Quotes about attribute
page 5

“Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes. Pragmatism exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; today he is divine because he has been able to create equipment which makes him the master of matter.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 126-127 (regarding homo faber)

God, Justice, Law, Idea

“There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; 'tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it. God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection, cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him, forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name, which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us. Thus is it that to God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having continual need of amelioration, 'tis to that we ought to employ all our endeavour.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 16
Essais (1595), Book II

God, Parting, Perfection

“The quote "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple," is often attributed to Switzer but, in fact, appeared in print five years before the interview in which he is known to have said it. Ralph Keyes, author of The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, attributes the quote to to an unknown author following an investigation in his book.”

Barry Switzer (1937) American football player and coach

[The Unknown Barry Switzer - Poverty, Tragedy Build Oklahoma Coach into a Winner, Tom Shatel, December 14, 1986, Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-8604030680-story.html, October 1, 2018]

Life, People, Books, Quotes

“Science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Science

“When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.
Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?…Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading.
Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 156-157

Life, God, Religion, Question

“Such knowledge [of contemporary physicists] is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases: abstraction can provide us with knowledge of accidents but not necessary attributes as such. If we find that the search for essences can in fact only take the form of abstraction from individual cases then Aristotle's account of what counts as an explanation in physics is an unrealisable ideal.”

Stephen Gaukroger (1954) British philosopher and intellectual historian

Stephen Gaukroger (1978). Explanatory structures: a study of concepts of explanation ...

Search, Knowledge

“In geometry the following theorems are attributed to him [Thales]—and their character shows how the Greeks had to begin at the very beginning of the theory—(1) that a circle is bisected by any diameter (Eucl. I., Def. 17), (2) that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal (Eucl. I., 5), (3) that, if two straight lines cut one another, the vertically opposite angles are equal (Eucl. I., 15), (4) that, if two triangles have two angles and one side respectively equal, the triangles are equal in all respects (Eucl. I., 26). He is said (5) to have been the first to inscribe a right-angled triangle in a circle: which must mean that he was the first to discover that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle. He also solved two problems in practical geometry: (1) he showed how to measure the distance from the land of a ship at sea (for this he is said to have used the proposition numbered (4) above), and (2) he measured the heights of pyramids by means of the shadow thrown on the ground”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

this implies the use of similar triangles in the way that the Egyptians had used them in the construction of pyramids
Achimedes (1920)

Way, Problem, Sea

“The war on terror is an abstraction. But the terrorists are real people and they are not all alike. Most of the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq originally had nothing to do with al Qaeda. They have been generated by the policies of the Bush administration. We have been spared a terrorist attack at home but it is quite a stretch to attribute that to the invasion of Iraq. The insurrection in Iraq, however, is a somber reality and it doesn't make us safer at home. Our security, far from improving as President Bush claims, is deteriorating.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

War, People, Home, Reality

“Of errors and defects we certainly have not less than our full share, enough to keep the reformer awake, the statesman busy, and the country in a pretty lively state of agitation for some time to come. Perfection is an object to be aimed at by all, but it is not an attribute of any form of government. Mutability is the law for all. Something different, something better, or something worse may come, but so far as respects our present system and form of government, and the altitude we occupy, we need not shrink from comparison with any nation of our times. We are to day the best fed, the best clothed, the best sheltered and the best instructed people in the world.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Law, Error

“With a father who is a fabulous craftsman, I was raised with the fundamental belief that it is only when you personally work with a material with your hands, that you come to understand its true nature, its characteristics, its attributes, and I think – very importantly – its potential.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Dezeen: "Fewer designers seem to be interested in how something is actually made" says Jonathan Ive https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/03/fewer-designers-interested-in-how-something-is-made-jonathan-ive-apple-manus-x-machina/ (3 May 2016)

Understanding, Nature, Thinking, Personality

“Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 261 (2003)

Truth

“Having now finished the observations on this, probably, the last occasion I shall have of communicating with you, all me to express the hope, that whatever errors I may have committed, will be attributed to no want of zeal in the discharge of my official duties, and that they may find a correction in the intelligence and patriotism, of the gentleman who will succeed me. And in my retirement, whatever may be my lot, I shall not cease to invoke that Beneficent Being, to whose providence we are so signally indebted for the general prosperity of the Territory; for the continuance of his blessings upon Oregon—upon you—and upon your constituents, from whom I have received uniform kindness and support in the discharge of my duties.”

Joseph Lane

Joseph Lane (May 7, 1850) " Governor Joseph Lane Legislative Message, 1850 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/6777826", Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State, Oregon Provisional and Territorial Records, 1850, Calendar No. 10571.

Hope, Error, Intelligence, Communication

“Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:
# Be as verbally explicit and universal as possible…. The effect is to make `proper' scientific statements seem to talk only about an unchanging universal realm….
# Avoid colloquial forms of language and use, even in speech, forms close to those of written language. Certain words mark language as colloquial…, as does use of first and second person…
# Use technical terms in place of colloquial synonyms or paraphrases….
# Avoid personification and use of specifically or usually human attributes or qualities…, human agents or actors, and human types of action or process…
# Avoid metaphoric and figurative language, especially those using emotional, colorful, or value laden words, hyperboles and exaggeration, irony, and humorous or comic expressions.
# Be serious and dignified in all expression of scientific content. Avoid sensationalism.
# Avoid personalities and reference to individual human beings and their actions, including (for the most part) historical figures and events….
# Avoid reference to fiction or fantasy.
# Use causal forms of explanation and avoid narrative and dramatic accounts…. Similarly forbidden are dramatic forms, including dialogue, the development of suspense or mystery, the element of surprise, dramatic action, and so on.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 133-134, as cited in: Mary U. Hanrahan, "Applying CDA to the analysis of productive hybrid discourses in science classrooms." (2002).

Color, Teachers, Universe, Parting

“The Occidental man is not so bad... Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha]... I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.... one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals... These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds..”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quotes in his letter to Jaque Berne, 29 April, 1949 (the day after his return to Paris); as cited in ; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 250 1940's

World, Appearance

“In all these various instances of stigma… the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obstrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his other attributes have on us. He posses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals.
The attitude we normals have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to him, are well known, since these responses are what the benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Erving Goffman (1963), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, p. 5-6, ISBN 1439188335
1950s-1960s

Life, Exercises, Chance, Personality

“Truth is the daughter of God, and in all her attributes God-like and eternal. Truth never depreciates in value”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

God, Truth, Daughters

“The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Hunger, World, Communication, Reality

“Magic bullet: One that wends its way through several bodies, smashing bones on the way, but ends up in pristine condition, conveniently located for police attribution to the gun of choice.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 152.

Way

“All military governments are going to be targets from now on for every sort of Jewish and Communistic attack from the press.
My self esteem would be better had I simply asked for immediate retirement but then any thing I said in the future could be attributed to revenge…
At the moment I feel pretty mad.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Letter to Beatrice (29 September 1945), published in The Patton Papers (1996), edited by Martin Blumenson, Vol. 2 , p. 787

Feeling, Revenge, Future, Madness

“Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she’d won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School, Girl, Sister, Time

“Whatever good fortune befalls you, attribute it to the gods.”

Bias of Priene (-600–-530 BC) ancient Greek philosopher, one of the Seven Sages

The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230)

God

“The seething racial resentment in the Third World against the West — decades after independence and trillions in foreign aid — should cause second thoughts about opening our borders to mass immigration from that world. Not everyone coming here brings in his heart the passionate attachment to America we attribute to the peoples of Ellis Island.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, State of Emergency (2006)

People, World, Passion, Heart

“By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin had created a regime that had abandoned every principle that had presumably typified left-wing aspirations and had given himself over to notions of ‘socialism in one country’ — with all the attendant attributes: nationalism, the leadership principle, anti-liberalism, anti-individualism, communitarianism, hierarchical rule, missionary zeal, the employment of violence to assure national purpose, and anti-Semitism — making the Soviet Union unmistakenly ‘a cousin to the German National Socialism.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), pp. 4-5

Country

“In this return in love in the divine ground every divine way and activity and all the attributes of the persons are swallowed up in the rich compass of the essential unity. All the divine means and all conditions, and all living images which are reflected in the mirror of truth, lapse in the onefold and ineffable waylessness beyond reason. Here there is nothing but eternal rest in the fruitive embrace of outpouring love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Gnostic Society Library, From the Western Mystical tradition http://www.gnosis.org/library/coll.htm The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love, Truth, Way, Personality

“Male penguins are unfaithful up to an advanced age, a phenomenon sometimes attributed to the sea air.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Penguin
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Age, Unfaithfulness, Sea

“To a lesser degree, a secret ressentiment underlies every way of thinking which attributes creative power to mere negation and criticism. Thus modern philosophy is deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by ressentiment. I am referring to the view that the “true” and the “given” is not that which is self-evident, but rather that which is “indubitable” or “incontestable,” which can be maintained against doubt and criticism.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 67

Secret, Way, Thinking

“We have created a false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species that blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals.
The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption. While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 2

Food, Behavior, Problem, Thinking

“Let’s move on to the next major lie in my opening statement, the idea of Putin’s popularity in Russia. I could not begin to count the number of times I’ve been forced to address this myth, the persistence of which I again attribute to our lack of language to describe modern dictatorships. Terms like “polls” and “popularity” as applied to politicians in the free world have very different meanings in authoritarian regimes. I’m fond of asking in response to questions about Putin’s “popularity” if a restaurant is popular if it’s the only one in town and every other restaurant was burned to the ground.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

Lie, World, Idea, Question

“I attribute a scab to the present state of society. The way the scab looks in its worst state is gross and chaotic and horrible, that's now, but when it breaks away, there's a brand new piece of skin that's stronger than before. It's like creation out of chaos.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Meaning behind the song New Skin

Way

“A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Shakespeare Once More
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

“The Allied airborne operation in Sicily was decisive despite widely scattered drops which must be expected in a night landing. It is my opinion that if it had not been for the Allied airborne forces (82nd) blocking the Hermann Goering Armd. Div. from reaching the beachhead, that division would have driven the initial seaborne forces back into the sea. I attribute the entire success of the Allied Sicilian Operation to the delaying of German reserves (by the 82nd ABN Div.) until sufficient forces had been landed by sea to resist the counterattacks by our defending forces, the strength of which had been held in mobile reserve.”

Kurt Student (1890–1978) German Luftwaffe general during World War II

Quoted in "Airlift Doctrine" - Page 88 - by Charles E. Miller - History - 1988.

Decision, Success, Sea, Night

“Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1920s, Lecture on Dada', 1922

Life, People, Art, Universe

“Principles heretofore unknown, signifying the emergence of a new era in creative work - an era of purely artistic achievements. An era of the final emancipation of the Great Art of Painting from Literary, Social, and crudely everyday attributes uncharacteristic of it at its core. The elaboration of this valuable world outlook is the service of our times, irrespective of idle speculation about how quickly the individual trends created by it will flash by.”

Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) Russian artist

Olga Rozanova, in 'Osnovy Novogo Tvorchestva i printsipy ego neponimaniia,' Soiuz molodezhi 3 (March 1913), pp. 20-21; as quoted by Svetlana Dzhafarova, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 (transl. Jane Bobko); Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 477

World, Art, Time, Painting

“Other states in the past sought to conceal this truth from themselves by the exercise of projection - customarily onto a dynasty with supposedly extraordinary powers of healing and unification. This did not save them: indeed historians usually attribute part of the magnitude of the eventual smash to the ingrained, faithful, fatalistic fixation. The supplanting of monarchy, in those circumstances, by new forms of despotism was not the negation of monarchy but the replication of it by societies not yet cured of the addiction.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Truth, Faith, Exercises, Past

“Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Wilderness as a Form of Land Use" [1925]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 137-138.
1920s

“I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980 of I Spit on Your Grave (16 July 1980) Reviews, Zero star reviews

People, Sex, Motivation, Thinking

“The individual self is subject to beginningless nescience, which has brought about an accumulation of karma, of the nature of both merit and demerit. The flood of such karma causes his entry into four kinds of bodies — heavenly, human, animal and plant beginning with that of Brahma downwards. This ingression into bodies produces the delusion of identity with those respective bodies (and the consequent attachments and aversions). This delusion inevitably brings about all the fears inherent in the state of worldly existence. The entire body of Vedanta aims at the annihilation of these fears. To accomplish their annihilation they teach the following:
(1) The essential nature of the individual self as transcending the body.
(2) The attributes of the individual self.
(3) The essential nature of the Supreme that is the inmost controller of both the material universe and the individual selves.
(4) The attributes of the Supreme.
(5) The devout meditation upon the Supreme.
(6) The goal to which such meditation, leads.
The Vedanta aims at making known the goal attainable through such a life of meditation, the goal being the realization, of the real nature of the individual self and after and through that realization, the direct experience of Brahman, which is of the nature of bliss infinite and perfect.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Source: Vedartha Sangraham, 11th century, p. 9-10.

Life, Fear, Nature, Universe

“OOA - Object-Oriented Analysis - is based upon concepts that we first learned in kindergarten: objects and attributes, wholes and parts, classes and members.”

Peter Coad (1953) American software entrepreneur

Peter Coad & Ed Yourdon (1991, p. 1); cited in: Sten Carlsson and Benneth Christiansson. (1999) " The Concept of Object and its Relation to Human Thinking: Some Misunderstandings Concerning the Connection between Object-Orientation and Human Thinking http://www.vits.org/publikationer/dokument/289.pdf." Informatica, Lith. Acad. Sci. 10.2. p. 147-160.

Learning, Parting

“Firishta' attributes to Sikandar the demolition of all the Kashmirian temples save one, which was dedicated to Mahadeva, and which only escaped ' in consequence of its foundation being below the surface of the neighbouring water.'. (…) He most likely gave orders that they should all be overturned; and I have no doubt that many of the principal temples were thrown down during his reign. For instance, the tomb of his own Queen in Srinagur is built upon the foundation, and with the materials of a Hindu temple; likewise the wall which surrounds the tomb of his son Zeinu-1 Abidin was once the inclosure of a Hindu temple; and lastly the entrance of a masjid in Nowa-Shehra of Srinagur, which, according to its inscription, was built during the reign of his son Zeinu-1 Abidin, is formed of two fluted pillars of a Hindu peristyle. These instances prove that at least three different temples in the capital alone must have been overthrown either by Sikandar or by one of his predecessors. But as the demolition of idol-temples is not attributed to any one of the earlier kings, we may safely ascribe the destruction of the three above mentioned to Sikandar himself.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Elliot, H. M. (Henry Miers), Sir; Ed. John Dowson (1871). The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. The Muhammadan Period. London : Trübner & Co. Vol VI. Appendix, Note A. ON THE EARLY USE OF GUNPOWDER IN INDIA.

Water

“I think why people will love these monster films is the they are an homage to the originals, which means you’re gonna get complex characters. And the thing that I think is interesting about monsters is that they are always exaggerations of human attributes or human fears. For example, Frankenstein was a result of the kind of industrial and scientific revolution—are we playing God? Should we be playing God? And with the Wolfman there’s that worry of what happens if I lose control? What happens if I hurt the things around me that I love? There’s very human questions and worries and fears and darkness and cravings.”

Chris Morgan (writer)

Writer Chris Morgan on ‘Fate of the Furious’, the Franchise’s Future, Universal’s Monster Universe & More http://collider.com/chris-morgan-fate-of-the-furious-interview/#the-mummy (April 28, 2017)

Love, God, People, Fear

“To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 68

Thinking, Time

“Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

God

“Sociology is the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By "action" in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful […] the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the "meaning" to be thought of as somehow objectively "correct" or "true" by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter "correct" or "valid" meaning.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, 1922

Way, History, Science

“The contrast between Tolstoy’s discretion and Dostoevsky’s exhibitionism, between the restraint of the one and the ‘dancing about naked in public’ of the other—as someone says in The Possessed—is attributable to the same social gap as separated Voltaire from Rousseau.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

' Chapter 1. Naturalism and Impressionism
The Social History of Art, Volume IV. Naturalism, impressionism, the film age, 1999

Dance

“This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.”

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

What is to be Done? (1902)

Fear, Question, Freedom, Sincerity

“[T]he Celtic Twilightists achieved the remarkable feat of attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, 1939, quoted in Cheape, Hugh (2016). "'A mind restless seeking': Sorley MacLean's historical research and the poet as historian" https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/portal/files/2038514/Cheape_Ainmeil_thar_Cheudan_121_134.pdf Letters and interviews

“The Paradox of Our Time is one of many stories that has been forwarded around the internet and attributed to Carlin, but is actually by Bob Moorehead.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

"Don't Blame Me", Georgecarlin.com (official website), 2012-09-09 http://www.georgecarlin.com/home/dontblame.html, "snopes.com: The Paradox of Our Time", Snopes.com, 2012-09-09 http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/paradox.asp, Misattributed

Time

“Genius is a starry word; but if there ever was a chess player to whom that attribute applied, it was Paul Morphy.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

Andrew Soltis (in Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess, New York, 1977)
About

“Our children grow up in a culture permeated with the idea that there are "smart people" and "dumb people". The social construction of the individual is as a bundle of aptitudes. There are people who are "good at math" and people who "can't do math." Everything is set up for children to attribute their first unsuccessful or unpleasant learning experiences to their own disabilities. As a result, children perceive failure as relegating them either to the group of "dumb people" or, more often, to a group of people "dumb at x" (where, as we have pointed out, x often equals mathematics). Within this framework children will define themselves in terms of their limitations, and this definition will be consolidated and reinforced throughout their lives. Only rarely does some exceptional event lead people to reorganize their intellectual self-image in such a way as to open up new perspectives on what is learnable.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Children, People, Way, Mathematics

“V. Bérard attributed the [Greece and Israel] links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic. …but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them, and indeed the problem itself, into disrepute among critical scholars. The history of the problem has been ably documented by W. Baumgartner…”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

History, Problem

“But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed…And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

2000s

God, War, World, Motivation

“"Rachael Ray does to food what Hitler did to Poland." Attributed to credentialed chef Anthony Bourdain.”

Rachael Ray (1968) American businessman

Unsourced

Food

“Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Adrian J. Slywotzky, Clayton M. Christensen, Richard S. Tedlow, Nicholas G. Carr (2000) "The future of commerce." Harvard Business Review Vol 78.1. p. 39-53. ( abstract http://hbr.org/product/future-of-commerce-hbr-onpoint-enhanced-edition/an/4681-PDF-ENG).

People, Way, Change

“The sculptors of the cathedral porches of the Middle Ages already knew that we can identify many legendary figures by their attributes, not their physical appearance. How is one to recognize Orpheus without his lyre, or Saint Lawrence without his grid? At the same time it seems a bit absurd, In an art that claims to be realistic, to have Orpheus always carrying his lyre, like a German businessman his briefcase. There must have been moments when Orpheus and Saint Lawrence left their lyre or their grid at the checkroom, for instance.. [c. 1960, in France]”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 153

Age, Art, Appearance, Time

“I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

God, Nature, Country

“Let me remind you that science is not necessarily wisdom. To know, is not the sole nor even the highest office of the intellect; and it loses all its glory unless it act in furtherance of the great end of man's life. That end is, as both reason and revelation unite in telling us, to acquire the feelings and habits that will lead us to love and seek what is good in all its forms, and guide us by following its traces to the first Great Cause of all, where only we find it pure and unclouded.
If science be cultivated in congruity with this, it is the most precious possession we can have— the most divine endowment. But if it be perverted to minister to any wicked or ignoble purpose — if it even be permitted to take too absolute a hold of the mind, or overshadow that which should be paramount over all, the perception of right, the sense of Duty — if it does not increase in us the consciousness of an Almighty and All-beneficent presence, — it lowers instead of raising us in the great scale of existence.
This, however, it can never do but by our fault. All its tendencies are heavenward; every new fact which it reveals is a ray from the origin of light, which leads us to its source. If any think otherwise, their knowledge is imperfect, or their understanding warped, or darkened by their passions. The book of nature is, like that of revelation, written by God, and therefore cannot contradict it; both we are unable to read through all their extent, and therefore should neither wonder nor be alarmed if at times we miss the pages which reconcile any seeming inconsistence. In both, too, we may fail to interpret rightly that which is recorded; but be assured, if we search them in quest of truth alone, each will bear witness to the other, — and physical knowledge, instead of being hostile to religion, will be found its most powerful ally, its most useful servant. Many, I know, think otherwise; and because attempts have occasionally been made to draw from astronomy, from geology, from the modes of the growth and formation of animals and plants, arguments against the divine origin of the sacred Scripture, or even to substitute for the creative will of an intelligent first cause the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, they would reject their study as fraught with danger. In this I must express my deep conviction that they do injury to that very cause which they think they are serving.
Time will not let me touch further on the cavils and errors in question; and besides they have been often fully answered. I will only say, that I am here surrounded by many, matchless in the sciences which are supposed so dangerous, and not less conspicuous for truth and piety. If they find no discord between faith and knowledge, why should you or any suppose it to exist? On the contrary, they cannot be well separated. We must know that God is, before we can confess Him; we must know that He is wise and powerful before we can trust in Him, — that He is good before we can love Him. All these attributes, the study of His works had made known before He gave that more perfect knowledge of himself with which we are blessed. Among the Semitic tribes his names betoken exalted nature and resistless power; among the Hellenic races they denote his wisdom; but that which we inherit from our northern ancestors denotes his goodness. All these the more perfect researches of modern science bring out in ever-increasing splendour, and I cannot conceive anything that more effectually brings home to the mind the absolute omnipresence of the Deity than high physical knowledge. I fear I have too long trespassed on your patience, yet let me point out to you a few examples.
What can fill us with an overwhelming sense of His infinite wisdom like the telescope? As you sound with it the fathomless abyss of stars, till all measure of distances seems to fail and imagination alone gauges the distance; yet even there as here is the same divine harmony of forces, the same perfect conservation of systems, which the being able to trace in the pages of Newton or Laplace makes us feel as if we were more than men. If it is such a triumph of intellect to trace this law of the universe, how transcendent must that Greatest over all be, in which it and many like it, have their existence! That instrument tells us that the globe which we inhabit is but a speck, the existence of which cannot be perceived beyond our system. Can we then hope that in this immensity of worlds we shall not be overlooked? The microscope will answer. If the telescope lead to one verge of infinity, it brings us to the other; and shows us that down in the very twilight of visibility the living points which it discloses are fashioned with the most finished perfection, — that the most marvellous contrivances minister to their preservation and their enjoyment, — that as nothing is too vast for the Creator's control, so nothing is too minute or trifling for His care. At every turn the philosopher meets facts which show that man's Creator is also his Father, — things which seem to contain a special provision for his use and his happiness : but I will take only two, from their special relation to this very district. Is it possible to consider the properties which distinguish iron from other metals without a conviction that those qualities were given to it that it might be useful to man, whatever other purposes might be answered by them. That it should. be ductile and plastic while influenced by heat, capable of being welded, and yet by a slight chemical change capable of adamantine hardness, — and that the metal which alone possesses properties so precious should be the most abundant of all, — must seem, as it is, a miracle of bounty. And not less marvellous is the prescient kindness which stored up in your coalfields the exuberant vegetation of the ancient world, under circumstances which preserved this precious magazine of wealth and power, not merely till He had placed on earth beings who would use it, but even to a late period of their existence, lest the element that was to develope to the utmost their civilization and energy migbt be wasted or abused.
But I must conclude with this summary of all which I would wish to impress on your minds—* that the more we know His works the nearer we are to Him. Such knowledge pleases Him; it is bright and holy, it is our purest happiness here, and will assuredly follow us into another life if rightly sought in this. May He guide us in its pursuit; and in particular, may this meeting which I have attempted to open in His name, be successful and prosperous, so that in future years they who follow me in this high office may refer to it as one to be remembered with unmixed satisfaction.”

Thomas Romney Robinson

Robinson in his 1849 adress, as quoted in the Report of the Nineteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science https://archive.org/stream/report36sciegoog#page/n50/mode/2up, London, 1850.

Love, Life, Wisdom, Men

“Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Nature

“A selective process goes on, whereby systems attract and keep those people whose attributes are such as to make them adapted to life in the system: Systems attract systems-people.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 66

Life, People

“We can regard the vector ci as representing certain physical, social, and psychological attributes of player i himself in that it summarizes some crucial parameters of player i's own payoff function Ui as well as the main parameters of his beliefs about his social and physical environment… the rules of the game as such allow any given player i to belong to any one of a number of possible types, corresponding to the alternative values of his attribute vector c i could take… Each player is assumed to know his own actual type but to be in general ignorant about the other players' actual types.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 171; As quoted in: Mertens, Jean-Francois, and Shmuel Zamir. " Formulation of Bayesian analysis for games with incomplete information http://jeremy-chen.org/sites/default/files/files/convexset/2013_01/formulation_of_bayesian_analysis_for_games_with_incomplete_information_mertens_and_zamir_1985.pdf." International Journal of Game Theory 14.1 (1985): p. 1-2

Game

“Moria and stultitia are both rendered nowadays as 'folly', but both have far stronger senses than folly has now. They imply derangement of mind, madness, mania. Such are the defects attributed to Christians by the worldly-wise. And vice-versa.”

Michael Andrew Screech (1926–2018)

Source: Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1998), p. 73

Sense, Madness

“Nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression, that Saddam Hussein committed aggression. We attribute to them rational goals, maybe they wanted to control the energy of the Middle East or something. With regard to ourselves, it's impossible… We just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily, in fact reflexively, when others commit crimes… And if anyone says it, educated people, liberal intellectuals, are infuriated. Because it suggests that we could do something that's not noble. We can make mistakes, that's easy. You can criticize mistakes. You can criticize low-level crimes, like Abu-Ghraib, you can criticize that. You can criticize My Lai. But not the educated, civilized people, the kind of people we have dinner with, see at concerts, sitting in air-conditioned offices planning mass-murder. So that's beyond criticism. On the other hand, if it's half-crazed G. I. s in the field, uneducated, don't know who's going to shoot at them next, you can blame them, you can say how awful they are. You can criticize Lynndie England, disadvantaged young woman, very different from us. But how about the guys who organized and planned it? No.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2006, Discussion with Robert Trivers, 2006

People, Education, Guy

“If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping among the tombs, nor around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

18 January 1870, pages 43-44
John of the Mountains, 1938

Men, Law, Beauty, Soul

“To sum up: numbers appear to represent both an attribute of matter and the unconscious foundation of our mental process. For this reason, number forms, according to Jung, that particular element that unites the realms of matter and psyche. It is “real” in a double sense, as an archetypal image and as a qualitative manifestation in the realm of outer-world experience.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Number and Time (1974), p. .52

World, Sense, Appearance

“I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1800-11-20) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Error, Wine, Night

“The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow."”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1969) in: Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist. p. 139
1960s

Communication, Knowledge

“Unfortunately, the word "system" has many colloquial meanings, some of which have no place in scientific discussion. In order to exclude such meanings, and at the same time provide a starting point for exposition we state the following definition:
A system is a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes.
Our definition does imply of course that a system has properties, functions or purposes distinct from its constituent objects, relationships and attributes.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 18: Italics quote cited in: Thorbjoern Mann (1992) Building Economics for Architects. p. 140

Time

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

"Interview to the Press" in Karachi about the execution of Bhagat Singh (23 March 1931); published in Young India (2 April 1931), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Online Vol. 51. Gandhi begins by making a statement on his failure "to bring about the commutation of the death sentence of Bhagat Singh and his friends." He is asked two questions. First: "Do you not think it impolitic to forgive a government which has been guilty of a thousand murders?" Gandhi replies: "I do not know a single instance where forgiveness has been found so wanting as to be impolitic." In a follow-up question, Gandhi is asked: "But no country has ever shown such forgiveness as India is showing to Britain?" Gandhi replies: "That does not affect my reply. What is true of individuals is true of nations. One cannot forgive too much. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
1930s

Forgiveness, Strong, Peaceful

“To be perfectly just is an attribute in the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 99.
The Guardian (1713)

Nature

“The pressure to generate the ideas and methods attributed to Systems Engineering stems directly from the needs of 20th century society. As our frontiers have disappeared, man has turned to technology to furnish the "good life" in a rapidly shrinking, crowded world. Our interdependence upon one another has increased in direct proportion to the population increase. The race to maintain or improve the operating efficiency of society has required that the systems and mechanisms that serve the society also become increasingly complex and interdependent.
Goode and Machal have provided statistics to illustrate the above. They note that the world population increased from 800 million in 1750, to 1200 million in 1850, and 2400 million in 1950. Maximum transportation speeds went from 40 mph in 1850, and 100 mph in 1900, to commercial transport speed of 350 mph in 1950 and supersonic transport planes of over 1200 mph in the 1960's. Our communication systems are a good indication of increasing complexity. U. S. telephones jumped from 350,000 in 1900, to 55 million in 1955.”

Allen B. Rosenstein (1920–2018) American systems engineers

Source: Systems engineering and Modern Engineering Design (1965), p. 1.

Life, World, Communication, Idea

“Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. XV

Pleasure, Suffering

“People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (2002)

People, Behavior, Learning, Animals

“I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5 points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_adams.html to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress) http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/053/0800/0841.jpg 1820s

God, World, Religion, Thinking

“The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section I, pp. 14-15

History, Change

“No Arab Spring protester, however much he or she might identify with the plight of the Palestinians or decry the cruel policies of Israeli occupation (as I do), would think today to attribute all the ills of Arab polities to empty abstractions like "imperialism" and "Zionism". They understand in their bones that those phrases were tools of a language designed to prop up nasty regimes and distract people like them from the struggle for a better life.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Arab Spring started in Iraq", The New York Times (April 6, 2013)

Life, People, Spring, Understanding

“…they have brainwashed us into believing in the last 150 years… that quantitative change is superior to qualitative attributes. If we can turn out more… it doesn't matter if they're half as good. …We're quantifying everything, and that is why we're trying to put everything on computers. Governments will no longer have to make decisions; computers will do it.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Decision, Change

“You feel afraid of small, insignificant rulers and obey them; shouldn’t you fear and obey the Sole, Absolute Ruler? He has taken no son for Himself. The Jews say, ‘Uzair-as is the son of Allah’; the Christians claim, ‘Jesus is the son of Allah.’ But He says: ‘I have no son.’ He is the Absolute, the Single; there can be none like Him. A son necessarily belongs to the genre and species of his father. The son of a human being would be a human, the young of an elephant would be an elephant and that of a bird would essentially be a bird, inheriting the attributes of its father. If God had a son, he would have been another god. But, He neither has any son, nor any partner in His sovereignty; He is the Absolute Ruler, no one can interfere with His rule. It is He Who has created everything.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

God, Fear, Feeling, Bird

“We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Cars, Understanding

“I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Being Idle".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Men, Age, Nature

“In philosophy at the universities truth occupies only a secondary place and, if called upon, she must get up and make room for another attribute.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Man sieht daraus, daß in der Universitäts-philosophie die Wahrheit nur eine sekundäre Stelle einnimmt und, wenn es gefordert wird, aufstehn muß, einer andern Eigenschaft Platz zu machen.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 152, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 140
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Truth, Universe

“Jesus assumes the wisdom, power, love, and accessibility of God. Without attempting to prove these attributes, he simply acts as if their truth were beyond dispute.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 16

Love, Wisdom, God, Truth

“To ignore social costs because they require an evaluation by society… and to leave social losses out of account because they are 'external' and 'non-economic' in character, would be equivalent to attributing no or ‘zero’ value to all social damages which is no less arbitrary and subjective a judgement than any positive or negative evaluation of social costs.”

Karl William Kapp (1910–1976) American economist

Source: Social Costs of Business Enterprise, 1963, p. 12. Cited in: M. Rangone & S. Solari (2012) "Southern European capitalism and the social costs of business enterprise". in: Studi e Note di Economia, Anno XVII, n. 1-2012, pp. 3-28

Loss

“I am a Bad American is another mass-forwarded internet message often attributed to George Carlin, but was not written by him.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

"Bogus Carlin email", GeorgeCarlin.com (official website, 2012-09-09 http://georgecarlin.com/home/bogus.html, Misattributed

“If I had a province to punish, I would let it be governed by philosophers. Attributed in The Orthodox churchman's magazine; or, A Treasury of divine and useful knowledge”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

1803
Attributed

Knowledge

“The courage to press on regardless—regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us—is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.”

John Bogle (1929–2019)

Speech at the Trinity University Policymaker Breakfast Series, April 16, 2001 ( http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp20010416.html)

Courage, Success, Sea

“But since it is better to have perception or to have omnipotence, to be pitiful or to be without passions, than not to have these attributes; how hast Thou perception, if Thou art not a body? or omnipotence, if Thou canst not do everything? or how art Thou at one and the same time pitiful and without passions? For if only bodily things have perception, since the senses with which we perceive belong and attach to the body; how canst Thou have perception, since Thou art not a body but the Supreme Spirit, which is higher than a body can be? But if perception is only knowledge or a means towards knowledge; since he who perceives, has knowledge thereby, according to the special character of the senses, by sight of colours, by taste of savours and so forth: then whatsoever has knowledge in whatsoever manner may be said without impropriety in some sense to perceive. Therefore, O Lord, although Thou art not a body, yet of a truth Thou hast in this sense perception in the highest degree, since Thou knowest all things in the highest degree; but not in the sense wherein an animal that has knowledge by means of bodily feeling is said to have perception.”

Anselm of Canterbury Proslogion

Proslogion, chapter 5 by Anselm of Canterbury, translated by Clement C. J. Webb (1903).

Truth, Art, Feeling, Knowledge

“There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.”

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

Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter XIV, When The Money Stopped, p. 183-184.

“I do not pretend that I know the whole solution of the world's problems, but I am burdened with a Puritanical sense of obligation to set the world to rights. I feel responsible for many enterprises that are not really my business at all, but many times I have kept silence on issues that interested me deeply through the fear that others would be blamed for my opinions. I have never been willing to believe that human nature cannot be changed; but even if it cannot, I am sure it can be curbed and led into channels of usefulness. I believe that life, not wealth, is the aim of existence — life including all its attributes of love, happiness, and joyful labour. I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system, but even if I am wrong I believe that truth can lose nothing by agitation but may gain all.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Midstream (1929)

Love, Life, War, Happiness

“The last decade has seen a great deal of research on the perception of causation and the consequences of such perception. Conducted primarily within social psychology, the focus has been the perceived causes of other persons' behavior. A parallel analysis has been made of the perceived causes of one's own behavior, and the liveliest recent topic has concerned differences between other-perception and self-perception. The study of perceived causation is identified by the term "attribution theory," attribution referring to the perception inference of cause. As we will see, there is not one but many attribution "theories" and the term refers to several different kinds of problem. The common ideas are that people interpret behavior in terms of its causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining reactions to the behavior.”

Harold Kelley (1921–2003) American psychologist & academic

Source: "Attribution theory and research." 1980, p. 458; Lead paragraph

People, Behavior, Idea, Problem

“Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes established and changes its name.
We hear much of the conflict between science and religion, but our conflict is with both of these. Science and religion always have agreed in opposing and suppressing the various witchcrafts. Now that religion is inglorious, one of the most fantastic of transferences of worships is that of glorifying science, as a beneficent being. It is the attributing of all that is of development, or of possible betterment to science. But no scientist has ever upheld a new idea, without bringing upon himself abuse from other scientists. Science has done its utmost to prevent whatever science has done.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 4
Lo! (1931)

Religion, Idea, Science, Change

“Ignoring the restrictions which the United States imposed upon itself in conducting the war in Indochina, some observers have seen in the outcome some special military genius on the side of North Vietnam. They have in large measure attributed that alleged genius to my apparent counterpart, Vo Nyugen Giap. In reality, Giap was hardly my counterpart, for my position was never so exalted as Giap's. While he was apparently an influential member of his country's government, I was a field commander restricted to decisions and actions within the boundaries of South Vietnam, subject to the dictates of my country's government, and influential in policy matters only to the extent that Washington chose to act on my recommendations. Yet since Giap was for long his own field commander, there was enough direct confrontation between the two of us to enable me to some degree to analyze and judge his military performance.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 404.

War, Reality, Decision, Country

“An analogous process I shall call Churchillian Drift…Whereas quotations with an apothegmatic feel are normally ascribed to Shaw, those with a more grandiose or belligerent tone are, as if by osmosis, credited to Churchill. All humorous remarks obviously made by a female originated, of course, with Dorothy Parker. All quotations in translation, on the other hand, should be attributed to Goethe”

Nigel Rees (1944) British writer and broadcaster

with 'I think' obligatory Brewer's Quotations (London: Cassell, 1994), p. x. Adaptation of the original: "The Vagueness Is All" http://www.qunl.com/rees0001.html from Volume 2, Number 2, April 1993 issue of The “Quote... Unquote” Newsletter

Feeling, Thinking

“You doubt where you're going, you doubt the way you shave in the morning and even the way you talk to people. Looking back on my past, I think that when you are out of form I attribute it to how I am in my life. I guess it was a reflection of the way I was playing my cricket, you know, I was inconsistent.”

Lou Vincent (1978) New Zealand cricketer

When asked about his career and self-doubt. Quoted in [Hanging out with Lou Vincent, Michele Hewitson, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10434215&pnum=3, The New Zealand Herald, 2008-06-05, 2008-06-05]

Life, People, Way, Thinking

“"Isn't it sad, that in a time when we face so many devastating problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, war and conflict – that in our Communion we should be investing so much time and energy on disagreement about sexual orientation?" [The Communion, which] "used to be known for embodying the attribute of comprehensiveness, of inclusiveness, where we were meant to accommodate all and diverse views, saying we may differ in our theology but we belong together as sisters and brothers" now seems "hell-bent on excommunicating one another. God must look on and God must weep."”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

"Tutu calls on Anglicans to accept gay bishop" http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=33&idsub=128&id=2141 in Spero News (14 November 2005)

God, War, Sadness, Hell

“"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159
Misattributed

God

“I truly felt, ultimate objective aside, that the Marines had something beautiful about them. Fraternity, initiation, mentoring, honor, valor, duty—beautiful male attributes in a society in which masculinity is maligned. I can get a bit like that, a bit D. H. Lawrence, a bit jazzed on unexamined humanity. When I chatted on camera to a pair of perfectly assembled teen Marines who sat handsomely in their fatigues, rifles pristine and bolt upright at their sides, I was overwhelmed by the salvation that the military offers to boys that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Beauty, Boy

“lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Speech to the National Convention, (5 February 1794), as quoted in The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1 (1951) by Edward Hallett Carr, p. 154 Variant translations: The attribute of popular government in a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror. Terror without virtue is fatal; virtue without terror is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue. As quoted in Red Star Over Southern Africa (1988) by Morgan Norval, p. xvi If the mainspring of popular government in peace time is virtue, its resource during a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is merely terrible; terror, without which virtue is simply powerless. As quoted in Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (1999) by Gregory Dart Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs. Original French: La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible; elle est donc une émanation de la vertu ; elle est moins un principe particulier, qu’une conséquence du principe général de la démocratie, appliqué aux plus pressants besoins de la patrie. From Sur les principes de morale politique http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/robespierre_principes_morale_politique_05_02_94.htm

Peace, Justice, Time

“It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that some portion of the neglect of science in England, may be attributed to the system of education we pursue. A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant of almost every branch of useful knowledge; and at these latter establishments … classical and mathematical pursuits are nearly the sole objects proposed to the student's ambition.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes (1830), p. 3

Education, School, Mathematics, Knowledge

“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. 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.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), p. 28

Beauty, Art, Knowledge, Decision

“To remove the name of God from the clarified and purified conception of the eternal Ideal Type would be to do violence, inexcusable affront, to the deepest and truest element in the historic religious consciousness. I feel the strongest assurance that my new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious life. What offends us in the Spinozistic or other monistic appropriations of the name " God" is the evident absence from their Absolute of all the essential moral qualities. In these it is that true Deity lies, and all God's metaphysical attributes must be keyed up to them; not one of these "natural" attributes dare be construed in any way that conflicts with the eternal moral essence. If they have been so construed historically (as indeed they have), genuine theology requires that the conception of God shall be relieved of these errors, in order that God's nature may stand revealed as it is in its own reality.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix E: Reply to Criticisms of Mr. J.M.E. McTaggert, p.430

Life, God, Way, Error

“If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front:
The content of this book is distributed on an 'as is' basis, without warranty as to accuracy of content, quality of writing, punctuation, usefulness of the ideas presented, merchantability, correctness or readability of formulae, charts, and figures, or correspondence of (a) the table of contents with the actual contents, (2) page references in the index (if any) with the actual page numbering (if present), and (iii) any illustration with its adjacent caption. Illustrations may have been printed reversed or inverted, the publisher accepts no responsibility for orientation or chirality. Any resemblance of the author or his or her likeness or name to any person, living or dead, or their heirs or assigns, is coincidental; all references to people, places, or events have been or should have been fictionalized and may or may not have any factual basis, even if reported as factual. Similarities to existing works of art, literature, song, or television or movie scripts is pure happenstance. References have been chosen at random from our own catalog. Neither the author(s) nor the publisher shall have any liability whatever to any person, corporation, animal whether feral or domesticated, or other corporeal or incorporeal entity with respect to any loss, damage, misunderstanding, or death from choking with laughter or apoplexy at or due to, respectively, the contents; that is caused or is alleged to be caused by any party, whether directly or indirectly due to the information or lack of information that may or may not be found in this alleged work. No representation is made as to the correctness of the ISBN or date of publication as our typist isn't good with numbers and errors of spelling and usage are attributable solely to bugs in the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. If sold without a cover, this book will be thinner than those sold with a cover. You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party. This disclaimer is a copyrighted work of Jef Raskin, first published in 2004, and is distributed 'as is', without warranty as to quality of humor, incisiveness of commentary, sharpness of taunt, or aptness of jibe.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)

Death, People, Books, Art

Quotes about attribute page 5

Quotes about attribute
page 5