Quotes about back
page 69

“A third-party candidate is never treated equally. They look at you as a novelty, as cannon fodder. "This is entertaining," they think, "but we'll go back to the Democrats and Republicans, because only they can run our government."”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Which is baloney.
Harvard interview (February 2004)

Thinking

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and the Lt. Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality. Today we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand. And now if you would join me in a moment of silence. May God bless the victims, their families, and America. Thank you very much.”

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

Remarks on After Two Planes Crash Into World Trade Center https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Remarks_After_Two_Planes_Crash_Into_World_Trade_Center (11 September 2001) 2000s, 2001

God, World, Education, School

“Chris Wallace: Where do you stand on the right of return?
Herman Cain: The right of return? The right of return?
Chris Wallace: The Palestinian right of return.
Herman Cain: That's something that should be negotiated. That's something that should be negotiated.
Chris Wallace: Do you think the Palestinian refugees, the people who were kicked out of the land in 1948, should be able or should have any right to return to Israeli land?
Herman Cain: Yes. But under — but not under Palestinian conditions. Yes. They should have a right to come back if that is a decision that Israel wants to make. Back to — it's up to Israel to determine the things they will accept. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it real clear in his statement following the statement that President Obama made. They are wiling to make some concessions. They are willing to give on a lot of things. They are willing to be compassionate. I don't think they have a big problem with people returning.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

Fox News Sunday
2011-05-22
Television
Fox News
10:05
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday/transcript/herman-cain-his-presidential-bid-sen-mitch-mcconnell-talks-foreign-policy-debt-reduction?page=3#ixzz1NCzc1xGW
2011-10-08

People, Problem, Thinking, Decision

“And so it went on, day after day. This was not the first time that those who had at first smiled at him turned their backs on him and began to think of themselves isntead of thinking of him. Sometimes it was as if you understood people's souls; a few days later, you understood nothing. One day you were kissed, and it meant everything; next day, you were not kissed.... He consoled himself by looking at his exercise books with the poems approaching the thousand total soon, and more. Perhaps the world would some day understand that the heart existed. Some day.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

People, Books, World, Smile

“Off the stretch, Orosco, here's the pitch…swing and a long one into left field! Way back in the corner…GRAND SLAMMMMMAAHHH! A grand slam home run by Herr! And that's a winner! Twelve to eight!”

Jack Buck (1924–2002) American sportscaster

Calling Tom Herr's game-winning grand slam home run on Seat Cushion Night against the New York Mets in April 1987.
1980s

Way, Home

“They stopped at The Sahara, taking a long table near the back, and listened to a baldheaded little comedian named Don Rickles, who is probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one — it is too offensive to be offensive.”

Gay Talese Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (Esquire, April 1966)

Country

“My chief, let Fate cry on or back,
'Tis ours to follow, nothing slack:
Whate'er betide, he only cures
The stroke of Fortune who endures.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book V, p. 175

Fate, Cry

“If philosophy aims at being a theoretical mode of thought and speech, can it have a rhetorical character and be expressed in rhetorical forms? The answer seems obvious. Theoretical thinking, as a rational process, excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences—the influences of feeling—disturb the clarity of rational thought. …
To prove means to show something to be something, on the basis of something. To have something through which something is shown and explained definitively is the foundation of our knowledge. Apodictic, demonstrative speech is the kind of speech which establishes the definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai. It is clear that the first archai of any proof and hence of knowledge cannot be proved themselves because they cannot be the object of apodictic, demonstrative, logical speech; otherwise they would not be the first assertions. Their nonderivable, primary character is evident from the fact that we neither can speak nor comport ourselves without them, for both speech and human activity simply presuppose them. But if the original assertions are not demonstrable, what is the character of the speech in which we express them? Obviously this type of speech cannot have a rational-theoretical character….
Basic premises cannot have an apodictic, demonstrative character and structure but are thoroughly indicative….
Arche … cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character. Thus the term "rhetoric" assumes a fundamentally new significance; "rhetoric" is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of the rational thought.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), pp. 18-19

Art, Feeling, Knowledge, Thinking

“And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

regarding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
2012-12-17
Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk
Radio
http://www.drjamesdobson.org/Broadcasts/Broadcast?i=32d0ea7c-eeb2-41fb-9c05-f6e0c733d58a, quoted in * 2012-12-17
Dobson: Connecticut Shooting was God Allowing 'Judgment to Fall Upon Us' for Turning Our Back on Him
Kyle Mantyla
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/dobson-connecticut-shooting-was-god-allowing-judgment-fall-upon-us-turning-our-back-him
2012

God, Thinking, Madness

“The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience. 'The will,' says Francis Thompson, 'is the lynch-pin of the faculties.' We stand or fall by its strength or its infirmity. Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue. Parental legislation for the benefit of the weak leaves them as weak as ever… They may go to heaven in leading-strings, but they cannot conquer Apollyon on the way.”

Agnes Repplier (1855–1950) American essayist

in "Consolations of the Conservative" from Points of Friction (1920)

Men, Way, Parent, Strong

“[moot issue is that ] we should talk about is not just lessons in leadership or what the leaders need to do today but what can India do to bring those leaders back to India, so India itself can become an even more powerful economy going forward.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Quoted in "A Learning CEO Can Power Through Tough Times: Indra Nooyi".

“… That's all it takes to get you back to the late 18th century. Three grandfather's lifetimes. That's how close we are to it. And, yet, that world has disappeared so totally, it's like fairyland. Thatched cottages, meadows, happy peasants. A golden age. Garbage, all that. Nasty, brutish, and short - that's what life was all about. And dirty. And boring. And it had been like that for thousands of years! And then, suddenly, the whole complex polluted overpopulated phrenetic nonstop stressful high tech rat race that is the modern world… Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been. And the extraordinary thing is, none of that was planned.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections 2 (1994), 1 - Revolutions

Life, Age, World, Happiness

“The problem is, eternity is barred to humans, and so humans, all too painfully aware of that and entertaining little hope of appealing against that verdict of fate, seek to stifle and deafen their tragic wisdom in a hubbub of frail and fleeting pleasures. This admittedly being a false calculation—for the same reason which prompted it (that tragic wisdom can never be chased or conjured away for good)—they condemn themselves, whatever their material wealth, to perpetual spiritual poverty: to continuous unhappiness (‘A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself to be’). Instead of seeking the way to happiness within the limits of their predicament, they take a long detour, hoping that somewhere along the route their odious and repulsive destiny may be escaped or fooled—only to land back in the despair that prompted them to start on their voyage of (dearly wished for, yet unattainable) discovery. The only discovery humans can possibly make on that voyage is that the route they have taken was but a detour that sooner or later will bring them back to the starting line.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

[paraphrasing the view of Seneca], p. 34.
The Art of Life (2008)

Wisdom, Fate, Pleasure, Hope

“Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram… he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”

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

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. III, Reason in Religion, Ch. I

Men, God, Religion, Time

“The spirit of the smacking parry is not parrying, or smacking strongly, but smacking the enemy's long sword in accordance with his attacking cut, primarily intent on quickly cutting him. If you understand the timing of smacking, however hard your long swords clash together, your swordpoint will not be knocked back even a little. You must research sufficiently to realise this.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Understanding, Time

“I could see clearly that this problem could only be solved on the individual and personal level; political revolt is irrelevant. Both Camus and Sartre had been neatly hog-tied by their earlier radicalism. Camus came to see that rebellion is a political roundabout that revolves back to the same old tyranny; too ashamed to admit that he had outgrown his leftism, he found himself in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Sartre accused Camus of being a reactionary; but he paid for his own refusal to reexamine his political convictions by congealing into a grotesque attitude of permanent indignation, shaking his fist at some abstract Authority. Where politics is concerned, he seemed determined to be guided by his emotions.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 101

Problem, Personality

“Sometimes it makes your hips move. Sometimes it makes you rock your head. Sometimes it helps you just kick back and relax and soak it in. But no matter what form it comes in, you know this music always comes straight from the heart. You know you’re listening to someone who’s found her own unique voice, and isn’t afraid to show it to the world. And these women are perfect examples of just that.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Statements at "I'm every woman: The History of Women in Soul" event (06 March 2014) http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/03/michelle-obama-hangs-out-with-soul-sisters-melissa-etheridge-and-pattie-labelle/ 2010s

Women, World, Music, Help

“We live in a liberal democracy…. That’s what we created in this country. I think we should be very clear on this. You know, this country was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment… It was the idea that people could talk, reason, have dialogue, discuss the issues. It wasn't founded on the idea that someone would get struck by a divine inspiration and know everything right from wrong. I mean, people who founded this country had religion, they had strong beliefs, but they believed in reason, in dialogue, in civil discourse. We can’t lose that in this country. We've got to get it back.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Interview with Bill Maher, on Real Time with Bill Maher (5 September 2003) http://www.safesearching.com/billmaher/print/t_hbo_realtime_090503.htm

People, Religion, Democracy, Idea

“Every winter I am here sometimes for two or four months. These are my roots, this is where I feel I must come to grow and learn as an artist. I must always come back to the guru to learn and grow more as a musician. There is no question of going anywhere and forgetting where I came from because that would be like losing my identity.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I am not torchbearer of Indian classical music: Zakir Hussain

Feeling, Question, Learning, Winter

“This is the day on which the American people each year acknowledged that they have such a debt. It has been set aside that a grateful Nation may do fitting honor to the memory of those who have made the greatest and most voluntary contribution to it. Here about us, in this place of beauty and reverence, lies the mortal dust of a noble host, to whom we have come to pay our tribute, as thousands of other like gatherings will do throughout our land. In their youth and strength, their love and loyalty, those who rest here gave to their country all that mortality can give. For what they sacrificed we must give back the pledge of faith to all that they held dear, constantly renewed, constantly justified. Doing less would betray them and dishonor us.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

Love, People, Youth, Faith

“If they believe it, they go back to scoff at the religion of their parents.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

On evolution, in transcript of the fifth day's proceedings (16 Jul 1925) in The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case: a Complete Stenographic Report of the Famous Court Test of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, Including Speeches and Arguments of Attorneys (1925), by John Thomas Scopes, p. 175
Scopes Trial (1925)

Religion, Parent

“It takes professionalism to convince a doubting public that it should accept back into its midst many of those diagnosed as psychotics, neurotics and other sufferers who Victorian communities decided should be kept out of sight in the safety of mental institutions.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

The Princess of Wales during a speech for Turning Point in 1990 The Telegraph, (31 Aug 1997) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/5871774/Diana-Princess-of-Wales.html

Communication, Suffering

“I recently researched my family tree, and quite quickly labels of class are smudged into nonsense. For a couple of generations back, it’s all very proletariat in every direction—Bethnal Green bottle-makers and jobs that belong in Dickens. But with the generational doubling that occurs, before too long it’s a muddle of all manner of colliding types: scullery maids and sculptors, officers and gentlemen.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Family, Tree

“With drugs, there are some dangers. There are dimensions in which you are completely incapable, and if through some molecular disturbance you fell into one of these it is possible that you could not find your way back.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 307, Page 212
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7

Way

“There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Life, Question

“Vietnam vet: We haven't heard why you voted against your colleagues' proposals to increase health care funding in 2004, '05, '06, and '07, when we had troops coming back from two wars.
Madow: Instead of the answer the questioner is looking for, McCain now takes credit for the GI bill and takes a political shot at Jim Webb.
McCain: On the issue of the GI bill, I was disappointed that Senator Webb didn't support making it permanent. Senator Graham, other veterans and I will be looking to extend that to all veterans, not just 2001. I hope you'll urge Senator Webb to agree with that.
McCain: I received every award from every major veterans' organization in America. The reason is I have a perfect voting record from organizations like Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and all the other veterans service organizations because of my support of them.
Vietnam vet: You do not have a perfect voting record by the DIV and the VFW. That's where these votes [of yours against increasing vet health care] are recorded. The votes were proposals by your colleagues in the Senate to increase health care funding of the VA in 2003, '04, '05, and '06 for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and you voted against those proposals. I can give you specific Senate votes, the numbers of those Senate votes right now.
McCain: I thank you, and I'll examine your version of what my voting record is, but again, I've been endorsed in every election by all of the veterans' organizations that do that. I've been supported by them, and I've received their highest rewards, from all of those organizations, so I guess they don't know something you know.
Rieckoff: [McCain's] voting record is not very strong. The Disabled American Veterans gave him a 20% rating out of 100. Our organization, the IAVA, gave him a D rating in the last voting session. He does not have a perfect voting record from the VFW. He's consistently voted against increased funding of the VA, and he's been a major opponent of the new GI bill.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans for America and author of Chasing Ghosts, on Countdown, discussing a town hall exchange between McCain and another Vietnam vet; 9 July 2008; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnyEMLXvgV8 IAVA ratings: McCain: D; Obama: B+ http://www.iava.org/full-ratings-list; DAV: McCain: 20%; Obama: 80%; the AL and VFW don't perform such voting record ratings http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/does_mccain_have_a_perfect_voting_record.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnyEMLXvgV8 2000s, 2008

War, Health, Hope, Disappointment

“We spent 5 trillion dollars in the Middle East and our country is going to hell. We gotta bring it back. We gotta knock the hell out of ISIS.”

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

2010s, 2016, January, Speech at (18 January 2016)

Hell, Country

“For me it is not dubious that our thinking goes on for the most part without use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how, otherwise, should it happen that sometimes we "wonder" quite spontaneously about some experience? This "wondering" seems to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts which is already sufficiently fixed in us. Whenever such a conflict is experienced hard and intensively it reacts back upon our thought world in a decisive way. The development of this thought world is in a certain sense a continuous flight from "wonder."”

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

1940s, "Autobiographical Notes" (1949)

World, Way, Thinking, Decision

“Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

“You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.
But there it was again, the girl's spreading bloodstain.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Life, Cars, Girl, Chance

“In the future I will focus on improving the economy, making big changes to win back the support from the public.”

Chen Shui-bian (1950) Taiwanese politician

DPP Campaign speech, December 7, 2002
Pet Phrases, 2002

Support, Change, Future

“… in science, we often have predecessors much further back in time than we think a priori.”

Louis Eugène Félix Néel (1904–2000) French physicist

... en matière scientifique, on a souvent des prédécesseurs beaucoup plus anciens qu'on ne le pense a priori. mentionning Pierre de Maricourt who thoroughly studied magnetic materials in the 13th century. In his Nobel Prize Banquet speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1970/neel-speech.html, December 10, 1970.

Thinking, Science, Time

“To love life and men as God loves them —
for the sake of
their infinite possibilities,
to wait like Him,
to judge like Him,
without passing judgment,
to obey the order when it is given
and never look back.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Love, Life, Men, God

“I want, if I may, to address a few words to the Opposition [Labour Party]… Whatever may be said of this Parliament in years to come and whatever may be said of the right hon. Gentleman's party, I believe that full tribute will be given to him and to his friends. As I and those on these benches who take part in the daily work of the House so well know, the Labour party as a whole have helped to keep the flag of Parliamentary government flying in the world through the difficult periods through which we have passed. They were nearly wiped out at the polls. Coming back with 50 Members, with hardly a man among them with experience of government, many would have thrown their hands in. But from the first day the right hon. Gentleman led his party in this House, they have taken their part as His Majesty's Opposition—and none but those who have been through the mill in opposition know what the day-to-day work is—with no Civil Service behind them, they have equipped themselves for debate after debate and held their own and put their case. I want to say that partly because I think it is due, and partly because I know that they, as I do, stand in their heart of hearts for our Constitution and for our free Parliament, and that has been preserved in the world against all difficulties and against all dangers.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1935/may/22/defence-policy in the House of Commons (22 May 1935). This speech reduced the Labour leader George Lansbury to tears (Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 149.) 1935

World, Thinking, Help, Heart

“Commuter — one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train
And then rides back to shave again.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

"Commuter," The Lady Is Cold (1929)

Life, Training

“I would be happy to have a gay child. He would be a Boy Scout, and he would teach all the other Boy Scouts how to build a fire with two sticks and a back-handed compliment.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, Revolution Tour

Boy, Scouting, Happiness

“As I look back, I am forever grateful for the journey I traveled and to all the people who have helped me to grow on the way. Never could I have imagined where the invisible hand of destiny was leading me. Through it all, I have come to realize that only if we cling to our sacred ideals, not being diverted by either successes or failures, we may find that amazing powers, beyond our own, are there to test us, protect us, and empower us. I pray that this simple story of mine may inspire all my readers with hope. Our true home awaits us at the end of life’s perilous journey. It is a place of lasting peace, beckoning us to persevere until we, too, reunite with our lost love.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Love, Life, People, Peace

“Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no
further question,
And only the waves reply.”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 5
Collected Poems (1993)

Children, Soul, Question, Silence

“A gun cracked, quite close to the tent. Soldier's instinct pulled Lee's head up. Then he smiled and laughed to himself. One of his staff officers, most likely, shooting at a possum or squirrel. He hoped the young man had scored a hit. But no sooner had the smile appeared than it vanished. The report of the gun sounded- odd. It had been an abrupt bark, not a pistol shot or the deeper boom of an Enfield rifle musket. Maybe it was a captured Federal weapon. The gun cracked again and again and again. Each report came closer to the one than two heartbeats were to each other. A Federal weapon indeed, Lee thought: one of those fancy repeaters their cavalry like so well. The fusillade went on and on. He frowned at the waste of precious cartridges- no Southern armory could easily duplicate them. He frowned once more, this time in puzzlement, when silence fell. He had automatically kept track of the number of rounds fired. No Northern rifle he knew was a thirty-shooter. He turned his mind back to the letter to President Davis. -Valley, he wrote. Then gunfire rang out again, an unbelievably rapid stutter of shots, altogether too quick to count and altogether unlike anything he had ever heard. He took off his glasses and set down the pen. Then he put on a hat and got up to see what was going on.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 4

Smile, Hope, Silence, Appearance

“Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Introduction, Section I, p. ix The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Question, Business, Problem

“For five years I have talked to the House on these matters – not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. [ … ] Look back upon the last five years – since, that is to say, Germany began to rearm in earnest and openly to seek revenge … historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind! Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery. That is the position – that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit.”

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

Speech in the House of Commons (24 March 1938) "Foreign Affairs and Rearmament" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1938/mar/24/foreign-affairs-and-rearmament#column_1454, 12 days after the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria). The 1930s

World, Understanding, Revenge, Suffering

“Sidney Rigdon went immediately to Kirtland, but Joseph remained at Father Johnson's to finish his preparations for a journey, which he contemplated making to Missouri. Immediately after Sidney's arrival at Kirtland, we met for the purpose of holding a prayer-meeting, and, as Sidney had not been with us for some time, we hoped to hear from him upon this occasion. We waited a long time before he made his appearance; at last he came in, seemingly much agitated. He did not go to the stand, but began to pace back and forth through the house. My husband said, "Brother Sidney, we would like to hear a discourse from you to-day." Brother Rigdon replied, in a tone of excitement, "The keys of the kingdom are rent from the church, and there shall not be a prayer put up in this house this day."”

Lucy Mack Smith (1775–1856) American religious leader

The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (1853), "Rigdon's Depression"

Hope, Appearance, Time, Waiting

“We have to go back to philosophy to treat things as they are. We are suffering from our own karma. It is not the fault of God. What we do is our own fault, nothing else. Why should God be blamed?”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

God, Suffering

“Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack,
Is it true what Mammy said,
You won't come back.
Oh no, no.”

Keith West (1944) English singer

Song Grocer Jack

“You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit…which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you’re not present.”

Cecil Howard Green (1900–2003) American businessman

as quoted by Mike Carlowicz in WHOI Waypoints: Remembrance: Cecil Howard Green, Woods Hole Currents: Volume 10, Number 2, 2003 http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=14940

People, Help

“That’s the words: "So I’m back to the velvet underground"—which is a clothing store in downtown San Francisco, where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff—”back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was."”

Stevie Nicks (1948) American singer and songwriter, member of Fleetwood Mac

(on the inspiration for "Gypsy") Leah Greenblatt, "Stevie Nicks On Her Favorite Songs: A Music Mix Exclusive", http://music-mix.ew.com/2009/03/31/stevie-nicks-in/ Entertainment Weekly, 31 March 2009

Love, Beauty, Flowers, Clothes

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

"Statement for the Paterson Society" (1961), as quoted in David Kherdian, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists (1967), p. 52. Snyder repeated the first part of this quote (up to "… common work of the tribe.") in the introduction to the revised edition of Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts (1978), p. viii.

Love, History, Solitude, Time

“I remember a rusher; not on a sports team. A rusher who carried an American flag, the regimental flag of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. It is an attack on the Confederate fort known as Battery Wagner outside of Charleston, south Carolina, in July of 1863. 54th Massachusetts was an all black regiment, one of the first to be recruited after the Emancipation Proclamation. The attack was almost a suicide mission. the regiment swept up to the walls of the fort. penetrated briefly, only to be driven out with heavy losses. the rusher I am thinking of was the color sergeant of the regiment. his name was William H. Carney. He had been born a slave. He was now a free man and a soldier. He brought the stars and stripes off the ramparts of Fort Wagner, despite being wounded in the chest and leg, staggering back under fire to a field hospital, and there, just before he collapsed, he surrendered the flag into the hands of several others there saying, "The old flag never touched the ground, boys!" Before the first of January 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, he didn't have a flag, he doesn't have a country. He was a slave; he was an unperson. But in July of 1863, he was a free man. As a free man, there was no symbol to him of greater value than that flag. So you understand that it is difficult for me to understand why people would insult it.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

"Free Speech and the First Amendment" https://www.c-span.org/video/?437511-1/free-speech-amendment&start=150 (20 November 2017), C-SPAN 2010s

People, Law, Color, Star

“I didn’t come to the personal conclusion that God probably didn’t exist because I was angry…. It wasn’t merely a reaction to the problems I saw in many religious beliefs and communities, or to the negative experiences I’d had—I had already made my peace with my past and saw that religious communities were making progress on addressing dehumanizing beliefs and practices. Rather, it was a conclusion I came to through intellectual and personal consideration. As I studied religion, I took a step back and reflected on the arguments for and against the existence of God, and was underwhelmed by the evidence. Recalling my nontheism in childhood, it suddenly seemed odd that I had adopted a theistic worldview after not having had one in my youth. It became apparent that believing in a divine force simply didn’t resonate with my experiences or how I understood the world.”

Chris Stedman (1987) American activist

Source: Faitheist (2012), Chapter 5, “Unholier Than Thou: Saying Goodbye to God” (p. 84)

God, Youth, World, Peace

“Today, I would like to provide the American people with an update on the White House transition and our policy plans for the first 100 days. Our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Truly great and talented men and women, patriots indeed are being brought in and many will soon be a part of our government, helping us to Make America Great Again. My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America First. Whether it's producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland: America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers. As part of this plan, I've asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It's about time. These include the following: On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country. Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores. On energy, I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy – including shale energy and clean coal – creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That's what we want, that's what we've been waiting for. On regulation, I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated, it's so important. On national security, I will ask the Department of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and all other form of attacks. On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration – and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.”

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

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8 (21 November 2016) 2010s, 2016, November

Women, Men, People, Disease

“Suppose you have two friends, James and Joanna, who are becoming increasingly fond of each other. At some point you realize that in their hearts they both have made a commitment to spending the rest of their lives together. But James has not yet admitted this to himself, or declared himself to Joanna. What is holding him back is a certain exaggerated trust in his own rationality, preventing him from acknowledging the validity of any impulse in himself he cannot completely understand. You are sure that once he comes to see how misplaced this trust is, he will realize that he has in fact been committed to a life with Joanna for some time and this commitment has been controlling the way he already lives his life and his decisions about how to spend his time and devote his energies. Now does James believe he is going to get married to Joanna? You are not clear what to say. If you ask him to profess such a belief, he will probably say he does not know, one way or the other. But his life-choices indicate the condition of his heart, and in that sense he does already have the belief. Another thing you do not know is how things are actually going to turn out for James. It all depends on which of the two dispositions prevails, his love for Joanna or his pride in his intellect.”

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: "Kant on the Rational Instability of Atheism" (2006), pp. 63-64

Love, Life, Way, Understanding

“He gave up and went back to loafing, found that he could sleep all right in the afternoons but that the practice kept him awake at night.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 17, “To Reset the Clock” (p. 173)

Sleep, Night

“The problem solver needs to stand back and examine problem contexts in the light of different “Ws” (weltanschauungen). Perhaps he can then decide which “W” seems to capture the essence of the particular problem context he is faced with. This whole process needs formalizing if it is to be carried out successfully. The problem solver needs to be aware of different paradigms in the social sciences, and he must be prepared to view the problem context through each of these paradigms.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Source: Towards a System of Systems Methodologies (1984), p. 473

Problem, Light, Science

“I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 20 (in 1964 edition)

War, Parting

“Hey little leaf, lying on the ground—
now you're turning slightly brown!
Why don't you come back on the tree,
turn the color green the way you ought to be?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Same Old Man Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Color, Way, Lying, Tree

“In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story!”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (pp. 30-31)

Life, Pain, World

“Welcome back to the big show where (at this point, he references something from earlier in the show)”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

citation needed
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–2014), "Welcome Back" variations

“Can storied urn, or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 11 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Death, Animals

“Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Dune Genesis (1980)

Universe, Change

“If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 5, The Audience, p. 26.

“These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them”

Hugh Thompson, Jr. (1943–2006) United States helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War

In a 1998 interview with AP. http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?/base/news-22/1136568553158920.xml&storylist=louisiana Attributed

People, Way, Help

“When my looks are shot—which I reckon will be in about six years—I’ll have plastic surgery here on my chin, and they can pull my cheeks back, but I’m not ready for that. And because of the smoking, the mouth is starting to give.”

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

On plastic surgery, The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/the-11-most-courtney-love-things-courtney-love-said-in-her-latest-interview-20140811-102qxd.html (11 August 2014) 2014–2017

“Radio, on the other hand, is now the chief agent of imperialism. It does not purify the spirit of man, does not, like the book, bring him back to the sanctuary of solitude, but throws him to the lions, subtly preparing his mind for the blood and chains of public sacrifice.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 42

Books, Solitude

“I said, yes, if you think I will avoid bloodshed by standing aside I will stand aside … but I will never ever again come back.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

(Quotes from an interview conducted in 2001, broadcast on Fijian television partially on 30 April 2001, and fully on 29 April 2004).

Thinking

“The victorious army on the right and on the left departed towards Ajmer… When the crow-faced Hindus began to sound their white shells on the backs of the elephants, you would have said that a river of pitch was flowing impetuously down the face of a mountain of blue… The army of Islam was completely victorious, and a hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell… He destroyed (at Ajmer) the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Hasan Nizami, Taj-ul-Maasir,about the conquest of Ajmer by Muhammad Ghauri in 1192: E and D, II, pp.214-15. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

Law, Mountain, Hell, Victory

“These aren't the people who take drugs, these are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we've got to deal with down the road.”

Paul LePage (1948) American businessman, Republican Party politician, and the 74th Governor of Maine

As quoted by The Times. http://time.com/4172603/paul-lepage-chris-christie-maine-2016-election/ (January 8, 2016)

Money, People, Sadness, Guy

“The first icon of the 21st Century is the closed-circuit surveillance camera, slowly panning back and forth as we move beneath its gaze.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

How We Live Now (2005)

“Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized – the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old…. When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”

Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) United States Senator

and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123086375678148323.html http://www.wnd.com/2009/09/108646/ a private letter from August 3, 1971 in response to New York's legalization of abortion

Love, Life, War, Children

“Television people have put blinders on and they absolutely refuse—and movie people too—to admit that they can have any influence for ill in our society. You know the argument: 'We only reflect what's going on. We do not perpetuate it.' And yet not a week goes by in this town where there's not an award ceremony where they're patting each other on the back, saying, 'You raised AIDS awareness' [or] 'There'll be no more child abuse thanks to this fine show you did.' The argument is you can only do influence for good; you can't influence for ill. That makes no sense at all.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

Attributed to Pat Sajak, in: Bloom: A Girl's Guide to Growing Up, (2003), p. 171
2000s

People, Sense

“Back he'll come…With vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and confident.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Hedda, Act II
Hedda Gabler (1890)

Confidence

“Saw a magnificent Koros – tall, fierce and passionate bigger than life size – in the Museum. A heavenly work – the backs and buttocks in relation to the hip and waist – an inspiration. I thought the fragment of leg and calf (attached below the knee) was falsely attributed.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Quote from Barbara Hepworth, in her 'Greek diary' - 1965; J.P Hodin, European Critic; London: Corby, Adams and MacKay
1961 - 1975

Life, Passion, Falseness

“Unfortunately in our education system youngsters are still not given sufficient encouragement to go into industry or commerce and not told that it is a good thing to make an honest profit. They should be told that if you don't make a profit, you won't be in business very long because you haven't anything to plow back for tomorrow. You make your profit by pleasing others so you have to make it honestly.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview for Director magazine (4 July 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105182, quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 345. Second term as Prime Minister

Education, Business

“I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, "Do not weep for me,
This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country—I now go back there,
I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn."”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Salut au Monde, 6
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

People, Country

“Check this joke out: If you wanna talk to me after the show I'll be… Fuckin'… Surprised. I'm gonna have to have some liner notes for that joke, like "During that joke, he points to the back." So people get the full experience. I'm gonna do a bunch of jokes that require actually seeing me. Then the CD will piss people off.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

People

“[PlayStation 2] is a new canvas for humanity that takes us back to our nature.”

Trip Hawkins (1953) American businessman

Quoted in "The Amazing PlayStation 2", Newsweek, 2006-02-26

Nature

“We could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn't be that cruel in the our civilized twentieth century — the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.
The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 131

Love, World, Error, Reality

“I found an old baby picture of me… and it was somebody else - not me. It was somebody pink and fat. Who never heard of sick or lonely. Somebody who cried and got fed. And reached up and got held. Slept whenever she wanted to just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving over, round her head. And chewed on a polka-dot whale. And woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day. Rolled over and drooled on a sheet. Felt your hand pull the quilt back up over me. That's who I started out. And this is who's left.”

Marsha Norman (1947) American playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Jessie
night Mother (1983)

Color, Baby

“The struggle for counterfactual insight—the attempt to see what things might become along a periphery of possible next steps around how things are now—presents us with what at first seems to be a conundrum of the understanding…. If we cannot close the configuration space of the possible states of affairs and bring them all under the regime of a closed and timeless set of laws, we cannot be sure that we shall be able to fight our way back from our flight of causal inquiry to the recovery of the phenomenal world in its visionary immediacy. We shall be unhappy because our consciousness of the world will remain divided between the poetry of experience and the science of nature…. There is an aspect of our mental life in which we enjoy such a reconciliation. However, its presence there instead of reassuring us ought to arouse and disturb us all the more. It should do so both by suggesting what we lack in the remainder of our conscious experience and by implying that the reconciliation is a mirage, never to be grasped. Dreams regularly join two features, the combination of which eludes us in our waking livesː counterfactual insight and visionary immediacy.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 157-8.

Life, World, Law, Dreams

“Sometimes the duck is tormented in a different manner, without the assistance of the dogs; by having an owl tied upon her back, and so put into the water, where she frequently dives in order to escape from the burden, and on her return for air, the miserable owl, half drowned, shakes itself, and hooting, frightens the duck; she of course dives again, and replunges the owl into the water; the frequent repetition of this action soon deprives the poor bird of its sensation, and generally ends in its death, if not in that of the duck also.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 285
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Death, Dogs, Bird, Water

“Striving for excellence means never being satisfied—always doing things to keep improving, even if it means changing everything we do. It means we never feel that we have arrived. We don’t believe our press clippings. We don’t get complacent and pat ourselves on the backs. We talk about what we could have done better. We believe that we can achieve extraordinary results when we strive for excellence in all we do.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 33. On Striving for Excellence

Feeling, Change

“If you are joyful, whatever you do you will do it to the hilt because you have nothing to hold back, nothing to fear, isn't it?”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Joy 24x7

Fear

“For fifty years the women of this nation have tried to dam up this deadly stream that poisons all their lives, but thus far they have lacked the insight or courage to follow it back to its source and there strike the blow at the fountain of all tyranny, religious superstition, priestly power and the canon law.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

1896
September
The Degraded Status of Woman in the Bible
Free Thought Magazine
Chicago
14
542
http://books.google.com/books?id=TfOfAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA542&dq=%22for+fifty+years+the+women%22

Women, Law, Courage

“We want all the Palestinians back in their homeland, and then there can be a fair referendum for people to choose the form of state they want. Whoever gets the majority can rule.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Excerpts at Friday prayers http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801959.html (October 29, 2005) 2005

People

““A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.””

Sofia Samatar book A Stranger in Olondria

Source: A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Chapter 3, “Doorways” (p. 19; the first sentence is echoed on p. 273)

Life, Death, God, Lie

“Marcia: Lovely. Yeah, go the rock chick. Yeah, um, you've been so great through this competition. Um, we've said no, you've come back blah blah blah blah. (sic). You know, um, its great to see you grow Hayley. Uh huh, and step out of that place that's comfortable because that's what being a performer is. Congratulations and a great choice of song.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 12

Love

“Various threats come along with the development of information technologies. Connecting people with machines, such a cyborgization of societies, creates a new type of threats – such threats that bring us back a little bit to the Orwellian universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which someone gets very strong tools to control everything. If every human being will be appropriately chipped and our nervous systems, or even our minds, will be incorporated into a global network – one can imagine that sooner or later someone would like to take these technological possibilities in order to get some unprecedented concentration of power and domination. The possibilities of direct physical control may be created, especially if we are connected to a network in a way that interferes with the structure of our nervous system – then we can imagine different possibilities of exerting direct influence. For now, this is the field of speculation.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

People, Way, Imagination, Strong

“We now have a global business system that is virtually unregulated, with trade unions crippled and politicians largely bought by the super-rich to serve their interests. And what is the result? Inequality has returned to 1920s levels, and movement between the classes has collapsed. We have bank runs unseen in a century. And now even senior Wall Street figures mutter — with only a hint of hyperbole — about a looming Depression and "the worst crisis since 1929." All we need now is rising unemployment and Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald boozily waltzing through Wall Street, and we are back where this story began.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"Has Market Fundamentalism Had Its Day?," The Independent (2008-03-20).

Business

“In the content of his work it is interesting to notice that he is profoundly English. His romanticism, and his choice of the theme of Time and Age – both these look back to the Anglo-Saxons and forward to the nineteenth century. Yet his form is French. The heart is insular and romantic, the head cool and continental: it is a good combination.”

John Gower (1330–1408) English writer

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1975 [1936]), p. 222.
Criticism

Age, Time, Heart

“"Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?" With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have "that fellow", because the priest Ikkyu is known even to children as a most amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six, and early showed his genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. "If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes." Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. … He gave his collected poetry the title "Collection of the Roiling Clouds", and himself used the expression "Roiling Clouds" as a pen name. In his collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, and to seek liberation from them, and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day civil war and moral collapse.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Life, Women, God, War

“The long-form endings have pushed away the short-form endings completely in the oblique cases. In the last few years, there are attempts in Croatia to bring back again the short forms in the usage. This attempts are the part of the new sociolinguistic politics to bring back the archaic words and forms in the usage and to construct new words, neologisms, in place of customary words - all that with the aim to make the language in the west of the Serbo-Croatian language community as different as possible from the language in the east of the Serbo-Croatian language community. Leaders of the new language politics proclaim as incorrect what was customary, and as correct what was rare, archaic or even did not exist in the usage, and then they carry it out in practice through the control of the media, text-books etc. Such inversion of the criteria for what is correct and what is not correct in the language usage makes the native speakers unsure and frustrated.”

Snježana Kordić (1964) Croatian linguist

[Kordić, Snježana, w:Snježana Kordić, Snježana Kordić, Serbo-Croatian, Languages of the World/Materials 148, Munich & Newcastle, Lincom Europa, 1997, 18, 3-89586-161-8, 37959860]

Books, Communication, Parting

“Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Shadows on the Grass (1960)

Age, Flowers

“There were often times
when we had no wine to drink,
However, this morning
we fill the empty beakers.
Over the new spring wine
midges hover—
When will we ever
taste its like again?
Tables with funeral meats
stand piled high before us,
Old friends and relatives
come and weep beside us.
We try to speak
but cannot utter words,
We try to see
but our eyes are dim.
Once he used to sleep
within the lofty hall,
Now he will spend the night
out on the lonely moor.
Leaving the city gate
we accompanied him thither
But we were back again
before midnight had come.”

Tao Yuanming (365–427) Chinese poet

"Written in Imitation of an Ancient Bearers' Song"
Translated by William Acker; T'ao the Hermit: Sixty Poems by T'ao Ch'ien (1952), p. 102

Spring, Drink, Sleep, Wine

“Henri Matisse and I were already working, before the 1900 Exhibition, as far back as 1898, in what was later to be called the Fauve style.”

Albert Marquet (1875–1947) French artist

As quoted by J. E. Müller, Le Fauvisme, Paris, Hazan, 1956, p. 18
[Marquet's quote refers to the Spring and Summer of 1898 - after the death of their common Paris' art-teacher Gustave Moreau; Marquet was then painting together with Henri Matisse ].

“And then all of a sudden
Oh, it seemed so strange to me,
How we went from something's missing
To a family.
Lookin' back all I can say
About all the things he did for me
Is I hope I'm at least half the dad
That he didn't have to be.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

He Didn't Have to Be, written by Brad Paisley and Kelley Lovelace.
Song lyrics, Who Needs Pictures (1999)

Family, Hope

“I know you have a heavy heart, I can feel it when we kiss
So many men stronger than me
Have thrown their backs out trying to lift it
But me I'm not a gamble
You can count on me to split
The love I sell you in the evening by the morning won't exist.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Lua
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005)

Love, Men, Feeling, Kiss

“The difference between most mothers and me is that I didn't sit around drinking coffee at baby group for 12 months after the birth of my baby. No, in three weeks I was back in my suit, back at my desk earning profit for my business and I don’t see why other women shouldn't do the same.”

Katie Hopkins (1975) English media personality and newspaper columnist

Women, Coffee, Birth, Drink

“As you know, there are al-Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they're moving back into Iraq.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

The Hugh Hewitt Show. , http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/talkradio/transcripts/Transcript.aspx?ContentGuid=ae522a49-6c82-4791-a76e-44ebb718bf32 2000s, 2008

Training

“I do support direct action. I do not advocate or support violence.… Elections are not a viable means of ensuring democratic change in Russia. Therefore I do support using other methods to push for a change back towards democracy”

Boris Berezovsky (1946–2013) Russian mathematician

Bloomberg News (13 April 2007) Russia Demands Berezovsky Extradition After Call for Revolution http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aTJX3NiO.sR0&refer=europe

Democracy, Support, Change

“The stories of the pharmaceutical companies and the health insurance companies is told. My film acts as a balance. I exist to provide balance, and I tell you, it isn't much balance. They're on every day, all day. My film is two hours. If for two hours during this entire year, people are exposed to the other side of the story, isn't that ok? It's amazing how they go after me. You asked me back there, 'You're biased. You have only one side.' Well, yeah, I have a bias. I have a bias on behalf of the little guy who doesn't have a say. I'm lucky enough to be able to have this bully pulpit, to be able to say the things I say, on behalf of the people who don't have a voice. The pharmaceutical companies and corporate America, they've got their voice. They own the networks and they can say whatever they want, all the time, and they do. So can we just have two hours for this side to have their say? I hope so, I think so. That's what I'm trying to do.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

Press conference in New York, as quoted in CommingSoon (June 2007) http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=21257 2007

People, Health, Hope, Guy

“I was always fighting from a young age… I wouldn’t back down, I knew Andy wouldn’t have backed down.”

Nigel Benn (1964) British boxer

Describing the motivation behind him, Andy his older brother who passed away when he was young http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/programmes/my_childhood/episode04.shtml

Age, Fight

Quotes about back page 69

Quotes about back
page 69