Quotes about back (7784 quotes, page 38)

“And so it has come to this: I, uh… am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. I want to thank the gentlemen who've shared this stage with me for thirty years, Mr. Ed McMahon… Mr. Doc Severinsen… and… you people watching, I can only tell you that it has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you—and I hope when I find something that I want to do, and I think you would like, and come back, that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been. I bid you a very heartfelt good night.”

Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American talk show host and magician

Closing words on his final Tonight Show appearance (22 May 1992).

People , World , Hope , Home

“Thank you, Donald, for that well-meant but rather pedestrian introduction. Regarding yourself, I quote from the third part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Act Two, Scene One. Richard speaks, "Were thy heart as hard as steel/ As thou hast shown it flinty by thy deeds/ I come to pierce it, or to give thee mine." To translate into your own idiom, Donald; you're a yo-yo. Now I direct my remarks to Dean Martin, who is being honored here tonight… for reasons that completely elude me. No, I'm not being fair to Dean because - this is true - in his way Dean, and I know him very well, has the soul of a poet. I'm told that in his most famous song Dean authored a lyric which is so romantic, so touching that it will be enjoyed by generations of lovers until the end of time. Let's share it together. [Opens a songsheet for Dean's "That's Amore" and reads in a monotone] "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza-pie/ That's amore" Now, that's what I call 'touching', Dean. It has all the romanticism of a Ty-D-Bol commercial. "When the world seems to shine/ Like you've had too much wine/ That's amore" What a profound thought. It could be inscribed forever on a cocktail napkin. Hey, there's more. "Tippy-tippy-tay/ Like a gay tarantella" Like a gay tarantella? Apparently, Dean has a 'side Dean' we know nothing about. "When the stars make you drool/ Just like a pasta fazool…. Scuzza me, but you see/ Back in old Napoli/ That's amore" No, Dean; that's infermo, Italian for "sickened". Now, lyrics like that - lyrics like that ought to be issued with a warning: a song like that is hazardous to your health. Ladies and gentlemen… [motions to Dean] you are looking at the end result!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given at a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. Viewable here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKR0i-51S4.

Health , World , Way , Quotes

“Back when a hoe was a hoe.
Coke was a coke.
And crack's what you were doing.
When you were cracking jokes.
Back when a screw was a screw.
The wind was all that blew.
And when you said I'm down with that.
Well, it meant you had the flu.
I miss back when.
I miss back when.
I miss back when.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Back When
Song lyrics, Live Like You Were Dying (2004)

“There is no. man, there is no people, without a God. That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisible idol, fashioned in a man's own image and worshipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Somewhere in the universe there is that in which each individual has firm faith, and on which he places steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart "There is no God" really means there is no God but himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, have placed him at the center of the universe which is thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass that after nearly two thousand years much of the world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case there are as many idols as idol worshippers, and every such idol worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. The time has come once again to repeat and to expound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
There can be no cure for the world's ills and no abatement of the world's discontents until faith and the rule of everlasting principle are again restored and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and the heart and mind of man brought back to a comprehension of the real meaning of faith and its place in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show in a simple language which the uninstructed can understand what are the essentials of a permanent and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, and of a secure and sublime religious faith.
Here we come upon the whole great problem of national education, its successes and its disappointments, its achievements and its problems yet unsolved. Education is not merely instruction far from it. It is the leading of the youth out into a comprehension of his environment, that, comprehending, he may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the world better and happier for his having lived in it. This environment is not by any means a material thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led to an understanding of nature and of economics and left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, of morals and of religion, has been shown but a part of that great environment which is his inheritance as a human being. The school and the college do much, but the school and the college cannot do all. Since Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesiastical organization in the western world, and since democracy made intermingling of state and church impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be saved for men, that the family and the church do their vital cooperative part in a national organization of educational effort. The school, the family and the church are three cooperating educational agencies, each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its obligation to offer systematic, continuous and convincing religious instruction to the young who are within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetuation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of the next generation and those immediately to follow. We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty God for the infinite damage that will be done in the life of individuals and of nations…. Clear thinking will distinguish between men's different associations, and it will be able to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which are God's.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Making liberal men and women : public criticism of present-day education, the new paganism, the university, politics and religion https://archive.org/stream/makingliberalmen00butluoft/makingliberalmen00butluoft_djvu.txt (1921)

Life , Men , God , People

“At this time I was hesitant to venture into the greenery, because I wasn't keen on the possibility of having spiders the size of basketballs drop onto my face from overhead branches and refuse to let go. (…) Hunger pains were moving to the 'excruciating' stage by mid-morning. After a last-ditch attempt to extract nutrients from filling my mouth with sand, I decided that, if a big spider the size of a basketball dropped onto my face and tried to eat it, I would eat it back and we could turn the whole thing into an exciting competition.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Fog Juice, Chapter Two

Hunger , Pain , Time

“When I was first elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2002, I was part of a group of lawmakers who brought common-sense, conservative principals back to Missouri. As I reflect on my time in the State Capitol, I am proud of the legislation my fellow lawmakers and I have passed. I firmly believe our efforts positively impacted the lives of all Missourians. From day one in the State Capitol, my goal has been job creation. I firmly believe a good job empowers all Missourians to reach their full potential.”

Ron Richard (1947) American politician

2018: An Opportunity to Finish What I Started http://ronrichard.com/2018/01/08/2018-opportunity-finish-started-1818/ (January 8, 2018)

Sense , Effort , Time , Parting

“…. Humankind, -- that all men anthropological come from the same source, with the same potentials, must have a potential equality in chance and opportunity and that is so right, I think, that posterity will look back upon what we are doing today in our domestic issues here. They will look back upon it, I think, with incredulity and they'll wonder what the issue was all about. I really think so. It's solved in baseball. It'll be solved educationally. It'll be solved everywhere in the course of time.”

Branch Rickey (1881–1965) American baseball player and coach

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNEo_mOi29U

Men , Thinking , Chance , Time

“My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is… Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Bob Dylan: The Song Talk Interview http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm by Paul Zollo (1991)

Way , Sense

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia… Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p. 15

Behavior , History , Birth , Learning

“Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour. The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam. They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Women , God , War , Children

““Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.”
“Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.”
Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.””

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 25 (p. 321)

Religion , Time

“Mary's treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no favors to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that three hundred years later the puritan reformers were not satisfied with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The puritans abandoned the New Testament in order to go back to the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve. This is the Church's affair, not ours, and the women are competent to settle it with Church or State, without help from outside; but honest tourists are seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the dead architecture where it belongs.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Women , People , Law , Feeling

“I loved making films. There was something about that lens that I adored, and it adored me back. So we were a great combination.”

Lizabeth Scott (1922–2015) American actress and singer

Colker, David (February 6, 2015). " From the Archives: Lizabeth Scott dies at 92; sultry leading woman of film noir http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-lizabeth-scott-20150206-story.html". Los Angeles Times

Love

“He picked the rock back up. “Do you believe that it floated?”
“No!” I sulked, rubbing my temples.
“Good. It didn’t. Never fool yourself into perceiving things that don’t exist.””

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 10, “Alar and Several Stones” (p. 78)

Fools

“It was strange going back to Spain again: I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as any of my friends there were in jail. But in the spring of 1953 in Cuba I talked with good friends who had fought on opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War about stopping in Spain on our way to Africa and they agreed that I might honorably return to Spain if I did not recant anything that I had written and kept my mouth shut on politics. There was no question of applying for a visa. They were no longer required for American tourists.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1 (the opening paragraph of the book)

Love , War , Way , Spring

“The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called “final causes.” The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p.5.

Age , Unfaithfulness , Faith , Universe

“The immaterial Blue colour shown at Iris Clert’s in April [1958, together with Jean Tinguely ] had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1958; p. 47
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Life , World , Reality , Speed

“Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Love , Life , School

“When we returned [to] India, we realised how the countrymen had celebrated the win! Everybody was over the moon. Some of them said that the August 15, 1947 came back.”

Kapil Dev (1959) Indian cricketer

Kapil Dev: 30 years on, I can still recall India World Cup victory

“It is easy to explain. This is the first time I ever went into a season without aches and pains. One year I was bothered by a bad back and it carried into another season. Another year I hurt my hand. This year I feel good.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

On his vastly improved run production, as quoted in "3 Years Are Up and Clemente's At Top of Heap" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J8MVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HBAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5046%2C533946&dq=easy by Oscar Fraley (UPI), in The Milwaukee Sentinel (Saturday, June 11, 1960), Page 6, Part 2
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1960</big>

Pain , Feeling , Time , Hurt

“Lincoln habitually would tell people he was totally ignorant of a subject which in fact he was quite well versed in, because then they would underestimate him, and when they underestimated him they would fall into his trap. Leonard Swett once said that anybody who mistook Lincoln for a simple man would soon end up with his back in a ditch.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

People

“Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.”

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

Lecture IX, "Conversion, concluded"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Life , Nature

“You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom. … We certainly do not wish to pursue a policy inimical to the legitimate interests of Germany, but you must surely be aware that when the German Government speaks of friendship with England, what they mean is that we shall give them back their former Colonies, and also agree to their having a free hand so far as we are concerned in Central and Southern Europe. This means that they would devour Austria and Czecho-Slovakia as a preliminary to making a gigantic middle Europe-block. It would certainly not be in our interests to connive at such policies of aggression.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Londonderry (23 October 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 873
The 1930s

Friendship , People

“Personally I'm very much opposed to Hamas' policies in almost every respect. However, we should recognize that the policies of Hamas are more forthcoming and more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel. … So, for example, Hamas has called for a long-term indefinite truce on the international border. There is a long-standing international consensus that goes back over thirty years that there should be a two-state political settlement on the international border, the pre-June 1967 border, with minor and mutual modifications. That's the official phrase. Hamas is willing to accept that as a long-term truce. The United States and Israel are unwilling even to consider it… The demand on Hamas by the United States and the European Union and Israel […] is first that they recognize the State of Israel. Actually, that they recognize its right to exist. Well, Israel and the U. S. certainly don't recognize the right of Palestine to exist, nor recognize any state of Palestine. In fact, they have been acting consistently to undermine any such possibility. The second condition is that Hamas must renounce violence. Israel and the United States certainly do not renounce violence. The third condition is that Hamas accept international agreements. The United States and Israel reject international agreements. So, though the policies of Hamas are, again in my view, unacceptable, they happen to be closer to the international consensus on a political peaceful settlement than those of their antagonists, and it's a reflection of the power of the imperial states - the United States and Europe - that they are able to shift the framework, so that the problem appears to be Hamas' policies, and not the more extreme policies of the United States and Israel… And we must remember that in their case it's not just policies. It's not words - it's actions.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview on LBC TV, May 23, 2006 http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1152
Quotes 2000s, 2006

Peace , Problem , Appearance , Personality

“So hard to find my way,
Now that I'm all on my own.
I saw you just the other day,
My how you have grown,
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometimes I'm overcome thinking 'bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown eyed girl
You my brown eyed girl.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Brown Eyed Girl
Song lyrics, Blowin' Your Mind! (1967)

Love , Making love , Way , Girl

“Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. …The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Mathematics

“When I look back on my life and consider all the way I have been led, above all I thank God to Whom I owe everything, for all His goodness to me and ascribe to Him all the praise and honour.”

William Henry Perkin

As quoted in The chemist and druggist https://archive.org/stream/b19974760M1453#page/222/mode/2up (1906), UBM. p. 222.

Life , God , Way

“It will all come back — the wasted splendor,
The heart's lost youth like a breaking flower,
The dauntless dare, and the wistful, tender
Touch of the April hour.”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, III

Youth , Flowers , Heart

“A shop-keeper in good business is quite as well off as a pedlar that travels the country with his wares on his back. Commercial jealousy is, after all, nothing but prejudice: it is a wild fruit, that will drop of itself when it has arrived at maturity.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter IX, p. 101

Jealousy , Travel , Business , Country

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Prayer on D-Day (1944)

God , Faith , Religion , Strong

“I shall have to express a very deep conviction: that until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”

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

Letter to Fon Boardman; quoted in Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, ed. Lisa H. Sideris and Kathleen Dean Moore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 102 https://books.google.it/books?id=awR4kJrhQK0C&pg=PA102.

Men , World , Peace , Courage

“Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8

People , Feeling , Spring , Thinking

“After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all0time low. I really had a case of writer's block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing-which was absolutely true. This gave me time to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught?”

William S. Burroughs book The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

"A Word to the Wise Guy"
The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

Thinking , Time

“As I plodded back and forth I reflected miserably upon my own political rootlessness, in a world where politics is so important. When I am with Tories I am a violent advocate of reform; when I am with reformers I hold forth on the value of tradition and stability. When I am with communists I become a royalist — almost a Jacobite; when I am with socialists I am an advocate of free trade, private enterprise and laissez-faire. The presence of a person who has strong political convictions always sends me flying off in a contrary direction. Inevitably, in the world of today, this will bring me before a firing squad sooner or later. Maybe the fascists will shoot me, and maybe the proletariat, but political contrariness will be the end of me; I feel it in my bones.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

World , Feeling , Strong , Personality

“The meaning of the word “feminist” has not really changed since it first appeared in a book review in the Athenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.” It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen's A Doll's House a century ago, “Before everything else I'm a human being.” It is the simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL. Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren't decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a “special-interest group”. They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable of participating in the world's events, as the other half. Feminism's agenda is basic It asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Backlash (1992)

Women , Men , Books , World

“All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ‘security’. The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

Women , Men , Democracy , Freedom

“Imagine you go away
On a business trip one day
And when you come back home
Your children have grown
And you never made your wife moan”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Ghost Of Corporate Future
Soviet Kitsch (2004)

Children , Home , Imagination , Business

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" The Death of Privacy and Why We Should Welcome It http://liftconference.com/death-privacy-and-why-we-should-welcome-it," January 18, 2009. (Remarks made during the Lift Conference)

Friendship , People , Dreams , Hope

“ We used many techniques, but probably the most common is that we will go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet- like oil- and we will arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters. But almost all of the money goes to U. S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in the country- power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks- things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor.In fact the poor suffer because the loans have to be repaid, and they are huge loans, and the repayment of them means that poor won’t get education, health, and other social services and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hitmen, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh”.”

John Perkins (1945) American author

Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

Money , Health , World , Education

“Got my ticket at the airport
Well I guess I've been marking time
I've been living in another country
That operates along entirely different lines
Keep me away from porter or whiskey
Don't play anything sentimental it'll make me cry
I've got to go back my friend
Is there really any need to ask why?”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Got to Go Back
Song lyrics, No Guru (1986)

Time , Cry , Country

“First of all, I can see that you love your daughter and you are a nice person who has a great future ahead of you and I hope your future is here…. This is not the focus…. And so, what we have to do is find a way to make sure that you can get right with the law and we've got to do this in a good way, so that the rug doesn't get pulled out from under you and your family gets separated…but if you're worried about, you know, some deportation force coming, knocking on your door this year, don't worry about that…. Secure the border and the people who are violent criminals, repeat offenders who keep coming back in, we've got to focus on that.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

CNN Town Hall Meeting, responding to DACA audience member about her concern that she could be deported by ICE, CNN "Transcripts" http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1701/12/se.01.html aired 12 January 2017.

Love , People , Family , Law

“Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone... The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs... After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world... The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one's feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 41, note 30

World , Art , Reality , Change

“[Lloyd George] then went on to say that the Imperial Conference had had a meeting that morning, and that he, Smuts, Hughes and Massey did not intend to allow the British Empire to take a back seat. Gt Britain had won the war. She had made enormous sacrifices in men and money, and they were quite determined that she should not be overshadowed by America.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Lord Riddell's diary entry (July 1921), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 330
Prime Minister

Men , Money , War

“The question is: can they now be prevented from taking back into their own hands the decision about their identity and their form of government which truly was theirs all along? I do not believe they can be prevented: for they are now, at a general election, provided with a clear, definite and practicable alternative, namely, a fundamental renegotiation directed to regain free access to world food markets and recover or retain the powers of Parliament, a renegotiation to be followed in any event by a specific submission of the outcome to the electorate, a renegotiation protected by an immediate moratorium or stop on all further integration of the UK into the Community. This alternative is offered, as such an alternative must be in our parliamentary democracy, by a political party capable of securing a majority in the House of Commons and sustaining a Government.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Birmingham advising people to vote Labour (23 February 1974), quoted in Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 458
1970s

World , Food , Democracy , Communication

“The girl is mettle to the back.”

Charles Coffey Irish composer

Boarding-School, Sc. 5. (1733)

Girl

“And it's the same sad song coming back again. The same old song, flows back again. ~ "So Much Work"”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Song lyrics

Sadness

“I an a political asylum situation here. Legally, I cannot tell that I am making any politics action here. But I always want to be with my people over there. I want to go back to Vietnam, of course, if possible.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

Political resentment in contemporary Vietnam
1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

People

“Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel.”

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

Original: (zh-CN) 马克思主义的道理千条万绪，归根结底就是一句话：“造反有理。
Source: Speech marking the 60th birthday of Stalin (20 December 1939), later revised as "It is right to rebel against reactionaries."

“Back in 2014, when no one else was planning how to win the referendum, @DouglasCarswell talked tactics at the @Tate. He said: "We can win in one of two circumstances: a visible failure of the renegotiation, or one of the two main party leaders being neutral."”

Daniel Hannan (1971) British politician

In the event, we got both. Thanks @jeremycorbyn.
Series of tweets following Jeremy Corbyn's sacking of shadow ministers who defied a Labour whip not to support an amendment calling for the UK to stay in the single market after Brexit https://twitter.com/DanielJHannan/status/880721871720808448 (30 June 2017)
2010s

Failure

“Today, I will try to remember to regret the past. I will think of how many mistakes I have made throughout my life. I will say to myself, "If only I could go back in time and make different choices, so that my life could be the way it should have been."”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

Then I will remind myself that I cannot.
March 16
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Life , Way , Thinking , Time

“Alok tried to ask the professor for a re-quiz, who stared back as if he had been asked for both his kidneys.”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Source: Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT! (2004), P. 34

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life , Men , War , Education

“To understand events as experienced by actual men and institutions we must be concerned with the history of errors and false starts as well as successes-although we make this distinction on the basis of what we now know of the tradition of success. As we go back in time the uncertainty of the outlook and of the objectives of scientific inquiries increases. The essence of the scientific movement is research. The answers to the essential question, what to do in scientific research-what questions to put to nature, by what methods to get answers, what to count as satisfactory answers-became clear only by the accumulation of successes and the marking of failures.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

A. C. Crombie, 1963. as cited in: Robert Maxwell Young. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101.

Men , Error , History , Failure

“Lao Chiu's burns were so extensive that, with the exception of his scalp, two shoulders, the waist where his leather belt was worn and the soles of his feet, pratically his whole body was affected. His back and hips were burned deeply and his right leg was even worse. Every time it was necessary to turn him over and change his dressings ten doctors and five nurses were required and the process took several hours. Moreover, the patient suffered very much and was short of breath for a long while.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

A Battle For Life (July 1958)

Suffering , Change , Time

“Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it; I could talk about Mondrian but it didn't occur to me to do it. [around 1950]. I saw a Dubuffet show at Pierre Matisse [the son of Henri Matisse, running an art-gallery in New York then] in the late forties and came back with a new vocabulary. Also when Baziotes won the Carnegie (1948) there was a reproduction in 'The Times'. I remember bringing it to class. It was source of bewilderment, delineated configurations that seemed to come out of Cubism. It was something new. Those were the tastes of a whole dimension that was to come, much more abstract and allover and I didn't see much more of it until I came to New York. I would go to the old Guggenheim to look at Kandinsky. I liked the early abstractions but the later ones I didn't like at all..”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Source: 1960s, Interview with Henry Geldzahler', in 'Artforum', 1965, p. 36

Art , Feeling , Time

“You know, some people like to call me Mad Max like in the movie.
They may believe it’s an insult. But let me tell you something:
It’s true. I am mad!
I’m mad about government waste!
I’m mad about government borrowing money on the backs of future generations, to benefit big corporations!
I’M MAD THAT THE LIBERALS ARE RUNNING OUR COUNTRY’S FINANCES, AND OUR NATION’S FUTURE, INTO THE GROUND!
I’M MAD THAT THE LIBERAL GOVERNMENT SHRINKS OUR PAYCHECK WITH HIGHT TAXES AND TAKES AWAY OUR FREEDOM.
I’m mad about the federal government constantly meddling in provincial jurisdictions!
I’m mad at politicians who promise anything to get elected!
So yes, you can call me Mad Max.
I don’t mind!
I’m asking you to get mad like me and take your future into your hands.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

3 October 2016 Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/hon.maximebernier/posts/10154565323228703 quoted 28 May 2018 on Toronto Sun https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/bonokoski-mad-maxs-dustup-over-a-liberal-mps-skin-colour-comments
About

Money , People , Freedom , Future

“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running — from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Tree , Housing , Daughters

“Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself—either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Thinking , Chance , Time , Reading

“Let us be honest. Suppose a man came into this city and should meet a funeral procession, and say, “Who is dead?” and they should reply, “The son of a widow; her only support.” Suppose he should say to the procession, “Halt!” and to the undertaker, “Take out that coffin, unscrew that lid. Young man, I say unto thee, arise!” and the dead should step from the coffin and in a moment afterward hold his mother in his arms. Suppose this stranger should go to your cemetery and find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell upon a new-made grave, and he should say to her, “Who lies buried here?” and she should reply, “My husband;” and he should cry, “I say unto thee, oh grave, give up thy dead!” and the husband should rise, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife’s, and the little children with their arms around his neck; do you think that the people of this city would kill him? Do you think any one would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that every one who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Love , Death , Children , People

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love , Women , Men , World

“It’s hard to know how to deal with liberalization in cultures that have been repressed for a long time, that don’t have strong civil societies. But for the United States, of all countries, to be talking about human rights just rings very, very hollow in light of all the objections to our policy in Israel — the perception that we’re hard on one side and not on the other, and that we don’t contest the settlements or human-rights abuses committed by Israeli soldiers, and so on. Plus the fact that we have turned our back on international treaties and not been a global citizen, I think, makes people, even democrats, the leading lights in these repressed societies, very squeamish about being associated with the United States.”

Samantha Power (1970) Irish-American academic, author and diplomat

Samantha Power: How to lose friends and make enemies http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/02844399.htm, Boston Phoenix, 2003.

People , Thinking , Light , Strong

“In August 2009, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer was discussing a tea party rally in Arizona, where it's legal to carry an unconcealed weapon. She said: "A man at a pro-health care rally… wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip… There are questions about whether this has racial overtones, I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns." All that her audience was shown were a rifle and pistol strapped to a man's back. MSNBC concealed the fact that the armed man was black and did not show the interview he gave to the reporter. Brewer knowingly deceived her audience because an armed black man didn't fit the racial narrative.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

"Leftist race-baiters stir up animosity" (9 May 2012)
2010s

People , Health , Color , Question

“What they had me doing first was autographing copies of Come and Get It at the Bon Marche, where I had been fired a couple of years back. That was bad enough but think of me autographing a book written by somebody else. That took crust but it didn't turn out so badly because when I got to the store, about twenty people finally strolled in and looked at me from a distance and kept their buying firmly in control. What the Goldwyn people had forgotten was that up that way I'm still remembered as the freak from West Seattle High.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

Collier's magazine, (8 May 1937)

People , Books , Way , Thinking

“When these guitar mags bring up that stuff up and say such and such came up with this and that which is pushing the boundaries, I just say, "let's step back for a minute and admit something: nothing has happened for the last 100 years." And it's okay. It's not a bad thing … We're all working with "tools" that have been in existence for the last 100 years and there hadn't been a new "tool" for a long long time.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in RIP magazine (June 1994).

Time

“Since it is the actions of investors whose buy and sell decisions move prices up and down, any deviation from a random walk has ultimately to be traced back to the behavior of investors.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 4, Positive Feedbacks, p. 81

Behavior , Decision

“Nigel Barton (On TV): I feel I don't belong here, that's my trouble.
Interviewer (on TV): Well, where do you belong? At home?
Harry Barton: Of course!
Nigel Barton (on TV): No, I'm afraid I don't. Now it hurts to say this, of course, but it's the truth. Back at home, in the village, in the workingmen's club, with people I went to school with, I'm so much on the defensive, you see. They suspect me of making qualitative judgments about their environment, you understand, but it's not that I wish to do so. Yet I even find my own father looking at me oddly some times, waiting to pounce on some remark, some expression in my face, watching me like a hawk. I don't feel at home in either place. I don't belong. It's a tightrope between two different worlds, and I'm walking it.
Harry Barton: You're a bloody liar, Nigel!”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Stand up, Nigel Barton (1965)

People , Truth , World , School

“"I am not going to kill a man because he won't let us rob him." "Then go back to your mother and send for a man who wants to win."”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 9

“As any military strategist knows, it's impossible to win a defensive warfare. Defensive war is doomed to defeat. To win a war, you have to launch an attack. You have to go on the offensive. You have to attack the enemy. You have to set him back on his heels. You have to take the initiative. You have to be positive. You have to attack and invade and overpower. You can't just sit there and try to ward him off while he attacks and invades, or he'll finally overpower you.”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Attack!

War

“The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Music , Lovers , Universe , Time

“And when you are poor and have to carry
The Christian creed and wife and children
All on your back, it is too much!
That's why I made the Elixir of Youth,
Which landed me in the jail at Peoria
Branded a swindler and a crook
By the upright Federal Judge!”

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) American writer

" Dr. Siegfried Iseman http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dr-siegfried-iseman/"

Children , Youth

“His remains will be transported back to Quezon City on Sunday morning. A mass will be held at the Arlington Memorial Chapel in Araneta Avenue, Quezon City where his remains will be cremated.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2012, Statement: on the Passing of His Father Rep. Salvador H. Escudero III

Memory

“At my back I hear the word—”homosexual”—and it seems to split my world in two…. It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

The Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

World , Light

“Whenever I ask about Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola, people immediately say it is an American or European drink. This is not true. The kola is African. They have taken the cheap raw material from us. They produced it, they made it into a drink, and they sell it to us for a high price. Why are Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola expensive? Because they have taken our kola, produced it, and sold it back to us. We should produce it ourselves and sell it to them.”

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

Speech in Conakry, Guinea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JDct2pJeZM (25 June 2007)
Speeches

People , Drink

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Smile , Sport , Winter

“When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods.”

William D. Nordhaus (1941) American economist

"After Nobel in Economics, William Nordhaus Talks About Who’s Getting His Pollution-Tax Ideas Right: A few governments — notably, parts of Canada and South Korea — have adapted his ideas in ways that frame them as a financial windfall for taxpayers." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/climate/nordhaus-carbon-tax-interview.html The New York Times. Oct. 13, 2018.

People , Thinking

“For so long I hid behind the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Now I feel like I've done it, I've done what I set out to achieve, now I can just go back to being me.”

Jodie Marsh (1978) English glamour model and television personality

Interview in The Guardian, 25 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/25/broadcasting.bigbrother

Feeling

“If she's passing back this way I'm not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she's got the time.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), If You See Her, Say Hello

Way , Time

“Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much?
Tony Blair: I am afraid that the Hon. Gentleman will have to repeat that.
Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much?
Tony Blair: Basically, that it never won two successive terms of Government and, perhaps, that it never put the Conservative party flat on its back, which is where it is now. Thankfully, we are running an economy with low inflation, low mortgage rates and low unemployment; fortunately, we are doing a darn sight better than the Government of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a Member, who had—I thank him for allowing me to mention this—interest rates at 10 per cent. for four years, 3 million unemployed and two recessions. Whether it is old Labour or new Labour, it is a darn sight better than the Tories.”

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

Hansard http://archive.is/20130707074457/http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm050126/debtext/50126-03.htm%2350126-03_spnew24, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 430, col. 302.
In the House of Commons, 26 January 2005.
2000s

Success

“Study your craft and know who you are and what's special about you. Find out what everyone does on a film set, ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don't do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Craig Modderno, "Newman remains animated at 81," Reuters (2006-06-12)

Life , Question , Study

“At the end of the day I'm maybe clean of cancer right now, but that doesn't mean it won't come back at 100%. So I'm not leaving here going: "Oh my God my life is over, cuz I don't know…" I'm sitting here, I'm happy I'm at Rove, I'm happy I'm in Australia, I'm pleased I finished an album, I'm just grateful. If it comes back I will kick it in the butt as much as I could. But it's not about winning, it's just about fighting, and that's all you got to on this earth. It's just fight for what your right is, and that's to live.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

from an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUsb1LCn5l4 at The Rove Live, Australia, 2004
General Quotes

Life , God , Fight , Happiness

“I am greedy. I eat under stress. When you are eating, the rest of the world is tuned out. And when you tune back in you feel guilty about having been greedy and the rest of the world is still there, so you have to carry on eating!”

Nigella Lawson (1960) British food writer, journalist and broadcaster

A woman of extremes (2001)

World , Feeling

“I'm back for the second time.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Announcing his return to the Bulls (1995-03-18), Classic NBA Quotes: Michael Jordan, 2006-11-22, NBA Encyclopedia, NBA Media Ventures http://www.nba.com/history/Classic_NBA_Quotes_Jordan.html,

Time

“Pride looks back upon its past deeds, and calculating with nicety what it has done, it commits itself to rest; whereas humility looks to that which is before, and discovering how much ground remains to be trodden, it is active and vigilant. Having gained one height, pride looks down with complacency on that which is beneath it; humility looks up to a higher and yet higher elevation. The one keeps us on this earth, which is congenial to its nature; the other directs our eye, and tends to lift us up to heaven.”

James McCosh (1811–1894) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 485.

Nature , Past

“As a physician I am embarrassed by the lack of initiative and obstructionist policies of my own medical profession toward healthier lifestyles. This is not surprising. Physicians lack training and knowledge of nutrition and are self-serving when they proclaim “patients won't follow plant-based nutrition.” Having counseled patients with severe coronary artery heart disease for over twenty years, I find the opposite to be true. Patients sent home to die by expert cardiologists after failing bypass or stents rejoice as they lose weight, eliminate angina chest pains, lessen their medication, lower their blood sugars, decrease or come off their insulin, revert their positive stress test back to normal, selectively diminish the plaque plugging their arteries, and resume a fully active life empowered by the knowledge that they, not their physicians, have become the locus of control for the disease that was destroying them.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=6Aosc1wlAXcC&pg=PA1 to No More Bull! by Howard Lyman (New York: Scribner, 2005).

Life , Pain , Disease , Home

“What is a “heart of great forbearance?” As a practitioner, the first thing you should be able to do is to not fight back when you are beaten or sworn at—you must be tolerant. Otherwise, what kind of practitioner will you be?”

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Zhuan Falun http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/zflus.html

Heart , Fight

“I am my father's father,
You are your children's guilt.

In history's pity and terror
The child is Aeneas again;

Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire.

Child labor! The child must carry
His fathers on his back.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-ballad-of-the-children-of-the-czar/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Children , History , Horse

“You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun the understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of then to realize you'd been had, that there aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 21

Understanding

“Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 60

Death , Law , Time , Help

“Dear Polly,
Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair.
This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.
Yours ever, Sam.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Fire and Hemlock

Source: Fire and Hemlock (1985), p. 265.

Hope , Understanding , Thinking , Sun

“Your back's against the wall and you're almost done for – it's Dunkirk all over again! (The Apprentice (To Paul, the ex-army Lieutenant before he is fired.)).”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

The Apprentice, Series 3

“Back then "cruel and unusual punishment" meant the rack and burning at the stake — both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America — but in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.”

Tom Clancy book Executive Orders

Executive Orders (1996), p. 613
1990s

Sex , Change

“I soon came to know in the weary debates and the 104 divisions against the European Communities Bill who it was with whom I shared feelings of anger, outrage and hatred at what was being perpetrated. I am aware that the "Left" is supposed to be motivated only by the desire to be unimpeded by "Europe" in converting Britain into a socialist state; but I am compelled to depose that the instincts and reasoning of the "Left" opponents of membership…were exactly as nationalistic, not to say patriotic, as my own…[I part company with Labour only] because of my blind, high Tory ultimate faith in the people. If they are the people I thought and still want to think that they are, those who represent them will assuredly be pulled back in time from the betrayal of their birthright of parliamentary freedom either to a European state or to a Marxist bureaucracy.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Daily Telegraph (14 September 1980), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 631, p. 840.
1980s

People , Faith , Feeling , Communication

“The unkissed girls and boys of paradise
Are lining up around the block
Back pockets full of dynamite
While their neighbors talk and talk.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"Black Rainbow"
Actor (2009)

Girl , Boy

““Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 18 (p. 94).

People , Dreams , Communication , Memory

“I really see nothing of other people. I'm trying to dig my way back again into my work. One absolutely has to dedicate oneself, every bit of oneself, to the one inescapable thing. That's the only way to get somewhere and to become something.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her parents, Worpswede, 10 September 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199
1899

People , Way

“Hitching up the M11
coming back from a Dexys gig
got picked up 'bout half eleven
by this bloke in a funny wig”

Attila the Stockbroker (1957) punk poet, folk punk musician and songwriter

"Contributory Negligence", from Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters (1985)
Written for a judge who said a raped woman hitchhiker had been guilty of "contributory negligence". In the poem, Attila hitches a lift with a judge, attacks him and uses the ruling in his defence.