process of gradual refinement and spiritualization they resist it vigorously by every means in their power… thereby not only causing themselves a vast amount of entirely unnecessary pain and sorrow, but also very seriously delaying their upward progress and prolonging their stay in astral regions to an almost indefinite extent. In convincing them that this ignorant and disastrous opposition to the cosmic will is contrary to the laws of nature, and persuading them to adopt an attitude of mind which is the exact reversal of it, lies a great part of the work of those who are trying to help.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 12

Death, Pain, Law, Nature

“Perhaps the greatest of the many fundamental changes which are inevitable for the man who studies the facts of life is that which is produced in his attitude towards death. This matter has been fully treated elsewhere; here I need state only that the knowledge of the truth about death robs it of all its terror and much of its sorrow, and enables us to see it in its true proportion and to understand its place in the scheme of our evolution. It is perfectly possible to learn to know about all these things instead of accepting beliefs blindly at second-hand, as most people do; and knowledge means power, security and happiness.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Hidden Side of things (1913), Chapter II

Life, Death, Happiness, People

“We are about to enter an era in which the innate spiritual nature of humanity will begin to express itself in a mass form. Countless millions throughout the world will awaken to the true purpose of their lives. A deeper, more soundly-based attitude to life will develop and people will…come to understand the purpose of their incarnation, and, more and more, they will take a conscious part in their own evolution, creating modes of freedom and justice which this world has never before seen. Freedom and justice, and therefore peace, will allow the divine, spiritual aspect of humanity to come to the fore and be given expression, not only as a religious experience, but in every department of life. In politics, economics and education, in art and science, the inner awareness of our spiritual nature will increasingly be demonstrated.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

Life, People, World, Education

“The Middle East — Although the people are being made aware by the new energy, it is being blocked by political attitudes that cling to the past. This blockage is being flushed out in a wave of destruction. Political and religious leaders are confounded by events. But out of this confusion will come an awareness that will strike the people and create in them an aura of expectancy. People will begin looking for direction, guidance and understanding.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

People, Understanding, Past

“Prince Wilhelm has taken up an attitude strongly against England, a quite natural reaction for the most part against the efforts of his mother to make Anglomaniacs of her children.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 26 December 1884

Children, Making love, Nature, Effort

“Mrs. Gandhi has only one dream: to take over the whole sub continent, to subjugate us. She’d like a confederation so as to make Pakistan disappear from the face of the earth, and that’s why she says we’re brothers, and so forth. We’re not brothers. We never have been. Our religions go too deep into our souls, into our ways of life. Our cultures are different, our attitudes are different. From the day they’re born, to the day they die, a Hindu and a Muslim are subject to laws and customs that have no points of contact. Even their ways of eating and drinking are different. They’re two strong and irrecon cilable faiths. It’s shown by the fact that neither of the two has ever succeeded in reaching a compromise with the other, a modus vivendi. Only dictatorial monarchies, foreign invasions, from the Mongols to the British, have succeeded in holding us together by a kind of Pax Romana. We’ve never arrived at a harmonious relationship.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Life, Making love, Faith, Religion

“I have spoken in the past about how youth is not an embodiment of age, but of attitude - a willingness to risk for what is right, among others. We also shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge the dearth of young elected officials + those implications.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Twitter post, https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1076907387833978882 (23 December 2018) Twitter Quotes (2018)

Youth, Age, Past

“For me being an American is an attitude, a state of mind.”

Sebastian Gorka (1970) American politician

The War for America's Soul, ISBN 978-1-62157-940-3

“He maintained this attitude up to the very end, and no man ever saw Socrates too much elated or too much depressed. Amid all the disturbance of Fortune, he was undisturbed.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind

“We might more accurately think of nonattachment as nondependency. Much of our inner turbulence reflects the fear of loss: our dependence on people, circumstances, and things not really under our control. On some level we know that death, indifference, rejection, repossession, or high tide may leave us bereft in the morning. Still, we clutch desperately at things we cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Four, People Changing

Death, People, Fear, Thinking

“They are saying now that Vasyl Slipak was a Ukrainian patriot, a nationalist… He undoubtedly was, but not in the sense that dominates in our society! I’ve never seen him show a prejudicial attitude to other peoples. It would have been absurd to hear this from his mouth. A European person, he performed both in Europe and in Africa and received a warm welcome everywhere.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017 Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother

People, Sense, Personality

“Eichmann was personally a cowardly man, who was at great pains to protect himself from responsibility… He was amoral and completely ice cold in his attitude.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny, as quoted by Alan Rosenthal, "Eichmann, Revisited" in The Jerusalem Post (20 April 2011) http://m.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/Jewish-World/Eichmann-Revisited.

Pain, Personality

“The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.
Pg. 66.
Against Method (1975)

Law, Way, Mathematics

“No great philosopher has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as Baruch Spinoza.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Arne Næss, Spinoza and Ecology
M - R

Way

“I have had, for my entire life, an extraordinary esteem for the person and for the thinking of that great philosopher. But I do not believe that attitude gives me the right to say anything publically about him, for the good reason that I would have nothing to say that has not been said by others.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Siegfried Hessing. As quoted in António Damásio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003)
A - F

Life, Thinking, Personality

“Concerning Lu-Enki, the ruler of the province of Zimudar, he should come to you, and should bring with him 60 troops. And as for you, with the soldiers who are under your authority, get the trench dug! So as not to change the attitude of the province, you people are not to release the workers while the land has not yet been secured. Let messengers bring me news about those eastern provinces. This is urgent!”

Shu-Sin Sumerian king

To his general Sharrum-bani, Letter from Shu-Suen to Sharrum-bani about digging a trench http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3116.htm, Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Old Babylonian period, ca. 1800-1600 BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

People, Change

“It is frequently insufficient to identify the motives that guide our conduct, or that shape our attitudes and our thinking, just by observing vaguely that there are various things we want.”

Harry G. Frankfurt (1929) Philosopher

That often leaves out too much. In numerous contexts, it is both more precise and more fully explanatory to say that there is something we care about.
The Reasons of Love (2004)

Motivation, Thinking

“Tuslidas’s attitude toward life and literature was distinctly more objective. Quite naturally, therefore, he has used the objective forms–the epic and the narrative- besides of course, the lyric as vehicles of his devotional poetry.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

K. R. Sundararajan in Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern http://books.google.co.in/books?id=LO0DpWElIRIC&pg=PA306&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Bhakti&f=false, p. 73

Life, Literature, Nature

“Use PMA: Positive Mental Attitude.”

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

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 151

“According to the traditional interpretation Plato’s attitude against rhetoric is a rejection of the doxa, or opinion, and of the impact of images, upon which the art of rhetoric relies; at the same time his attitude is considered as a defense of the theoretical, rational speech, that is, of episteme.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

The fundamental argument of Plato’s critique of rhetoric usually is exemplified by the thesis, maintained, among other things, in the Gorgias, that only he who "knows" [epistatai] can speak correctly; for what would be the use of the "beautiful," of the rhetorical speech, if it merely sprang from opinions [doxa], hence from not knowing? … Plato’s … rejection of rhetoric, when understood in this manner, assumes that Plato rejects every emotive element in the realm of knowledge. But in several of his dialogues Plato connects the philosophical process, for example, with eros, which would lead to the conclusion that he attributes a decisive role to the emotive, seen even in philosophy as the absolute science.
Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), p. 28

Art, Time

“About mid-day, Kesselring telephones me and tells me that we shall probably have to wait three or four days before our large-scale counter-measures begin to get under way. Until then there can be no major shift of developments in our favour. Kesselring is nevertheless in good heart. He is assured and full of character in his estimate of the situation and there is not a trace of defeatism with him. He tells me also that the attitude of the civil population has somewhat improved under the influence of our propaganda.”

Albert Kesselring (1885–1960) German Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall during World War II

Joseph Goebbels, diary entry, April 1, 1945.

Way, Waiting, Heart

“They had rejected the state of things as they were, and that seemed to me to be the first step toward embracing a creative attitude toward life. I felt that it was not until one wanted the world to be different that one could look at the world with will and emotion. But these men had rejected what was before their eyes without quite knowing what they had rejected and why.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Life, Men, World

“Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives … It is too bad that most people will not accept this tremendous discovery and begin living it.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"Man alone, of all creatures of earth, can change his thought pattern and become the architect of his destiny." Actually said by Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his Miracle of Forgiveness (1969), p. 114. This predates any of the misquotations.
Other forms: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." This is also misattributed to Albert Schweitzer.
James did say: "As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness."
Misattributed

Bad luck, People, Change

“I challenge you, instead of asking with an attitude of doubt, “If the Universe or God loved me, why would this bad thing have happened or be happening?” ask with an attitude of curiosity “Assuming the Universe or God loves me, why did this thing happen or why is it happening?””

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Love, God, Bad luck, Making love

“Education does have a great role to play in this period of transition. But it is not either education or legislation; it is both education and legislation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless, and this is what we often so and we have to do in society through legislation. We must depend on religion and education to change bad internal attitudes, but we need legislation to control the external effects of those bad internal attitudes. And so there is a need for meaningful civil right legislation.”

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

Address at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa (15 October 1962) https://news.cornellcollege.edu/dr-martin-luther-kings-visit-to-cornell-college/; also quoted in Wall Street Journal (13 November 1962), Notable & Quotable , p. 18 Variant: It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me, and I think that is kind of important. Address at Finney Chapel, Oberlin College (22 October 1964), as reported in "When MLK came to Oberlin" by Cindy Leise, The Chronicle-Telegram (21 January 2008) 1960s

Love, Bad luck, Education, Making love

“It is interesting to notice that the extreme pessimist and the extreme optimist agree on at least one point. They both feel that we must sit down and do nothing in the area of race relations. The extreme optimist says do nothing because integration is inevitable. The extreme pessimist says do nothing because integration is impossible. But there is a third attitude that can be taken, namely the realistic position. The realist in this area seeks to combine the truths of two opposites, while avoiding the extremes of both, and so the realist would agree with the optimist that we have come a long, long way in grappling with this problem, but he would balance that by agreeing with the pessimist that we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved in the United States. And it is this realistic position that I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together as we think of progress and as we think of the future of integration.”

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

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

Truth, Way, Feeling, Problem

“Consistent with his spiritual attitude, the National Socialist makes uncompromising demands in politics.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

Making love

“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations… If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out… You can hear other people’s wisdom, but you’ve got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.”

Mae Jemison (1956) American doctor and NASA astronaut

Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students https://www.space.com/17169-mae-jemison-biography.html, November 2009

Wisdom, People, World, Imagination

“Never lose, then, that attitude of mind. Hold fast in silence to all that is your own, for you will need it in the fight; but never, never desire to get knowledge or power for any other purpose than to give it on the altar, for thus alone can it be saved to you.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

Vol. I, Letter 1
Letters That Have Helped Me (1891)

Knowledge, Silence, Fight

“Allah has commanded rulers to be shepherds; He did not command them to be money-collectors. The attitude of the earliest leaders of this Ummah was that of shepherds, not money-collectors. Soon you will find your leaders becoming money-collectors, not shepherds. Once that happens, there will be no more modesty, trustworthiness or honesty. The best way of running the people's affairs is to examine the Muslims' situation, find out what their dues are and give them to them, and take from them what is due from them. Then go to ahl al-dhimmah and give them what is due to them and take from them what is due from them. Then confront the enemy and seek to defeat them by means of sincerity.”

Uthman (574–656) Companion of Muhammad and third Rashidun Caliph

Letter to Governors of Muslim Empire of Caliphate, quoted in History of the Prophets and Kings, Vol. 5, p. 244

Money, People, Way, Sincerity

“In committing these crimes, the mullahs are testing Western governments. In such circumstances, a lack of resolve or a passive attitude by Western governments will intensify the regime’s terrorist actions.”

Maryam Rajavi (1953) Iranian politician

Maryam Rajavi as quoted in The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/24/iranian-resistence-calls-european-action-against-r/ (24 September 2018)

“The obstacles to soul cognition are bodily disability, mental inertia, wrong questioning, carelessness, laziness, lack of dispassion, erroneous perception, inability to achieve concentration, failure to hold the meditative attitude when achieved.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Soul, Failure, Question

“Women not girls rule my world
I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama (not your shoe size)
Not your shoe size
Maybe we could do the twirl
U don't have 2 watch Dynasty
2 have an attitude
U just leave it all up 2 me
My love will be your food
Yeah.U don't have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don't have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain't no particular sign I'm more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your
Kiss.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Kiss
Song lyrics, Parade Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Love, Women, Age, World

“Don’t fight with your desires; don’t try to push them out; don’t try to settle them. But just be carefree about them; get the ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. Just lose them, neglect them, and they will go away one by one. Don’t struggle with them. I tell you that it is the only way it can be done.”

Shantananda Saraswati (1934–2005) Hindu spiritual teacher

Good Company. The Study Society. 2009

Way, Fight

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

Soul, Failure, Question

“Every person in this world wants to know the secrete behind success in professional as well as personal life. Having positive attitude is the key to achieving success in life.”

Gaur Gopal Das (1973) Indian spiritual leader, lifestyle coach and motivational speaker

[Positive attitude key to success, says Gaur Gopal Das, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/positive-attitude-key-to-success-says-gaur-gopal-das/articleshow/62501124.cms, Times of India, 15 January 2018]

Life, Secret, World, Success

“One becomes firmly established in practice only after attending to it for a long time, without interruption and with an attitude of devotion.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

Patanjali in Ashtanga Yoga Sutra I.14, in Ashtanga Yoga: Practice & Philosophy http://books.google.co.in/books?id=f9ygWu2xM3QC&pg=PA154, p. 154.

Time

“People have curious attitudes about nudity just as they have about sex. Nudity and sex are the most commonplace things in the world. Yet people often act as if they were things that only existed on Mars.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Source: As quoted in My Story (2006) by Marilyn Monroe and Ben Hecht p. 60

People, World, Sex

“I have seen men who had studied the sciences, who knew the messages of the Prophets, the recommendations of the wise, and yet who surpassed the most evil men in their worse deeds, and their depravation. This is very frequent, and so I have understood that these two moral attitudes were favours granted or denied by the Most High.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid, 24

Men, Study, Science, Evil

“You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.”

Simon Sinek (1973) British/American author and motivational speaker

Source: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

“The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on (anthropocentric) determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Embracing Death, pp. 152-153
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Life, Death, Pain, Bad luck

“Human extinction is still a sparse, loose idea advocated by sometimes opposing groups. Most obviously, there is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), the Church of Euthanasia and efilism. VHEMT is somewhat divided between those who wish the human race to cease population in order to eradicate human overpopulation and its exhaustion and destruction of the earth, and those who also choose not to breed but see an apocalyptic horizon and operate under an 'every man for himself' attitude of imminent hedonism 'for tomorrow we die."”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Ahumanism subscribes to no singular human extinction group, but clearly the message of the former sector of the group is more in keeping with the affirmative benefits of human death.
Embracing Death, p. 143
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Idea

“I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian.”

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) Irish writer

Source: A Time in Rome (1960), Ch. V, p. 141

Age

“There’s already an attitude among perpetrators that you can’t rape or harass the willing. Society views trans women as sexual deviants, and many believe that we "ask for it" or "bring it on ourselves."”

Ashlee Marie Preston American media personality, producer, and activist

As trans women we’re expected to function as sexual objects and an aide in satisfying the cis-hetero male libido. We’re demonized and criminalized as perverts out to trick and deceive cis hetero men; therefore anything that happens to us, we ‘had coming.
As quoted in [Bendix, Trish, Why it matters that transgender women are speaking out about Jeffrey Tambor — and that people are listening, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/matters-transgender-women-speaking-jeffrey-tambor-people-listening-163706277.html, 29 January 2019, Yahoo! Lifestyle, November 21, 2017]

Women

“Illusion is primarily of a mental quality and was characteristic of the attitude of mind of those people who are more intellectual than emotional. They have outgrown glamour as usually understood. It is the misunderstanding of ideas and thoughtforms of which they are guilty, and of misinterpretations.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Glamour: A World Problem (1950), The Nature of Glamor

People, Idea

“In the midst of normal activity, whatever it may be, there is a distant Signal, almost like heraldic trumpets. Everyone takes the Signal calmly, and with it, everyone stops speaking or whatever he may be doing. It is the Signal that He (or They) is coming through His Kingdom. There is no awestruck prostration or falling down on one's knees. Rather, the attitude is most matter-of-fact It is an occurrence to which all are accustomed and to comply takes absolute precedence over everything. There are no exceptions.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 8. Because the Bible Tells Me So

Distant

“Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure — the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it — the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics — the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual — the humility of the spirit.
These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God — more, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? So far, have we not drawn strength and comfort to maintain the one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other? Is this unavoidable? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

remarks (2 May 1956) at a Caltech YMCA lunch forum http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm

Love, Men, God, People

“It seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: 'Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.'”

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

For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. God’s Justice and Ours https://web.archive.org/web/20120311230630/http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/gods-justice-and-ours-32, 123 First Things 17. (May 2002). Adapted from remarks given at Pew Forum Conference on Religion, politics and death penalty. 2000s

Life, Death, God, Penalty